Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseDaniel and Jorge talk about why something so simple is one of the oldest and hardest problems in physics.
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Hey Daniel, when you are teaching, are you the kind of professor that assigns super hard homework in your classes?
You mean, like, find the motion of a banana tied to a string held by a squirrel riding on a roller coaster, all of that in orbit around a black hole like that kind of problem.
What are you, professor, Rube Goldberg.
No, that was just a joke. I actually like to make the homework just a little bit harder than what we work on in class. You know, that's where the concepts really come together in your mind.
Right, right, you're an evil professor. Basically you never assigned unsolved research problems to first year students.
No, that only happens in the movies. Man, Goodwill Hunting is not a documentary.
You're not Matt Damon.
I don't have the looks for it.
Yes, there's always room for improvement. M orgem a cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics.
Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I've never solved an outstanding math problem.
Not yet. Do you mean right? If you had solved it, it wouldn't be an outstanding math problem.
That's true. Yeah, there are these famous outstanding problems, and it's cool when they stand for hundreds of years and then somebody comes along and figures them out.
Wow, what do you think happens? Like somebody just comes up with the right way to look at it, or like they see something nobody else had seen before. Or the history was just waiting for the right intellect.
Yeah. Sometimes it's a slow construction of ideas over hundreds of years, and you look at the history of it and be like, problem proposed in sixteen nineteen, progress is made in eighteen fourteen, and then twenty seventeen Samantha figures it out, and it's really awesome to see the stretch of history there.
I'm waiting for people to solve some pretty intractable parenting problems that sometimes I have.
Those are eternal, man, they will never be solved.
This will never be solved. It's part of being human, I guess. But welcome to our podcast Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio in which.
We tackle the hardest problem, which is understanding the nature of this universe. We find ourselves in how does it work? Where did it come from? Why is it the way that it is? And is it even possible to understand it? We dive right into the biggest, hardest, deepest questions. We explain the answers and our ignorance to you.
I wonder if that's the harder problem Daniel explaining something to other people. We do our best here but it's pretty hard to sort of wrap your head around all the amazing and incredible stuff that is happening in the universe.
And one of my favorite things about doing this podcast is exercising that part of my brain that translates these ideas from like the cutting edge of physics to things everybody can understand, because to do that, you have to have a really good grasp on what's going on.
Oh, I see, you actually have to understand it first before it'splaining it to people. So what am I doing here?
Then?
Are Well, sometimes when you try to explain something, you realize whole lot a second, I don't really understand how this works as well as.
I thought it did sometimes only sometimes, though that never happens time on our podcast.
It happens to me all the time when I'm teaching and also on this podcast, And that's one reason why it's so fun, because not only are we explaining stuff, we're also learning as we go.
That is a pretty good parenting lesson. Also, it's good to share what you know. When you learn what you love about this crazy beautiful.
Cosmos, Yeah, how does that help you with your parenting?
Well, it's just good to share. I think it's good. Well, you have to share with your children. I think that's a law, that is a rule, But it's also good to teach it to share.
You know.
Just if everyone's more generous with their what they have in their knowledge, we're all happy.
I thought you were going to use the wonder and glamour of the universe to convince your kids to do their chores, like take out the trash, because stars are amazing.
Or you are insignificant in this universe. You're a tiny speck of dust and the floating and vast vacuum of perhaps infinite space, and therefore you should do your homework.
I think that will work against you. So then why should I bother taking out the trash if nothing matters?
Because if nothing matters children, everything matters.
I like that.
I like that trendid philosophical use that PhD for something. But anyways, we do like to talk about not only what scientists know about this universe and all of the wonderful stuff in it, but also what scientists are struggling with understanding about how things work.
That's right, because we have this amazing mental machinery of science that lets us build up a body of knowledge things we do understand about the universe. It has a machinery to it, and that machinery is mathematical. It's incredible to me sometimes that mathematics can describe the way the world works at all. You know, you throw a baseball and it follows a parabola, which is a very simple mathematical relationship. So it's incredible when you can use mathematics to describe what's really very complex behavior, all sorts of zillions of particles moving through the air all together. But sometimes it's easier than other times.
Yeah, the cool thing about science is that it's always at this sort of the leading edge of human knowledge, right, Like that's what science is. It's sort of like asking the questions nobody's ever asked, or finding the answers nobody that has so far. And so sometimes you run into things that are just really really extra hard or maybe even impossible.
Yeah, And sometimes they are impossible because the physics is really hard, and sometimes they're impossible because we just don't have the mathematics yet. Like, there have been lots of times in history when mathematicians have developed tools, not because they thought they were going to be useful for physics, but just because they thought it was fun, and then later on physicists were like, hold on a second, that totally helps me solve this problem I've been struggling with for twenty years. A great example is general relativity, which is built on geometry, which was developed just ten years before. Without all that work developing geometry, there's no way Einstein could have developed relativity. It's this really fascinating dance between mathematics and physics.
Yeah, what kind of dance? How would you describe it dance? Is it like a Charleston or more like a waltz? Or is it like a hip hop breakdancing competition? What would you call it?
The mathematicians carefully build their tools and we just sneak in and steal them. So maybe it's more like a cat burglar dance.
Oh man, I can't wait for that, you know, interpretive dance History of Science Broadway play that you're working on.
Yeah, you know, I wish it was more back and forth. Sometimes I feel like, shouldn't the mathematicians be excited when their tools actually get used to describe the real universe? But a lot of times they don't seem to care at all, and they're like whatever, who cares about the real universe. I'm walking the halls of truth.
You're selling their halls with like reality and like real mud and dirt, Like that's just dirt, just dirt.
Yeah, if they cared about getting dirty, they would have been physicists instead of mathematicians.
I see. Physicists are the down and dirty of scientists.
I think physicists are to mathematicians what engineers are to physicists.
Oh, I see, the better, the better people, right, the true heroes.
I'm the hierarchy of useless purity.
The hierarchy of usefulness.
You mean, depending on what you put it the top, Yes, exactly right.
Yes, if you turn upside down, we're actually at the top. Yes, it's all about your perspective.
That's right. There is no up in space anyway.
Well, there are interesting problems in physics, some of them which are even intractable, and so in this episode we'll be talking about one such problem that maybe affects our very movement through space, and it affects how planets revolve around their suns, and which we may never find the answer for. So to the end the podcast, we'll be asking the question, what's so hard about the three body problem. Now, Daniel, this is not something that's not safe for work, is it. I mean, I see something here. Three bodies? Is this about?
You know, No, this is not about being exploratory in your relationships at all. It's what's so mathematically different about three gravitationally attracting objects.
Is the safe for labratory in the heavenly bodies relationships?
You know, some bodies here on Earth are quite heavenly as well, but we're talking about celestial bodies.
That's right, the real stars, all right, So the three More specifically, this is kind of about what is this three body problem at all? Because I imagine not a lot of people have heard of them, although it is the title of a sort of a well known science fiction novel out there, right, that's fairly recent.
That's right. Yeah, it's like one of the biggest novels in the last few years. It's a whole trilogy written by a fantastic Chinese author. A lot of people are really into this book, and a lot of our listeners have written in asking us to talk about this book. But I thought, first maybe it'd be more fun to talk about like the physics problem that's at the heart of the novel that we can talk about the actual problem itself.
Yeah, I think I try to read the novel. It's pretty dense, it's kind of thick.
Yeah, there's a lot of physics in that book, which is pretty fun for people who like really well thought out physics novels. And so it's it's a good idea to try to get an understanding for like what is the underlying problem at the core of the story?
Right, And it's like a bestseller won all the awards right in science fiction.
Mm hmmm.
So you can check that out if you like. But the title of it refers to kind of an old and famous problem in physics about I imagine three bodies.
That's right, it's a really old problem, and old problems are the funnest problems because it means that like a lot of smart people have been butting their heads against this problem for decades or even centuries, and nobody's figured it out, and does just mean it's impossible. There are other mathematical problems that have existed for hundreds of years and then all of a sudden, some dude in a cabin in Russia comes out with like one hundred page proof of it, so it might be possible to be solved, but nobody's cracked this one.
Yeah, just a book on Airbnb, that cabin in Russia, and you know, book it for a couple of years, and you might solve a famous problem. That's the real answer.
That wasn't a metaphor, that was that really happened to you, not to me. No, there really is a Russian mathematism who worked all by himself for a decade and solved a famous problem in math, the Remond conjecture.
Wow.
And he was in a cabin, he used in a cabin, he worked all by himself, and he just sent in the solution and they tried to give him the fields metal for it and he wouldn't even show up.
Wow. That feels like such a fine line between like, you know, genius and you know, socially unacceptable behavior.
He's well on one side of that line.
But anyways, let's talk about this problem, the three body problem. And so, as usually, we were wondering how many people out there we knew what this was, if they had heard of it before beyond the novel, or how important it is to sort of predicting the movement of our planets in our solar system. So Daniel, as usually went out there into the wilds of the internet to ask people what is the three body problem?
So, while we are still pandemically shut down, I am very grateful to all of you who are willing to participate via email on the person on the virtual street. So if you would like to participate and hear your speculation on the podcast, please don't be shy. Send us a message to questions at Danielandjorge dot com.
Think about it for a second. Do you know what the three body problem is? Here's what people have to say.
I don't know what the three body problem is. I'm afraid so.
I'm really aware of what the three body problem is. I did read as you should lose three Body problem trilogy. My understanding is that it's a problem with how three bodies orbit one another and how it could continue to do that be stable without crashing into one another.
A lot of people spend a fair amount of time calculating how two massive bodies interact due to the gravitational field surrounding them, but actually, if you add a third body, the system becomes unstable, it becomes chaotic. So you can determine an exact solution. And also if you make a small change let's say in the initial positions of the bodies, you can't actually determine how let's say the forces between the three bodies will be affected.
I think that's the do when you've got three bodies that grotatically interactions like the Sun, the Earth and the Moon, for example, would be it would be three bodies. And I think you can solve two bodies, and can any more than a fee more and you can't solve it. I think it's one of the issues.
Oh wow, that is something I am not sure what it is.
I don't know what the three body problem is unless it's relating to a previous question where if you have three bodies acting on each other gravitationally, you haven't got sort of one orbiting another or one with a joint orbit with another, that there'll be probably quite at random to their rule bees.
I have never heard of the three body problem before, but if I were to guess, I think it is three bodies interacting with each other and something unusual happens, like something that doesn't happen between two bodies or four bodies. It just happens between these three bodies for some reason, and for some reason the number is three.
Actually, I've studied physics before, so I know that the three body problem is this problem where if you have two objects pulling on each other, then those equations can be solved pretty easily. But if you add in a third body, now you have three different interactions between ab AC and CB. And when you have interactions of that order that many interactions, it becomes sort of an unsolvable math problem. And so we don't have like good solutions for those sort of situations. We have to essentially come up with approximations and simulate it.
All right, it's not a lot of knowledge about this, but someone did read the trilogy.
Yeah, exactly three books in the three Body Problem trilogy. It's nice.
It must have been good because he read all three. Or I wonder if your completest, you know, tendencies would kick in after you rerun. Well, I can't just read one three body problem book. I gotta read all three.
Depends if they leave a cliffhanger at the end of the first novel.
You should title all your trilogies with the number three in it. But it seems like most people here are guessing it has to do with bodies in space and the specifically three bodies of course, but a lot of people are saying maybe it's about it becoming unsolvable or chaotic or unstable. Are they sort of in the right track.
They are exactly on the right track. It's really interesting. There's a problem which is easy if there's only two objects involved, and then becomes basically unsolvable if you have three objects involved.
Right, like real human relationships.
Which can be tricky even when there are two bodies.
Involved, even if everyone is open minded, it gets tricky. All right, Well, let's dig into it, Daniel, how would you describe the three body problems?
I think the best way to describe it is to first talk about what we can do and simply said, if you have two objects in space and you know where they are, how heavy they are, and the direction they're going in, then you can predict their emotion. You can say, at some time in the future, I know where they are going to be. So, for example, imagine just the Sun and the Earth. These are two objects that pull on each other. There are forces involved, and if you know where the Sun and the Earth are at some moments in time, and which direction they're heading, and their masses. You can write down a very simple formula that will tell you where they will be in the future. Like you say, where will the sun be in a year, or in a thousand years or in a million years. It's like a very simple mathematical expression. You plug in the time, it tells you where the sun will be. So that's the two body problem, and we have a solution for that. We can crank through the mathematics and get a very nice simple formula that tells us where they will be at any moment in the future.
Right, But you have to kind of assume that they're alone in the whole unit, like there's nothing else in the universe pulling on them.
Right, It's right, only two bodies. And as usual, you know, physics is telling a story, and that story is always approximate. The reality never matches the approximate stories we try to use when we tell physics stories, because in reality, there's an infinite number of bodies out there in space and gravity works for over infinite distances, and so everything in the universe is tugging on things all the time. But usually you can get away with disregarding that. You don't have to care about what's happening in Andromeda when you're doing the calculation of whether your satellite is going to go around the Earth, because it's basically zero contribution. So here we're talking about the scenario where you have two bodies and everything else can be ignored without changing anything down to like, you know, the tenth decimal place or something. Yeah, so in the sort of simplified universe of exactly two things in your universe, you can predict the motion of two objects.
All right, So then I'm guessing when you get to three bodies, it gets a little harder.
When you get to three bodies, it doesn't just get a little harder, it becomes impossible. If you know where three objects are. You know, so you have, for example, the Sun, the Earth, and then another object. Now you just have three objects, and you know exactly where they are, what direction they're going in, and you know their masses. You cannot write down a simple formula that tells you where they're going to be in a week, or in a year or in a thousand years.
Well, it gets really complicated. Suddenly, it gets really complicated. We don't have a solution. Now we have an understanding for what's going on, Like we know the forces involved, we know what the gravity is between two objects given their distance. Right, that's a pretty simple formula. Newton told us how to do that. But that doesn't mean we know how to find the solution. Doesn't mean we can take those forces and predict the motion.
Right. Well, I think this might be kind of a subtle subject for a lot of people out there. Which is it like what you mean in physics as a solution, because it doesn't mean that you can't predict where they're going to be. You just don't have an easy solution to the equations to predict this, right.
It means that we know what the constraints are, Like physics tells you what the rules are, tells you, like, for example, how two objects pull on each other. It doesn't tell you how those objects are going to move. To figure out how the objects are going to move, which is what you need to predict their emotion, you need to be able to solve all of those equations and get the answer out. So physics gives you, like all the equations you need to solve. It doesn't mean you know how to solve the equations, Like, not every equation you get is solvable, or we don't necessarily have the mathematical tools to solve an arbitrary equation. Turns out, in physics there are only like five problems we do know how to solve, and everything else is intractable.
Well, that probably makes for a short work day there for you. But I think what you mean is like, for example, like a ball, if I throw a ball here at my son in our backyard here, like I know that Doug ball. I know the constraints in it, like I know the forces pulling on it, the force of gravity, and I know that F equals M for example. So I can solve, for example, for its acceleration very easily, but maybe getting like a formula for what its position is going to be is a little tricky. It's different than knowing what it's accele is going to be exactly.
The acceleration just tells you how is momentums in change in a given moment right to know where it's going to be, you need to then solve the equations of motion which incorporate all these forces and is affected by that acceleration. But it requires actually solving the equation. You know. It's like if I have an equation that says X plus five equals ten. Right, that's an equation that constrains X. It limits what X can be, but it's not actually the solution. The solution is X equals five. That's a very simple one, right. You know exactly how to go from the equation X plus five equals ten to the solution, But you don't necessarily know how to do that for an arbitrary equation. Take another simple example, like X squared equals forty nine. How do you find the solution to that? You know off the top of your head that x equals seven works, You can plug it in and check it. But how do you find the solution? If I tell you X squared equals an arbitrary number, how do you find the square root of an arbitrary number? There actually is no way to do that. There is no mechanism for solve that equation other than guessing and checking.
Sounds like my parenting strategy right there. And I think what you mean is, like, you know, in physics you have equations to tell you, For example, like the acceleration of X, which is like how the velocity is changed, which is like how the position is changing. Like you have equations for that, but to actually get the position, you have to kind of backtrack from acceleration to velocity to position. And that's where the trickiness comes from, right.
Yeah, because the acceleration changes through time, and so to figure out like how all those accelerations add up to describe the motion of the object is not always easy. And then what you want is a simple formula that describes it, and that doesn't necessarily exist.
Right because I guess when you go from two bodies to three bodies, then the formula just get too complicated.
The formula gets too complicated. Exactly, the system gets really complicated because now you have these three different objects pulling on each other, and it actually becomes chaotic.
All right, Well, let's dig into why exactly it is so hard and how it becomes pure chaos when you add a third celestial body into the mix, and what consequences it has for our ability to predict the universe. But first, let's take a quick break.
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All right, Daniel, we're talking about the three body problem. And I guess we're not just talking about what happens if your spouse moves to another city, right, this is more cosmic.
I can't solve that problem for you. There is no equation that tells you how to live your life.
That's the one body problem is already pretty hard. Now we're talking about the three body problem.
One is the loneliest number. But this is not a relationship helpline, and this is not a podcast about human emotions. We are trying to solve the much easier problem of motion of objects through space.
And so you're saying that when I have two objects in space, it's easy enough to sort of predict where they're going to be. Well, once you have three, there's no easy solution to that problem.
Yeah, there's no easy solution. There's no like short mathematical answer. When you'd like is something like xft, where x is the position of the object, and then a simple formula where you can plug in the time and it'll tell you exactly the position of the object. That's what you're looking for, because you'd like to be able to take that system and say, I want to know where the moon is going to be, or I want to know where the sun is going to be in a thousand years. The problem is that there is no such simple formula. We haven't found one at least, and we suspect that it might not exist because the system of three objects is much much more complicated than a system of just two objects.
Right, And it gets really complicated because now you have three objects in three D? Is it kind of about going to that third dimension? That makes it hard because I imagine, if you have two bodies in space, you can just treat them as like a two D problem, right, like you just imagine the plane where these two bodies are. But once you have three and then it's like not it's a three D problem.
It's true that two objects in space you can always define a plane between them. You can also put three objects on a plane, though right three points define a plane, so there's always a plane for three objects. I think the problem is that when you have three objects, a small change in their location leads to a big change in where they're going to be in the future, at least for gravitational interactions, whereas if you have two objects, a small change and where the Earth is going to be, it will mostly settle back into the same answer. And so in terms of like finding an equation that describes it, there's a whole family of equations that can describe stable solutions. We don't really have functions that are very good at describing chaotic situations, where it's very small change in the angle or the velocity of the moon means it's now suddenly over here, or it's suddenly on the other side of the sun, or it flies off in a completely different direction. Our equations are not good at describing chaotic mathematics.
But I guess maybe the question is, like, what is it that about going from two to three that actually makes the equations unsolvable? Like beforeward two I can solve the equations, but with three, there's no solution for them, does it become nonlinear? Is that what it is?
It's already nonlinear, right that Even with N equals too, it's nonlinear because these distances go like one over radius squared, so there's an inverse R squared there, So it's already nonlinear. I think something you said earlier is really the right way to think about it. We know the forces F and the mass M, and we have F equals maa, so we can get the acceleration. That's a very simple formula. But how do you go from knowing the acceleration, which is how much the speed is changing, to knowing the actual location. What you have to do is add up the effects of lots of little accelerations over time, which means you have to integrate. You have to use the calculus. But just like there aren't that many physics problems that are solvable, not every function can be integrated, at least not into a simple formula you can write down. So just because you know the force in the acceleration doesn't mean you know how to integrate it into getting the location. And we can go a little bit further if you look at the structure of the problem. Mathematicians call these problems non integrable, which just means that, like the possible trajectories for these objects in this three D space don't follow simple paths right like, they diverge very quickly. It's not like it can be easily simplified from a whole big set of possible solutions down to just a few, and with any equals too. With a two body problem, there are a bunch of simplifications you can make that separate the problem so that, for example, the distance between the objects is independent of their relative angle, because for two objects, you know, the angle doesn't really matter. What only matters is really just the distance. But for three objects you have not just the relative distances, but you also have the relative angles, and so now all the problems are still tied together. You know, when you try to solve a set of equations, sometimes it's helpful to try to separate them and solve them independently, but that's not always possible, and when they're all entangled up with each other, you can't always find a solution.
I see, there's something sort of magical about the number two that then you lose once you get more than two, right, because it's not just three bodies that are hard. It's also four and five and six in infinite right.
Yes, you might have thought, oh, well, two bodies are solvable, so then why not three. It's actually the other direction. Two is the only one that is solvable. Right. All the problems are unsolvable except for this one magic special case of two bodies, which we have been able to separate using this special trick and solve. So it's sort of lucky that any of them are solvable.
Well, the zero body problem is solvable too, and the one body problem, I imagine is solvable. It's just that it just gets more complicate, relic like the equations start to like interact with each other, and then you can't like fit a simple format as.
A solution, right, yeah, exactly.
And in addition, there's something about chaos here, right.
That's right, The results become chaotic. As we said before, if you change a little bit the initial conditions, if Earth is a little bit further away or pointing in a slightly different direction, you can get completely different outcomes. So Earth can be like tossed out of the Solar System, or it can fall into another orbit or something like that. Whereas if you just have two bodies things tend to be pretty stable. That means that if you perturb it, something comes along and gives the Earth a little push, it'll probably roll back into its initial orbit, whereas in a three body system things get out of hand very quickly. And that's not just like is it complicated motion. That's one of the reasons why we don't have a simple formula, because we don't have functions that describe that, like sine and cosine and logarithm. These things are mostly well behaved and so it's very difficult to describe chaotic motion using the sort of mathematical language that we have developed.
Oh, I see, because there's no function that then is chaotic kind of Is that what you're saying, Like, chaotic motion is not easily kind of captured in a formula.
Yeah, it's not easily captured in a formula. It's possible to describe chaotic motion, but usually our solutions there are numerical, there are approximate. We use simulations. You know, we can describe chaotic systems like you build a computer system, you put three objects in it, and then what you do is you say, all right, what happens in the first second, and you say well, the Earth's going to move this way, the Sun's going to move that way, and the moon is going to move this other direction, and then you update everything, and then you do it again. So you slice the problem in time, and you say, what if I only want to predict a half second from now or a millisecond from now, then you can really simplify it and say I know what to do for a half second, and then you just do that over and over and over again. That's a way we can describe a chaotic system is like slicing it in time and then try to move our simulation forward, just one time slice at a time. But that doesn't mean that we can then look at that motion and say, oh, look it follows a sign. Oh look it follows the logarithm of a sine wave. We can't find a solution. We can't find a mathematical description of the motion, even if we can describe it in the simulation.
I see. So like we can maybe predict what the system is going to do, what these three bodies are going to do, but we have to do it step by step. We can't just say, like, hey, twenty years from now, this is what it's going to be. There's no formula that will tell you that. You have to like simulate it little by little till you get to ten years from now.
Yeah, and even those simulations are difficult because it's chaotic, Like if you don't make those calculations very very precise, then your simulation is going to be wrong as you try to predict further and further into the future, because small mistakes really add up the snowball into big mistakes. It's just like you know the butterfly problem. Butterfly flaps its wings in China and that has cascading effects on the weather, which causes eventually a storm in Central Park in New York. And these things are real. The real physical systems that behave this way where if you give them a very small nudge, it can have a very big effect downstream. And that makes them very very challenging even to stimulate, as we talked about, because you get something wrong very early on, your results in ten years are nonsense. We much prefer to have like a simple we call it an analytical formula, like a very short math expression that we can just plug numbers into, because it can be exact and it can tell us exactly what's going to happen in ten years or in one hundred years.
I think what you're saying is that these numerical approaches or simulations, they're just an approximation basically, right, Like you're looking at the equations like the f equals maas or the forces between the three bodies, and you're saying, well, let's not try to get the exact solution. Let's just pretend that for the next millisecond everyone has the same acceleration or something like that.
Exactly. You make a bunch of simplifications and you say, well, I only want to predict a millisecond in the future, so can I do that? And then you just keep doing that over and over again.
You're saying that if I'm wrong a little bit because of that simplication, then in a chaotic system, I could be really wrong.
Yeah, and that's a big deal. If you're doing something like plain ending a trip to the stars or sending your probe to Jupiter or whatever, you definitely want to get that right.
Right, Yeah, you don't want to be off by a few light years.
Yeah, Or even if you're just flying through the Solar System, if you get it wrong, you could end up crashing into the Sun or getting tossed out of the Solar System in the wrong direction. You're trying to make it to Pluto from here, right, Pluto is very far away in a very very small target. Imagine firing a gun from La to New York and trying to hit a tiny, tiny target. It's very difficult. They're very small. If you're off by a tiny little angle in LA, you're definitely not going to hit that target in New York.
But I guess that. You know, we are pretty good these days with you know, supercomputers, We are pretty good at simulating things and kind of predicting. You know, maybe not the storm that comes from the butterfly wings, but you know, the weather is you know, predictable sort of up to like a week, right or a couple of weeks, which is super impressive because they have to simulate all of those you know, air molecules and pockets of hot air that are out there in the atmosphere. It's not that it it makes the problem impossible. It just makes it harder or you know kind of shorings. How much we can predict it.
Yeah, if you had an infinitely powerful computer, then we could solve these problems because we could simulate them with really high resolution. We could take like really really short time steps in our simulation. Instead of stepping forward a millisecond, we could step forward a nanosecond and then correct. And so if you had infinite computing resources, you could do these things very effectively. And some of the reasons why these problems which seem to be impossible for a long time, like predicting the weather, seem to be getting easier, and not because humans are getting smarter, but because our computers are getting more powerful, and so now we have a lot more computing power available to do things like predicting the weather and trying to predict earthquakes and all these really really hard problems that are really important.
Like today we can predict how the whole Solar system works, right.
We mostly can, And a lot of that is because mostly the Solar system is a bunch of two body problems, like the Earth moving around the Sun. Technically it's you know, it's an eight body problem because the Earth is pulled on by the Moon and Jupiter or a neptune and whatever, but mostly it's just the Sun. You can ignore everything else when you're calculating the Earth to some degree. If you want to get it exactly right, then yes, you need to include effects from Mars and Venus. And then you can't use Kepler's laws. You can't use the simple formulas that we have for a two body problem. You have to get down and dirty and do the simulations using very powerful computers.
But then, I guess, would you say that our Solar system is chaotic as well? Like? Is our Solar system a chaotic system? Because it seems sort of stable right now, But are you saying maybe, like if you give it enough time, it is kind of a little unpredictable.
Yeah, definitely, the Solar system is chaotic, but on cosmological timescales, not on like a year or ten years, but onlike millions and billions of years, and it was more chaotic in the beginning. We sort of settled into something that's more stable. But when the Solar system began, it was a big hot mess and things were flying everywhere. Planets were colliding into each other and making new planets and throwing things out of the Solar system. We probably I had a different number of planets a billion or two billion years ago. People suspect there might have been like another giant planet which was tossed out of the Solar System by Jupiter and Saturn. So yeah, that sounds pretty chaotic to me.
Solar system was like, you know, I have enough to deal with with the A nine bodies, possibly eight, let's kick someone out.
But you can take a very complicated system like the Solar system and find approximately stable solutions, things which will last for a long long time. But how stable are they? Something which flies through the Solar System can perturb it a little bit, and then things can very quickly go out of whack. So if you have like another star that gets a little close to our Solar system, it could change the orbit of Jupiter, which could have knock on effects about changing the orbit of Saturn, and then the asteroid belt and Mars, and pretty soon we could have craziness.
All right, Well, let's get into that craziness of our Solar system and what the consequences are of this three body problem and our ability to understand the rest of the cosmos. But first, let's take another.
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All Right, we're talking about the three body problem and it's hard to find an analytical solution to it, as opposed to the two body problem, which you can find a nice, neat formula for it. But I wonder then if this is sort of like a physicist frustration, because as an engineer, I'm pretty much used to, like thinks, not having an analytical solution, like from day one, like nothing only like throwing a ball up in the air has an analytical solution. Everything else you have to do with numerical simulations or approximating, you know, Navy your Stokes equations and having non linear stuff that you can solve and so, you know, like any you you always rely on simulations. But maybe in physics you get more frustrated for not having like a neat, you know, clean formula to predict the future.
Well, the thing that's tantalizing is that there are a few cases when you can find a neat formula where you can start with just pencil and paper, describe the pushing and the pulling of your system, and then get out a formula that tells you where everything is going to be basically for all time. That's amazing. It's beautiful, and it's tempting. It makes you think, Wow, why can't I do this for other systems? Why can't I do this for every system?
Right?
Because if they exist for some systems, it gives you the sense that, like, if we had the right mathematics, if we knew the right language to talk about this stuff, maybe even really complicated problems would be simpler. So it's sort of aspirational.
Yeah, I can imagine that frustration. You're in your cabin in the middle of Russia, in Siberia, in the middle of nowhere, and you're like, oh shoot, I need a computer I didn't bring one, or oh shoot, I need to talk to somebody else I don't have a phone. That's frustrating, right it is.
And you know it's something funny about teaching freshman physics. I teach mechanics often here at you see Irvine and you know there are not a lot of problems that really are solvable, like very few problems can you actually sit down with pencil and paper and say, here's the situation, here's the solution. And so, in teaching this class for like almost twenty years now, I've noticed that basically every physics homework problem and every textbook is one variation on like one of these five solvable problems. And so as soon as you look at one and you're like, oh, this is that one problem, or this is problem number four, except they're using a squirrel instead of a ball rolling down a plane or something, and so it all boils down to like a few solvable problems because there are only a few that can actually be solved.
You mean, there's an analytical, simple solutions to what Professor Whitson is going to put on the final test. I hope students are taking notes.
I say, if you take my class for twenty years, it becomes pretty easy.
Yeah. I guess even physics professors are predictable. Is that what you're saying, Yes, exactly, take what they're going to do.
It's hard to invent new solvable problems in physics. And you know, it's not just like motion of two objects. There are lots of places in physics where the problems are not solvable. Einstein developed general relativity, right, which means he wrote down the equations for how space curves when mass is around. He wrote down the equations, which means those are the constraints that space has to follow. It doesn't mean he can tell you how space behaves when mass is around. Those are the solutions to the Einstein equation. And he couldn't solve his own equations. Like he developed general relativity and he's like, here are the equations. I don't know how to solve this. He wasn't even the first person to solve the Einstein equation. That was short style, because these equations are like famously impossible to solve. Now, if you have a solution, you can check it. You can say, hmm, I think space bends in this way when there's mass around. You can plug it into the equations and if it works, you're like, cool, I found it. But again, just because you have the equations doesn't mean you know how to find the solution. Anybody who's done differential equations knows that's true. We have like no general mechanism for saying here's a differential equation, I can go from the equation to finding the solution. And so there's lots of places in physics where we just don't know how to solve these things. Even still, for general relativity, we only know how to solve it for a few cases, like an empty universe, a universe that's smoothly filled with matter like no lumps at all, or a black hole. Basically everything else is unsolvable.
Then that's why Schortshield found right, he found a solution for general plativity in the case of a simple black hole.
Yeah, exactly. He was the first person to ever solve these equations. And he actually did it while he was a soldier in World War One?
What was he in fighting in a cabin in Russia?
Also, never fight a land war in Russia, man, especially while you're trying.
To solve physish questions. It's extra difficulty points. Unless he was fighting for the Russians. Maybe I don't know, Maybe he's Russian and then he had a lot of time because the other team was doomed.
No, but it's a great story. You should look up how Schwartz I'd solved this problem.
I see. So it's not he solved general relativity for all time in all cases. He just found a solution for general relativity in this special case of a simple black hole.
Yeah, a universe that has nothing but a black hole in it. He figured out the solution how space bends in that scenario, and then later people figured out, Okay, well, if I assume that the universe is totally empty, can I solve the equations? Oh? I can do that. Or if I assume the universe is like filled smoothly with matter, can I do that? But like, nobody has solved general relativity for like our solar system, or even just for like the Sun and the Earth together. It's too complicated. Nobody has figured out how to go from those equations to say, here's how space has to bend in this situation.
Oh wait, so not even like the two body problem has a solution in general relativity.
Yeah, that's right. General relativity much much harder than Newtonian mechanics. We can do things like numerical relativity, like we can describe how black holes orbit each other and collide and generally gravitational waves. Because we can do it numerically, we can use computers to do a proc submit solutions to these things, but nobody can like write down simple formulas to tell you, like how black holes orbit each other and collapse.
Oh, I see. All this time we've been talking about the two body probably being solvable. It's only solvable in the NEWTONI in case, right, Like, if you assume the simplest stuff or the simple physics of Newton, then you can find a solution, but not for three. But if you assume, like what we actually know what's going on general relativity, then it's we can't even start, Like there's no solution.
Yeah, exactly. You know, Einstein lays out the equations the constraints, but he doesn't tell you, and he doesn't know how to go from the constraints to a solution. You know. It's sort of like if you're driving down the highway with your family and you ask everybody what they want for dinner and everybody says, I want a salad, or I want pizza or I want hot dogs, Like, those are the constraints. Doesn't necessarily mean you know how to find a restaurant that satisfies those constraints, right, Having the constraints doesn't tell you how to find a solution.
Wow, it sounds like something from personal experience with that, and you're trying to vent peraps.
Yes, I'm looking for a rest thrown the search salads and hot dogs and pizza. Let me know if you find one.
That's not even the general relativity solution. Like if you add relatives to this card, right, then it gets impossible, right, because then you have all this relative.
Dynamics exactly, very chaotic, very quickly.
Well, I think what's interesting is that this is not just difficult for us as physicists to like predict these things and kind of like know what's going to happen, but it's also kind of hard for the universe to know what's going to happen, right, Like if something is chaotic, it also means that things are kind of unpredictable in general, Like crazy things can happen in our solar system yees.
Systems with three objects don't last very long because they are chaotic. They don't tend to fall into stable patterns and survive for very long. So if you have like three stars orbiting each other, then pretty quickly two of them will eject the third one out into the universe. Because there are not very many stable solutions to the three body problem. And this is different from like can in mathematicians write down a simple formula to predict what will happen? That's one question. Another question is like how long can three stars orbit each other before two of them kick out the other one.
I guess you mean like three stars of about the same size, right.
Yeah, three stars about the same size and about the same distance from each other, right, a real like three body system. Because the only way for that to really happen, for it to become stable, is to sort of turn it into a double two body system. Take your three stars, group two of them together, make them really close, and put them far away from the third star, and then what you have is like a little two body system of two stars. And then you have that two body system. You can treat it sort of like as a single object when you're talking about the third star which is now orbiting that pair. And so when we do find triary systems out there in the universe, there're typically this like two body system. In a hierarchy, we have a two body system and then one of those bodies turns out to have two things inside of it.
Right, And I think this hierarchy we sort of talked about it in last podcast. But it has to do with distance, right, Like, if two of them are out here, you know, interacting and orbiting around each other, then to another body that's fairly far away, our two little bodies here feel like one, and so then that makes it more stable.
Exactly, if, for example, we had two sons at the center of our solar system, if they were really close to each other, and they were much closer to each other than we were to them, we could treat it like it was just one object. It wouldn't matter to us that it was two objects. But if we got closer to them, or if we even like trying to get between them, then it would make a big difference on our trajectory that there were two objects instead of one. And so, for example, in that novel we talked about at the top of the episode, that's exactly what's going on. There's a solar system with two stars and a planet that's whizzing all around right through them in a very crazy, unstable orbit. And so not only does it have like really weird night and day patterns, but it has a very chaotic trajectory, and so you can't necessarily predict exactly where it's going to be.
It's kind of real couples, I guess. You know, like from a distance you can sort of assume they think and act as one. But once you like GetUp close to them, you see there's a lot of disagreement there.
But you never want to get between them exactly.
That's right. It's unstable. Yeah, you don't want to be the third body.
There, you definitely don't. You can get tossed out of their solar system.
Or maybe e check to one or the others.
Then I guess, yes, it sounds like we're writing a rom com now involving a trip to the woods in Russia.
All right, well, this is kind of an interesting question here, and an interesting problem because it doesn't just tell you that some things are hard to solve in nature, but some things are hard and unpredictable themselves in nature. Right, Like some of these things out in nature, they just don't last long. They spin out of control, or they settle into things that are more stable, like two body solar systems.
Yeah, and it could be that in the future somebody events mathematics that makes it easier to describe that crazy chaotic motion and that you know, in twenty years or fifty years, we have like a a new basic function, you know, like we have sign and cosign. These were invented functions by human mathematicians. Somebody might come up with a new function which turns out to be really useful to describing three body motion and allows us to find some expression. A lot of mathematicians are skeptical because they can sort of express these solutions as like an infinite series, and they show that it's very complicated, and they suspect that there isn't a simple function. But you know, future mathematicians are usually smarter than today's mathematicians, and so I hold out hope.
Or maybe like there are aliens who have figured this out, you know, like they'll come to us and be like, yes, sign and cost and we don't have you know, Chao sign or something that describes chaos motion.
Yeah, exactly, And maybe somewhere some mathematician is developing the tools and they don't even realize how it's going to be useful. I love those stories of mathematicians developing these ideas and then them later being co opted by physicists. And so maybe those ideas exist right now, and all you have to do is go out and read the right math paper and you're like, oh, this is exactly the hammer we need to hit this physics nail.
Or maybe the answer is in some cabin in Russia, but the the poor soul ran out of food or something and it's lost to us forever.
But it's written down on a frozen sheet of paper in that cabin.
It exists. But anyways, I guess the good news is that it's an open problem and there could be somebody listening to this podcast right now that might solve it.
In the future, maybe even you.
Well, we hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us, See you next time.
Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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