The Three-body Problem

[leonerd]

Apologies to my non-mathematical readers for a moment... This gets a touch mathsy, but I assure you it gets to a point in the end.

There is a problem in applied maths, called the Three Body Problem. It sortof goes like this. Take a single object alone in a universe. Either it is moving or it isn't. Either way, its motion is entirely boring, we can

Comments

[tryst_fel_cath]

It gets even better for galatic collision models. We had some hand outs of a simulation yesterday and it was limited to 1600 bodies. I did wonder why. Obviously in real life there are millions of objects in a galaxy and predicting the paths of every one of them, and their gravitational interactions is probably a bit much to ask of a super computer.Having little models of people can be useful, but yeah, in big groups it doesn't really work. It's like the N-body problem. There are too many interactions to see what's going on.