Under the spell of three bodies
Do you know Liu Cixin? The name didn't mean anything to me until now, although I'm quite interested in science fiction. The Chinese author wrote the novel "The Three Suns", which was also published in German in 2017. It is about man's first contact with an extraterrestrial civilization, the Trisolarians. Your home planet is influenced by three suns whose orbits cannot be precisely predicted. Time and again, global catastrophes occur on Trisolaris, which destroy the currently ruling civilization - with one exception: This even manages to build spaceships, with which it finally sets out into space to conquer the earth.
Liu Cixin's book popularizes a riddle that has occupied mathematicians and astronomers for centuries, and sometimes even tormented it: the trajectories of three celestial bodies - such as the three suns of the Trisolarians. Due to their mutual attraction, this movement is chaotic, which makes calculation impossible. Starting on page 12, our author Richard Montgomery describes how mathematicians are now increasingly concentrating on individual aspects of the problem and making astonishing discoveries in the process. Of course, I won't reveal what these are, just as I won't reveal the fate of mankind in Cixin's international bestseller.
Our "Way out of the black hole" also sounds like science fiction, from which nothing should actually escape. But as Steven Giddings (p. 58) writes, this would contradict quantum mechanical principles. Scientists continue to puzzle over this as well. They are now hoping for new observation opportunities in order to finally find solutions. In the end there could be new laws of space and time - and with it perhaps more futuristic scenarios for literary adventures in space.
Stay tuned…
Daniel Lingenhöhl
