Timeline for Random N-body problem
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
7 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jun 18, 2017 at 19:12 | history | edited | Geoffrey Irving | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Jun 18, 2017 at 19:11 | comment | added | Geoffrey Irving | Yep, you're right that this isn't plausible: energy can certainly bleed slowly from one pair to others. I'll edit to note this answer is wrong. Thanks! | |
| Jun 18, 2017 at 19:04 | comment | added | Douglas Zare | By "stable," you mean for all small perturbations and all time, not just a time so long that physicists don't care about it? How do you prove that? It seems to me that the local system can gain or lose small amounts of energy from the rest of the system. How do you know that these small amounts don't add up to enough to cause the bodies to move apart after a long time? I don't find that plausible, actually. Do you have a mathematical reference? | |
| Jun 18, 2017 at 18:48 | comment | added | Geoffrey Irving | It means that (1) treating the two bodies as a single body at the center of mass, the system is stable in a neighborhood of the current orbits under small perturbations (2) it would violate conservation of energy for the two bodies to move far enough apart to create more than a small perturbation. This leaves out some details, since small perturbations needs to be restricted to zero mean somehow; I'll leave the remaining details to the reader. :) | |
| Jun 18, 2017 at 7:45 | comment | added | Douglas Zare | What does "energetically bound" mean in mathematics? | |
| Jun 17, 2017 at 15:06 | history | edited | Geoffrey Irving | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Jun 17, 2017 at 14:58 | history | answered | Geoffrey Irving | CC BY-SA 3.0 |