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Over in the s-f subreddits, this novel gets so much love. So I feel left out that I - like you few here - really hated it. My big thing was that the science is
by CWuestefeld 7y ago
Over in the s-f subreddits, this novel gets so much love. So I feel left out that I - like you few here - really hated it.
My big thing was that the science is just wrong.
Most fundamentally, it's not a three-body problem, there are (at least) four bodies: the three suns and the planet.
And the real world isn't going to follow any theoretical solution to TBP anyway. There is atmospheric drag, microscopic gravitational perturbations from the rest of the universe, decreasing solar masses as the stars age, and so forth.
In a system as chaotic as was described, any of these things make the problem intractable.
That said, I did enjoy the description of a digital computer implemented with "people" acting as the logic gates.
- losvedir 7y agoI don't understand your opposition to the name. The three body problem is so named precisely because it's intractable. In physics with two bodies you can perfectly model the evolution of a system, but as soon as you add a third it becomes chaotic and requires numerical simulation to approximate solutions.
- CWuestefeld 7y agoI don't understand your opposition to the name. The three body problem is so named Look at my first objection, that the problem described in the book has (at least) FOUR bodies. Yet the idea that it's a three-body problem is pervasive throughout the book. Surely that in itself is enough to justify some aggravation.