Posted on 01/04/2022 12:20:44 PM PST by Red Badger
I’m not a physicist, so be gentle on me, but it seems that even though you might not know the “initial conditions”, you would certainly know every parameter (mass of each body, relative accelerations and velocities, etc.) at any subsequent snapshot in time. Why couldn’t their motion be predicted from that set of knowns?
Schrodinger !
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger%27s_cat
They also do it step by step. The true solution to the three body problem would be nine closed form equations that would specify every future x, y and z coordinate for all three bodies for all future values of time.
“Picky-picky....................
Not really. Calculus as mathematics is precise. Sometimes approximations are used for calculations. Computers can run many calculations thus enabling a very close answer without solving the equations directly.
“They also do it step by step...”
Can Niagara Falls be used as an example?
I remember my calculus professor telling us on the first day of class, back in the stone age, This is a class where you will never get the right answer..............
All they're adding is a probability of a long term outcome. This might be useful in determining the likelihood of binary star systems with large planets remaining stable over time or similar questions.
“I think you’ve had a bit too much to drink.”
“I’m a scientist!”
Only if they take into account the initial slow turn.
I read the article. They ‘cracked’ nothing.
I could not believe it when Algore said how proud he was that and indication of quality was when something was called
“Good enough for government work”
I bet the factory guys who told him that were rolling on the floor laughing their a$$es off.
(for those who have never worked in a govt. contractor factory, “good enough for government work” means throwing any old piece of crap into a box to shipping to the government)
<;-)
There is no closed-form mathematical solution to the problem.
A solution was found using a power series but you would need to use 10^8000000 terms.
Numerical techniques can be used but those are approximations. Those approximations lead errors calculating initial conditions for the next iteration leading to widely divergent solutions.
they stumbled across it...
“I remember my calculus professor telling us on the first day of class, back in the stone age, This is a class where you will never get the right answer..............”
I don’t understand why he would say that.
I was in my final semester of Calculus and still trying to figure out exactly why I needed to take it, when I was faced with a real-world problem at work that was similar to the equations we were studying at that time in Calc.
I was asked to solve the volume of a berm of garbage at the local landfill. I was essentially two different sized trapezoids separated by some length. I took it to my math prof, and he said he would solve it over the weekend. In the meantime I used the average end-area method.
On Monday evening at class the Prof said that was a quite the problem and it took him several hours and several sheets of paper to get the answer. When he showed it to me, I showed him my answer using the much simpler process. They were close enough that a few yards of garbage here or there were meaningless.
So, God’s physics are like grandma’s recipes.
A pinch of this and a pinch of that.
“At this point they seem satisfied with probability rather than certainty. Seems inadequate, still.”
But think about it. All it took was two pink elephants and some barf in the back of the taxi cab.
wy69
“The true solution to the three body problem would be nine closed form equations that would specify every future x, y and z coordinate for all three bodies for all future values of time.”
Only there is no closed form solution.
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