Those days, a serial released on Netflix, named “3Body Problem”, got huge attention from people who like the Science fiction genre due to the fact that it’s packed with scientific problems, that despite their complexity are highly thrilling and entertaining. And if you have watched this serial or at least listened to its name, then definitely you must have thought for sure what exactly “Three-Body Problem” is, and what parts of this serial are scientific and which are fully or partially fictional.
Actually, this series, “Three-Body Problem,” is a new work of the creators of the popular “Game of Thrones” series, adapted from the bestseller of the same name, a trilogy by the Chinese author Liu Cixin. This is the novel that includes three novels in itself, which are combined by the interwoven future and problems of quantum physics with the contradiction between the people and extraterrestrial beings, which won lots of fans and some literature prizes, including the most prestige Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2015.
With its concentration on the first book in the trilogy, the Netflix adaptation has most definitely dialed things down with many of its heavier, more theoretical aspects of the book for those whose quantum physics may be perhaps a tad less than at an Einsteinian level. Instead, it rather seems to have concentrated on bringing in completely new characters to try and heighten the emotional weight of the story.
However, all of them are scientists-good or bad-who decide about a backdrop of quantum physics, astrophysics, real-life technology, and imaginary ideas about extraterrestrial beings and gadgets that are centuries in advance of human ideas and change the face of human life on Earth.
In this respect, it would be worth discussing in more detail some scientific aspects of the serial to clearly understand what exactly happened in this story and introduce some quite interesting scientific theories.
What is the three-body problem, and why has nobody ever been able to solve it? The three-body problem is actually a real, almost insoluble science problem; it’s also known as the “celestial three-body dance” that the characters Jack and Jane have to solve in a virtual reality game called “San Ti” in this show. Later on, we will be discussing a series of VR headsets.
In this series, a home to some other-worldly organisms is known as “San Ti”.
This is because most other planets receive gravity emanating from one sun, while this one receives gravitational influences emanating from three stars. Such gravitational tugs have made its rotation chaotic and utterly unpredictable. The planet has one stable situation: when it orbits just one star at a logical distance, like Earth. Every time it is too close to or far away from the stars, a “chaotic period” forms with fatal disasters. This causes the development of the San Ti technology to be at a crisis point. In such a series, the mystery that scientists are to solve in the “game” is to forecast the “stable period”, but according to science, this is said not to be forecastable.
But first, the three-body problem has been there since the emergence of mankind in understanding gravity and its mechanisms, dating back to the 17-th century by Newton. As you well know, the Earth orbits the sun because its gravitational field pulls our planet, like all the other planets of the solar system, toward itself.
Because the gravitational pull of any other planet within the solar system is smaller compared with the gravitational pull of the Sun itself, and none of them is strong enough to substantially affect the others, each of the planets can stay around the Sun peacefully without interrupting the motion of other celestial bodies.
Now, the same situation is there in the case of the Moon, which is trapped within Earth’s gravitational field and thus orbits Earth. More specifically, in case the gravitational field of one body becomes stronger than that of the other body and tugs it towards its direction, a stable orbit is then created in the path which also shall be predictable and unchangeable, just like the Moon and Earth or Earth and the Sun. Newton discovered this in 1687, which we know as Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation.
The formula developed by Newton in predicting the orbits of the planets in a single-star system included a statement that any two bodies attract each other with a force directly proportional to their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. Because of this fact, this law has been termed as the “two-body problem.” Add another star in this equation and one is dealing with a binary star system wherein the two stars normally execute stable orbits around a mutual center of gravity.
Whereas our own solar system possesses only one star, binary star systems occur considerably more often and theoretically can possess stable planets in orbit around them, it is oftentimes quite easy for an astronomer or physicist to calculate what motion paths such binary system models will follow.
But stir in a third star, and all bets are off. The third element, other than just stabilizing the system, acts to create chaos and disruption, hurling all objects around it in a very unpredictable fashion. Those objects may spin off into space, collide with each other, or be influenced by the gravitational field of others to head off in completely different directions.
In the second half of the 19th century, the famous French mathematician Henri Poincaré gave birth, within the frame of the so-called three-body problem, to “Chaos Theory” and the “butterfly effect”.
All right, then, what might make such orbits of planets in a threestar system unstable? Astrophysical scientist Charles J. Lissauer can explain that by the Law of Conservation of Energy:
That’s the famous law saying that energy in the closed system has never disappeared or come into existence but is transformed from one form to another. Energy conservation implies that the planets are never going to come out of their orbit from a star and enter into the depth of an infinite space.
This means that a planet falling in the gravity region of a star cannot generate more energy to liberate itself from that gravity. Yet, when three bodies try to circle each other in space, chaotic and unstable orbits result. Such are the scenarios where the presence of an intermediary planet gets completely shattered as a consequence of its collision with one of the stars.
Now, based on the above case, is it ever possible to stabilize a three-body gravitational system or predict a direction and speed in which rotation can take place in orbit? It is in order to meet this puzzle that scientists did struggle, first from this angle and then from that, until hundreds of other methods came up, at least on paper, with computational algorithms in the last few decades.
The problem herein is that most of those methods are just about impossible to use in a real-world setting, and how well they can work outside a purely theoretical framework is highly questionable. With all of this, no system has been found in the universe that contains three massive stars which can even irregularly orbit each other. Even more impossible would be to add the fourth mass of a planet to such a trinary system and its having regular orbits around the three stars for even one revolution long enough for a civilization to form on it. Actually, when reading books or watching series, this is the problem of “four bodies,” but probably due to coincidence with the scientific hypothesis, it is still called the “three-body problem.”
The point is-what disasters can occur if there is any evolution of a civilization on a planet in a trinary star system?
In fact, the whole plot of the series is based on a hypothetical assumption about the existence of some species of extraterrestrial beings, “San Ti,” getting some very advanced technology on an alien planet placed in a trinary star system.
Due to the three-body problem, these three suns constantly pull on each other in the chaotic dance of gravity, flinging each other in all directions through space. The poor old planet keeping them company is perpetually going through devastation in climatic conditions. Thus, the civilization of San Ti has been periodically destroyed over thousands and thousands of years, making it almost impossible for them to achieve technological advancement.
Horowitz is of the view that the preconditions on the three-star San Ti planet are precarious. “For a while probably, nothing catastrophically bad is likely to happen to this planet, but in billions of years many of the planetary orbits around the two stars will become unstable. Its civilization will be extinct.”.
“If it takes billions of years to develop the signs of life on a planet, like Earth, then such a planet most likely can’t sustain conditions suitable for life. Still, there is a possibility of special conditions in some trinary star systems where stability could exist long enough to host life, or for that matter, this life will evolve quicker and overcome space quicker than humans do.
- Charles J. Horowitz, Astrophysicist
Actually, we Earthlings are pretty lucky to have enjoyed stable climate conditions on Earth during the last 10,000 years. And from this many of us may get the feeling that in fact the stable climate conditions for planets are the norm, while Earth is more of an oddity. It probably is no coincidence that advanced human civilization came into being.
Do aliens really exist? What is the Fermi Paradox?
The storyline of the three bodies is an axis with which aliens and a probable attack on Earth are connected, and it is so banal. Scientists in the series deal with this problem as if it was something one got used to. Of course, in a scene from the series, the character Yi Wenjie shortly explains the Fermi paradox.
One great physicist and designer of the first nuclear reactor, Enrico Fermi, once in 1950 asked the question as: “Where is everybody?” What he meant was that in a universe 14 billion years old, with over a trillion stars, we should find some signs of other intelligent life by now.
Several hypotheses have become answers to the Fermat Paradox: some consider that Earthlings are the ones who managed to get through the “Great Filter,” while the rest of the alien civilizations died; some others say aliens are all connected and we humans are just isolated from those other civilizations.
Maybe humans just haven’t developed the technology that would be needed to detect or decipher signals from aliens. This apparently solves the Fermi’s Paradox in the story of the three-body problem, where one conclusion is that aliens would not want to be seen because this would locate them for possible attacks and destruction by another civilization.
But the most plausible explanation that I came across was from two renowned astrophysicists, Martin Rees and Mario Livio. According to them, these aliens would be more machine-like, instead of organic, beings that would not necessarily live on any certain planet. Actually, all aliens could well exist in the form of nanobots floating in space, which we simply cannot see.
Is it conceivable, for instance, that two particles set on opposite sides of the universe can act as one particle, and thus share information right away? It’s so deeply sewn into the plot of the series that, even as unbelievable as it is, it’s almost plausible at the same time. Somewhere along the line in the series, it was shown how the aliens used supercomputers to spy on and communicate with the Earthlings; in simple terms, those were the so-called Sophons, positioned inside two protons-one on theirs and one on Earth.
This wonder of nature can also allow simultaneous communication between these two protons-something called quantum entanglement. To such an extent, it sounds unbelievable that even Einstein named it “spooky action at a distance”, and right until the end of his life, he believed it was evidence for the incompleteness of quantum mechanics. But the property was nonetheless observed on subatomic particles, and with the use of quantum computers, as many as 51 qubits have been entangled.
Entanglement is when two entangled particles in mutual relation have one soul, as it were, since whatever happens to one might influence the others even over billions of light years away.
As Horowitz said, “It might be better to say that these two entangled particles share information with each other rather than say they receive information and transmit it to another.” In other words, instead of saying these Sophons are in communication with each other, it is better to say they get information from both Earth and the Trisolaran planet.
In the series, the scientists exploded thousands of atomic bombs one after another in space to drive a capsule to travel at a speed of 1.2 percent of the velocity of light to the Trisolaran planet. Well, is this hazardous to try in reality?
This could be the most unimaginable scenario of the series. Within the series, when the character Jian Cheng proposes this solution, his colleagues burst into laughter and ask him if that is even possible. Jian Cheng’s idea actually gets its inspiration from a very real-life phenomenon: Nuclear Thermal Propulsion, or Nuclear Pulse Propulsion, wherein the heat generated through a nuclear reaction replaces chemical energy in a rocket.
As it happens, applied to space engines instead of earthly ones, nuclear propulsion really produces very little in the way of radioactive emissions. What it does, instead of economizing energy, is economize on cosmic radiation exposure and accelerate the processes of moving rockets. Though the series has Cheng’s concept of a domino effect as no more than gaudy, history books reflect that the U.S. actually had a number of tests with nuclear thermal propulsion.
In fact, under the Orion project linked to the early Cold War era, an attempt was made to build a rocket propelled with small atomic bombs. This was scrubbed, of course, due to the simple fact that scientists of the time couldn’t find a way around the major problem: any attempt to launch a nuclear missile from Earth into space would more than likely result in catastrophic nuclear fallout. The Orion of today revised this plan by hoping to launch missiles from space itself in order to prevent deadly particles from making it to Earth and limit astronauts’ exposure to radioactive radiation.
Can it be no bigger in overall size than a proton and still extend in space so that supercomputers could fit into its various dimensions?
The entire series contains one of the hardest things to imagine: what the aliens did with the entangled proton before sending it to Earth. Enlarge the multidimensional aspects of the proton into the size of a planet, set up a super-duper computer on its surface, shrink again to microscopic dimensions, and send it out for espionage and illusion.
The very idea of such an achievement is at best hard to conceive of; much less, of course, actually execute it in the real world. The same idea, at least on paper, exists in the real world, entitled “Multidimensional Unfolding.” Suppose you wanted to make an origami fortune teller. At first, it’s completely flat, but as you go on, it becomes more and more layered, potentially becoming more dimensions.
Now take that paper fortune teller and blow it up to huge, much larger than three in any dimension. Mathematicians all have different ways of trying to visualize the concept, the most wellknown of which is the “Hypercube” or “Tesseract,” but basically a fourdimensional cube.
A tesseract, or in other words a hypercube, is a four-dimensional analogue of a three-dimensional cube. While the latter one can easily be conceptualized and envisaged, it is impossible to do so concerning the former one, with our usual spatial intuition.
In a hypercube:
-The 0-dimensional point extends to a 1-dimensional line segment.
It collapses a 1-dimensional line segment into a 2-dimensional square.
A 2-D square becomes a 3-D cube.
A 3-dimensional cube becomes a 4-dimensional hypercube, or tesseract.
One of the problems working with a hypercube, or tesseract, is that it’s very hard to conceptualize within our three-dimensional view of space. We can do the math on it, and project it in various ways, but our brains really have a problem conceptualizing its shape and properties.
For example, if one were to “unroll” a tesseract into our familiar three-dimensional space, then one would see a cube embedded in a cube, sharing a cube at each of its vertices. Undoubtedly, a staggering, thought-reviving concept with which to stretch our concepts of space and dimensionality.
Above all, the idea of unfolding in many dimensions deals precisely with researching those higher dimensional shapes and how they can be manipulated and conceptualized. That’s really where things get interesting, really pushing the boundaries of mathematics, physics, and understanding the universe. Understandably, these hypercubes are abstract objects that exist in the abstract realms of theoretical mathematics and physics, and no example of them has been observed in nature. While no physical theory mentions a structure with more than three dimensions, none has been proven yet. Let me put it right: this idea taken from the series nowadays is in the realm of imagination.
Realistically, the nanofiber part of this series belongs to Aggie Salazar
Aggie Salazar is the leader of a nanofiber technology project; hers is applied to what can be called the most disturbing and irritating scene throughout the entire series. In order not to “injure” the extraterrestrial technology installed on the vessel, they employ Aggie’s nanofiber as an invisible net of razor-sharp blades with which they tear the ship and its passengers.
The advanced properties for these materials in the series are, while similar to their real-world counterparts in many ways, exaggerated.
Nanofibers are very, very strong and very thin carbon products which well conduct heat and electricity. In theory, if nanofibers could be manufactured as thin as we are seeing in this series, theoretically, they should be able to cut through everything: diamonds, the ship, human bodies – yet they remain invisible.
Scientific adviser to the series and a physics lecturer at Cambridge University Matt Kenzie confirms: nanofibers on such a scale are very expensive and hard to develop but can “cut through almost anything”. Scientific adviser for all episodes Erin MacDonald said from a point of view of the material sciences, the whole scene of the ship being shredded is just completely unrealistic; but hey, if all the resources were there then why not. So, how far are we from the VR headsets featured in the series?
According to one of the greatest science fiction authors, Arthur C. Clarke, impossible to differ some really advanced technologies from magic-describing this certain definition of the 3Body VR headset. Now, throughout this series, with some of its characters like Jane and Jack, it has shown how this shiny, snazzy, silver headset in the immersive 3D gaming feature is donned in fashion-apparently from firms such as Meta or Apple. Within that virtual world, they would be able to, say, feel the sand against their skin and view from a third-person perspective the surroundings of oneself.
No preparation, no screening, occlusion of cover, no controller, and no loading time-this Head-Mounted Display was supposed to not even require a power bank; supposedly, the battery life would last forever. If we take, for example, the most advanced VR-headsets nowadays, something like Meta Quest Pro or Apple Vision Pro, talking about such an approach as that would put us, by comparison, centuries ahead of executing technology in the 3Body series.
Considering design, performance, and battery life, today’s headsets are nowhere close to perfection, but something similar to what was shown in the 3Body series is not entirely implausible a few hundred years into the future. By then, of course, it will have more uses than helping to solve the three-body problem in some mystery game. Telos can easily imagine walking on a planet like Arrakis from the movie Dune or Hogwarts Castle from Harry Potter and talking with friends who have avatars just like oneself. That’s the day when the leaps of VR technology would finally reach the headsets of the 3Body, change the world; we’re just hundreds of years too early for that.