3 Body Problem

Greg and Tom discuss the new NETFLIX series 3 Body Problem.
We talk about the series and our impressions of the production. Along with some other invaluable nonsense like Tom’s  reading of the Audible Book Ping Pong Diplomacy and what else we are watching this week.  All of this hours before the Solar Eclipse of April 8th 2024


3 Body Problem Premise

Ye Wenjie is an astrophysicist who sees her father beaten to death during a struggle session in the Chinese Cultural Revolution. She is conscripted by the military because of her scientific background and is sent to a secret military base in a remote region. Her decision at the base to respond to contact from an alien planet has implications for a group of scientists in the present day, forcing them to face humanity’s greatest threat.

The three-body problem is an arm of cosmology, where the “bodies” are celestial, like calculating where planets are in relation to each other over time. (Chinese sci-fi author Liu Cixin used the term as a pun for the title of his Hugo Award-winning 2015 novel about murdered astrophysicists.) Applications range from the earliest low-tech ship navigators to modern theories of spaceflight like gravity assists, and the mathematical complexity of the problem itself has made it interesting to both mathematicians and computer scientists for many years.