n-body problem
I remember as a small child seeing for the first time a picture of the Earth from space. I’m not talking about the standard awe-striking one with the earth as a blue pebble in a sea of black and stars, but the one that is focused in on land masses and human habitation. The picture shows an uneven sea of lights across the US; some places are dark, others awash in light. Even as a small child, you can see the density of people in certain locations and with even a basic understanding of geography, you can identify the lighted areas. That’s New York City. That one is LA. That one is the DFW area (to a Ft. Worth native, it’s always DFW and never just Dallas). Recently I’ve seen cool art pieces that create similar images with information like air traffic data or internet connectivity.
While my contrarian nature loves these images for their new perspective on things that we already think we know (i.e. the US, the earth), what I really love is how they show the points around which we cluster and how we use the space we inhabit. If we took a curved space time approach to social organization, each of these cities or airport hubs is like a black hole, curving the world around it with its own social gravity.
Perhaps it’s unsurprising that I am interested in this level of social organization, being the type of person who has (at least theoretically) planned to dedicate his life to understanding social phenomena writ large. Maybe it’s more surprising that anymore, this macro level organization is less interesting to me than the individual pathways and trajectories that comprise it. More and more though, I care about the individual level, how a single person navigates the forces that comprise his or her life.
I’m sure if you close your eyes you can see your life just like this kind of orbital map. For me, I started with an easy exercise, what my life looked like when I was young. My time was divided between my house, school and my best friend’s house (all of two houses up the street). As time went on, the pattern grew and changed. New nodes appeared on the map: extracurricular activities, Boy Scouts (and the attendant camping trips), work, and finally, lab locations where I did my science. As new centers appear, old gravity loci vanish. The friend I don’t talk to anymore no longer pulls me into their orbit; they drop off the map. Then college comes and gone are the places and people I knew. Now the grid is totally changed; new nodes arise at my dorm room, college commons, friends’ rooms and all the places where you can get alcohol. Each year changes these nodes, as new forces lead to new gravitational orbits. New friends exert pull influences. The girl that doesn’t return your interest or the bar you got banned from push you into new social configurations.
In all honesty, this is a topic I’ve been considering a lot recently. A few months ago, my life was pretty basic. My orbit included campus, home and occasional drinking/social forays. Think of the electron orbital of neutral hydrogen (1s1) or the idealized orbits of planets around a star. I’ve written elsewhere (or you’ve heard the in-person version) about my recent spate of activity and life stuff. Consequently, that map has been subject to revision. Instead of the nice pretty orbit, I live in a complicated solar system with binary stars and insanely large asteroids and planets flying all over. I hate to say it, but my life has become the social equivalent of the n-body problem. But, while this would once have sent me running for the hills (literally possibly), I’m learning to love the eccentric bipolarity of my current social map. Social life is a dynamic process, balancing the forces experienced by all these gravitational centers. This sort of gravitational problem does not have an analytical solution (at least once there are at least three forces and no collisions /hat tip Wikipedia); it has to be lived. You throw the marble onto the table and see where it goes. In the end, the gravitational poles push and pull us, but the orbit they create is what we call life.
This entry is part of the Synchronized Blogging Experiment on the topic of “Centers of Gravity.” Click the link, enjoy the better compositions. Do it.
The frightening prospect of a life full of orbits is that there is no math you can apply to an existential n-body problem. Each force is variable, every point of tension in a constant state of flux in response to input from every other node. What would you do with an analytical solution even if you had one? I don’t think there would be any comfort in knowing how it would all play out; I imagine it would be quite boring.
Of course there’s no comfort in knowing the future-if God were omniscient, He’d blind himself to make it interesting. However, while we all fear the oracle if we think about it, we all also hunger for that knowledge of what will be.
I can think of a lot of times that I would have loved to know which way my orbit would swing next. Think about the planning you could do and the things you would be prepared for if you were Halley’s Comet!
No witty comments or questions. Instead, just a “really interesting piece”.
I. love. data. maps.
I could watch that flight one all day. It’s incredibly data rich! All my work in lab is centered on attempting to make something like this for the functional activity of proteins in eukaryotic cells. You just can’t beat real-time data mapping. So good.
As an aside, with fast enough data collection, processing, and flexible algorithms anything can be modeled empirically. The limiting factor is generally how much data, and of what kind, we can measure in a given time scale. Similar to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle (measuring the present position AND momentum of an electron simultaneously) – we may never have the tools necessary to both accurately measure the human state and its forward momentum. If those tools were made available the human n-body problem would have a solution. I suggest neural chip implants for best results.