Achi news desk-
Netflix’s 3 Body Problem has sparked interest and controversy.
Based on the 2008 novel by Liu Cixin and brought to the small screen by Game of Thrones creators DB Weiss and David Benioff, the series tells the story of an impending alien invasion of Earth.
The show portrays some science that left some viewers with questions and some historical events that have upset some people in China.
Global News spoke to experts to separate fact from fiction and history from hysteria.
What is the three body problem?
The three-body problem refers to three astronomical bodies, such as planets or the sun, and how the gravity of each object affects the orbits of the other.
But it is easier to understand if we start with a two-body problem.
“The closer objects are, the stronger the gravitational pull,” said Paul Delaney, emeritus professor of physics and astronomy at York University.
The sun is millions of times bigger than the Earth, according to NASA, and so its gravity holds our planet in orbit around it.
The orbit is stable, making it predictable, Delaney said.
This is a two-body problem, just like the moon and the Earth, and it is a problem that has been solved since Sir Isaac Newton’s work on gravity.
“Theoretically, we can figure out where (the two objects) are as a function of time,” Delaney told Global News.
“There are complications with angular momentum and tidal forces and friction,” he said, speaking from Tuscon, Ariz., “but for all practical intents and purposes, the moon will remain in a stable orbit.“
There are other planets in the solar system and the moon revolves around the Earth. Delaney told Global News, though, that these objects are so far away and have such a small mass compared to the sun that they don’t significantly influence Earth’s orbit.
The three-body problem involves another astronomical object, such as another sun.
“The stability of the planetary orbit around the two stars,” he said, “is not stable.”
That instability means that the orbit becomes less predictable because the changing distances and forces that the objects exert on each other would also change the speed.
“So, predicting where they will be as a function of time (is) feasible, but much more difficult,” Delaney said.
Therefore, three-body problems exist and can become even more complex, with even eight stars.
The “n-body” problem, Delaney explained – where “n” represents any number of objects that exert gravity on each other – is “terrible” to calculate.
An n-body problem could eventually lead to one of the objects colliding with another, or being ejected into space, according to Delaney.
And the different gravities that pull on a planet in an n-body problem of two or more could disrupt, if not destroy, life on the planet.
It could affect tectonic plates and cause earthquakes, change tides and change the water cycle and weather, Delaney told Global News.
“If our surface temperature dropped below zero consistently for just years, let alone centuries or more, yes, we would be toast,” he said.
The three-body problem in the Netflix show refers to three suns, with the Trisolaran people living on a planet caught between them.
“Tri” comes from Latin and Greek and means “three,” while “solar” comes from the Latin word for “sun.” Their planet is caught between the gravity of the three suns and their civilization is constantly being destroyed.
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The aliens want to invade Earth to live on a planet with a fixed two-body problem.
To see their potential future home, the Trisolarans use a proton to project and receive information across the universe from Trisolaris to Earth using something called “quantum entanglement.”
“The moment you put the word ‘quantum’ in front of anything, everyone goes, ‘ooh,’ and anything seems possible,” Delaney said.
Quantum entanglement is real, he added, but it doesn’t work – as far as we know – how the show portrays it.
Eiza González as Auggie Salazar in Episode 103 of ‘3 Body Problem.’ Courtesy of Netflix © 2024.
Protons are positively charged subatomic particles. Together with neutrons, which have no charge (as in, “neutral”), they form part of an atom’s nucleus.
For example, an atom of hydrogen contains one proton and one negatively charged electron in a probability field around it.
Protons are not “little lumps of matter that just sit there,” Delaney said. They have specific characteristics, which include, among other things, the electrons around them and their own spin.
“We believe that that information can be entangled with other particles, so that the entire exact state of this particular particle is mimicked by (that) particle,” Delaney said.
“And if you change the state of this (proton), it (the state of the other proton) changes immediately regardless of the distance.”
He said this was an example of the friction between quantum mechanics and the regular atomic theory of matter, which states that anything can only move as fast as the speed of light.
“If you’re 400 light years apart, then it takes 400 years” to get there, traveling at the speed of light, Delaney said.
A connection ignores that distance – but it doesn’t mean information can be transferred.
“The proton is not exactly scanning the Earth, taking out pictures and transmitting information about its local environment,” he said.
At one point, a human character in the show offers to detonate a series of nuclear bombs in space to propel a spaceship forward.
This, it turns out, is theoretically possible.
“We looked at that option back in the ’60s when nuclear warheads were common,” Delaney told Global News.
It was called Project Orion.
The craft would have been “powered by successive explosions of hydrogen atomic bombs,” according to the American Air and Space Museum’s website. The crew compartment would be “well shielded from the explosion and radiation” and shocks from the explosions were absorbed through water-cooled wells.
The site says the US government canceled Orion in 1964 after seven years of work “largely because of the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which banned nuclear tests in the atmosphere.”
Delaney said the design looked unsustainable and dangerous, with a huge irradiated plate permanently positioned behind the astronauts and requiring many nuclear bombs.
The show has drawn attention not only for its science fiction but also for its portrayals of political events.
The series opens with a scene set in 1960s China during the Cultural Revolution.
In it, the Red Guard beat a scientist to death.
Chapter 101 of ‘3 Body Problem.’ Cr. Ed Miller/Netflix © 2024.
“The first scene made my jaw drop,” one person wrote on Weibo, a Chinese social media platform.
“Fundamentally, westerners cannot accept the idea of Chinese people inventing advanced technology,” another person wrote on the rating and social network website Douban.
The Cultural Revolution in China began in 1966 when the leader of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the country, Mao Zedong, incited Chinese youth against the bureaucracy, according to Carleton University professor emeritus Jeremy Paltiel.
Mao believed he was being frozen out of power, he said, and he believed he could get rid of the people he didn’t like while also inoculating China from losing its revolutionary zeal by getting young people to throw out the old. out
“It became extremely violent very quickly because nobody was sure who the right targets were,” Paltiel said.
He said the CCP had never fully counted the dead, but “for sure we are talking about tens of thousands of people who were beaten to death.”
“People were beaten to death in public,” he said, and ssome were “cannibalized.”
He told Global News that he was an exchange student in 1974, after the violence had ended.
“In our dorm, the shower stalls had no doors left because they had been taken away during the Cultural Revolution to form armor (for) the students who were fighting each other.”
The country is still ruled by the CCP and Mao remains a revered leader. As such, says Paltiel, the Cultural Revolution “has not been taught very well.”
“They (the CCP) say it’s a mistake, but they don’t dwell on it” because it was a period of suffering and humiliation for the party.
He suspected that the criticism that some in China have leveled at the Netflix series is likely to stem from surprise by people unfamiliar with what happened, in a country where history and the internet have been heavily censored. He also suggests that some may be angry because foreigners seem to be shaming China by showing such a troubled time.
But the novel that forms the source material for the Netflix show was written by a Chinese author, Liu Cixin, and initially published in China before being translated into English.
The novel won the prestigious Hugo Award for science fiction and fantasy in 2015.
Although the decision to adapt the book faced criticism in 2020, with five Republican senators calling on Netflix to reconsider Liu’s comments about Uyghur Muslims, Netflix defended the decision in a statement reported by Variety that year.
“Mr. Liu is the author of the books, not the creator of this series,” Netflix was quoted as saying.
– with files from Reuters
