MidReal Story
Michael Young found out the solution to the three-body
Scenario: Michael Young found out the solution to the three-body problem.
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I have devoted my life to physics, to the study of how the universe works.
It’s never been enough for me to just accept the way things are; I need to know why.
And so, I’ve spent countless hours mulling over equations and ideas, trying to see what others haven’t.
A few years ago, I had a breakthrough, a solution to the three-body problem that has puzzled scientists for centuries.
It is a fundamental shift in the way we think about physics and our ability to predict the behavior of complex systems.
One that will totally change the way we think about the universe.
The three-body problem is simple enough to explain, but incredibly difficult to solve.
It involves predicting the motion of three celestial bodies under the influence of their mutual gravitational attraction.
For centuries, scientists have struggled to find a way to accurately describe this system and predict what will happen in the future.
Some of the greatest minds in history, like Sir Isaac Newton, have declared it unsolvable.
But as a physicist, I knew there had to be a way to make sense of the problem.
I began my research as all physicists do, by studying what others before me had discovered.
But when I encountered the three-body problem, I was struck by how little progress had been made.
Many scientists had tried and failed to solve it, and it was considered a sort of holy grail within our field.
I knew it wouldn’t be easy, but if anyone could figure out this problem, it would be me.
I spent years unraveling its mysteries piece by piece, often working long hours late into the night, trying to make sense of it all.
At times, it was incredibly frustrating, and I wasn’t always sure that I would ever be able to crack it.
But as I developed my theory, I knew that we were on to something big.
And so, I enlisted the help of Sarah Johnson, one of my colleagues at the institute where we both work.
Sarah is one of the most intuitive physicists I know and has an unmatched ability to understand complex systems in a way that is difficult for many others.
Her insight was invaluable to me as I worked through my theory on the three-body problem.
David Smith was another one of my colleagues who was instrumental in our research.
David is a mathematician with an almost obsessive attention to detail.
He is incredibly thorough in his work, and he leaves no equation unsolved.
Having him on our team made me feel even more confident that we would be able to finally solve this ancient mystery.
It didn’t take long for us to realize that we were on to something big.
And soon enough, we were able to successfully solve the three-body problem.
It was a remarkable achievement—one that will forever change the course of physics.
We knew that our discovery was going to have a profound impact on our field and that it would open up new possibilities for understanding complex systems.
There were skeptics at first who doubted our theory and our approach to solving this problem.
But after all of the research we had done and all of the late nights we spent working through these ideas together, we knew that we were right.
“Let me get this straight,” David said after Sarah had finished explaining her idea for solving the three-body problem.
We were sitting in my office again.
Sarah sat cross-legged on the chair opposite me.
The three-body problem is already a mathematical nightmare.
So you think adding an extra dimension to the problem will make it easier?”
The idea seems counterintuitive at best,” I said.
We were discussing her approach over lunch one day.
Sarah said she’d been thinking about this for a while now.
She hadn’t come up with anything concrete yet, just some ideas.
“It’s not about making things easier,” Sarah said sharply.
“It’s about looking at things from a different perspective.”
“Sure,” David said.
“But you can’t deny that adding another variable to an already complicated system doesn’t sound like the brightest idea.”
“He’s right,” I said.
“Not to mention, time isn’t even a spatial dimension like the other three—it’s fundamentally different.”
Of course, time is different,” Sarah said with a roll of her eyes.
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
David seemed intrigued by Sarah’s idea, which was quite unusual for him.
Typically he was more skeptical and wanted to see more concrete evidence before he got behind any new theory.
“Sure,” David said.
“I think this is a very interesting approach, and I would love to help you solve this problem.”
That night, Sarah and David and I spent hours discussing the three-body problem and Sarah’s new approach.
I wasn’t entirely convinced by her argument, but I was definitely intrigued.
Sarah has a history of coming up with ideas that seem counterintuitive but are actually quite brilliant.
I’ve been working with her for a long time now, and she has a lot more intuition about these things than I do.
So if she thought this was the right approach to solving the three-body problem, then I was willing to listen.
We spent the next several months working through Sarah’s theories on time and how it could be used to predict the motion of the planets and other celestial bodies.
It wasn’t as straightforward as we had hoped, but we did make some progress.
Sarah had a good point.
The dynamics of systems are always changing, and we need to take this into account if we want an accurate description of the system’s behavior over time.
But the math was still quite complicated, and an unorthodox approach can’t solve everything.
At least, that’s what I thought.
We soon realized that our current method of studying dynamics wasn’t working.
There was something we weren’t getting, and there was no point in trying to force the issue.
At this point, we were back at square one.
All of us felt pretty disheartened by this setback, but then I remembered something Sarah had said many times before.
“If you can find an angle where time becomes a true fourth dimension,” I said as I filled my cup with more coffee, “we can transform the three-body problem into several two-body problems.”
My words left them both speechless.
So I explained further.
I started by showing them how the addition of time to our system could be used to describe the motion of a single body.
When I was done explaining my idea and they understood the implications of my theory, the three of us sat in silence, almost not daring to believe what we’d just figured out.
The idea had come to me while I was pouring my coffee, milk swirling in with it as I stirred.
The motions of coffee and milk in a cup may seem simple and insignificant, but they have a deep connection with the three-body problem.
As I watched them mix, I realized that the motion of the coffee by itself was one part of the system and the motion of the milk by itself was another part of the system.
If I poured coffee into a cup already containing milk, then the motion of the coffee and milk would be a two-body problem in which coffee and milk are described as two celestial bodies.
I could then add in a third body – the combined coffee/milk mixture – and solve the motions of all three bodies.
It struck me then that this was what we’d been trying to do with our previous approach: We were trying to calculate the motion of all three bodies at once, when in fact they should be treated as separate entities.
I knew this was a long shot and I felt a little silly suggesting it, but it made sense to me at the time.
I poured myself another cup of coffee and took a sip before continuing.
I decided to use two cups, a black one for coffee and a white one for milk, to represent two celestial bodies.
If I poured coffee into the white cup with milk already in it, then the motion of these two liquids would be a two-body problem, just like before.
Now if I added a third cup – a grey one – and poured black-and-white mixtures into it from both cups, then the motions of both mixtures would be a three-body problem with all three celestial bodies taken into consideration.
It was incredibly simple and incredibly stupid, but it just seemed so perfect.
Sarah’s eyes lit up, and she clapped her hands together with excitement when she heard my plan.
This seemed encouraging to me, so I explained it again in great detail and waited for her response.
Sarah listened intently before turning to David.
“Do you get it?”
she asked him with a huge grin on her face.
David sat quietly for a moment before nodding his head in agreement.
I was so happy that he understood what I was saying.
It was a huge relief, and it meant that we could put my idea into practice right away.
We spent the next few weeks formalizing this analogy and creating a set of equations that obeyed it.
David did most of this work, but Sarah and I were by his side, helping him whenever he needed clarification.
Our idea was quite simple, but it worked, and this was what mattered most.
I’d been trying to come up with this idea for a few months now, and it finally seemed to have come together in my mind.
I knew that we were onto something, and I was so excited to see where this new direction would take us.
For centuries, people had searched for a solution to the three-body problem, but this was thought to be impossible.
Yet here we were, on the brink of solving it.
Not only that, but we’d found a way to predict how systems with any number of bodies would evolve over time.
This was even more amazing, and it was something that I couldn’t have even dreamed of when we first began looking at Jupiter’s moons and their weirdly erratic motions.
For over three years, I’d been consumed by the three-body problem.
As a theoretical physicist, I’d been trained to take on the most challenging problems in my field, and this was one of the most difficult ones of all.
I’d thrown myself headfirst into it, determined to solve it at any cost.
My colleagues had warned me that it might not be possible to find a solution, but I hadn’t believed them.
Instead, I’d thrown myself into it, working day and night, never giving up until the wee hours of the morning.
I’d tried everything I could think of, including some things that were so far out there that even my colleagues had laughed at me.
But no matter what I tried, the solution eluded me, slipping through my fingers every time.
This had gone on for over three years now, and it had consumed me entirely.
My mind was filled with thoughts of the three-body problem, and it had become all-consuming.
I knew that if I didn’t find a solution soon, it would spell disaster for my career.
After all, if I couldn’t solve one of the most basic problems in physics, then what hope did I have of ever making a name for myself in the field?
I sighed to myself as I gathered my things together in preparation for leaving the office.
It had been a long day, and I’d gotten nothing done except for staring at the same equations that I’d been staring at for the past year.
I was exhausted, both mentally and physically, and I didn’t know how much longer I could keep going like this.
I was about to walk out the door when I heard the phone ringing.
I hesitated for a moment before answering it, not sure if I wanted to talk to anyone right now.
It could be one of my colleagues, wondering where I was or wanting to ask me about something work-related.
If I ignored it, they might think that I was blowing them off or avoiding them.
I decided to answer it after all and picked it up just as it was about to go to voicemail.
“Hello?” I said as I brought the receiver up to my ear.
“Yes, hello,” said a woman’s voice on the other end of the line.
“I’m looking for Dr.
“Speaking,” I said as I leaned back in my chair.
“I read your paper on quantum entanglement last month and found it quite fascinating,” she said.
“I’ve also read some of your other work on celestial mechanics, and I must say that I’m very impressed with your approach to these problems.”
I could hear the smile in her voice, but something about her tone seemed off to me.
It was almost as if she were being sarcastic or talking down to me.
“I’m glad you enjoyed my paper,” I said as I sat up in my chair.
“It’s always nice to hear from a colleague who appreciates one’s work.”
“I found your paper to be quite insightful,” she said.
“But I must say that I’m rather disappointed with your approach to the three-body problem.”
She paused for a moment before continuing.
“I think that you’re missing something very important in your analysis of this problem.”
“And what might that be?”
I asked, raising an eyebrow in surprise.
“Surely you’re not suggesting that I’ve made some kind of mistake in my calculations?”
“No, not at all,” she said quickly.
“I’m simply saying that there might be another way to approach this problem that you haven’t thought of yet.”
“And what might that be?”
I asked somewhat skeptically.
“It’s difficult for me to say over the phone,” she said.
“But I think that it might be best if we meet in person to discuss this matter further.”
I raised an eyebrow again at her suggestion.
She seemed very confident about this idea of hers, almost as if she knew something that I didn’t.
She could be right about that too because I hadn’t exactly gotten very far with solving the three-body problem so far.
It couldn’t hurt to hear her out and see what she had to say about it.
“Perhaps we might discuss this over a cup of coffee or tea?”
she asked after a moment of silence.
“Are you free tomorrow morning?”
“That should work for me,” I said after checking my schedule on my computer.
“Could you meet me at 9:00 AM?
“I’ll be there,” she said.
I wrote down the time and date of our meeting on a piece of paper and hung up the phone.
I sat there for a moment, staring at the piece of paper in my hand.
Who was this woman anyway?
And what could she possibly know about solving the three-body problem that I didn’t?
I shook my head and sighed to myself as I crumpled up the piece of paper and threw it into the trash can.
I’d figure all of this out tomorrow morning.
I stood up and gathered my things together before leaving my office for the day.
Sarah Johnson wasn’t what I’d expected at all.
For one thing, she was a woman, which made her something of a rarity in the world of physics and science in general.
For another thing, she was quite attractive as well.
She had short curly hair and large brown eyes that seemed to take in everything around her.
Her features were very delicate and elfin-like.
And even though she was only five feet tall or so, her presence seemed to fill up the room around her.
Sarah was also very direct and confident in the way that she spoke.
She didn’t seem to be afraid of me or of anyone else for that matter.
And as I gazed into her eyes and saw the slight smile playing about her lips, I couldn’t help but be intrigued by her.
“Why didn’t you include quantum mechanics in your analysis?”
she asked as she took a sip of her coffee and looked at me over the rim of her cup.
Her question took me somewhat by surprise because I hadn’t been expecting it at all.
I thought about it for a moment before answering her.
“I’m not really sure,” I said after taking a sip of my tea.
“The two theories don’t really have much to do with each other.”
“That may be true,” she said as she set down her cup and folded her hands together on the table.
“But it never hurts to think outside of the box when you’re trying to solve a difficult problem like this.”
“You have a point there,” I said as I set down my cup and leaned back in my chair.
“And what do you suggest we do next?”
