• Question: Do you think we will develop new techniques in the future that will allow us to solve the three-body problem?

    Asked by bolzanoweierstrass to James, Marcus, Martin, Rob, Suzanne on 19 Mar 2012.
    • Photo: Suzanne McEndoo

      Suzanne McEndoo answered on 19 Mar 2012:

      It’s unlikely. I think the three body problem is one of those things in maths that, provably, doesn’t have a solution. This means that it’s not just that we haven’t found it yet, it’s that it doesn’t exist. We can solve it (I think) for special cases, but not in all cases.

      We can, however, use computer models to solve the equation in a way that produces numbers (rather than functions) as an answer. So if we have such and such conditions at the start, we can trace what would happen.

      Of course, maybe we’ll come up with something better than maths that we could use to solve it, but that’s such a huge shift from how we think that it’s hard to even begin to think what that might look like.

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