In 1889, in honour of his 60th birthday King Oscar II of Sweden offered a rich prize to any scientist who could solve an ancient puzzle known as the Three Body Problem. They had always assumed that the world worked by physical laws, and if you could measure initial conditions accurately enough, those laws would let you predict the future indefinitely. Like the butterfly that causes a hurricane by flapping its wings, it is exquisitely sensitive to initial conditions. Like the endlessly repeating patterns of chaos theory, the new solutions discovered by the Chinese researchers make for elaborate and weirdly beautiful images when they are plotted in two dimensions. Because of how solar systems form, planets, moons and stars tend to settle into regular orbits on a single plane.

Source: National Post October 18, 2017 21:14 UTC