Very much disagree. My sense is that the book series is pretty meagre on presenting “thoughtful hard science” as well as game theory and human sociology.
To pick the most obvious example—the title of the trilogy* - the three body problem was misrepresented in the books as “it’s hard to find the general analytic solution” instead of “the end state is extremely sensitive to changes in the initial condition”, and the characters in the book (both humans and Trisolarians) spend eons trying to solve the problem mathematically.
But even if an exact solution was found—which does exist for some chaotic systems like logistic maps—it would have been useless since the initial condition cannot be known perfectly. This isn’t a minor nitpick like the myriad other scientific problems with the Trisolarian system that can be more easily forgiven for artistic license; this is missing what chaotic systems are about. Why even invoke the three-body problem other than as attire?
*not technically the title of the book series, but frequently referred to as such
Very much disagree. My sense is that the book series is pretty meagre on presenting “thoughtful hard science” as well as game theory and human sociology.
To pick the most obvious example—the title of the trilogy* - the three body problem was misrepresented in the books as “it’s hard to find the general analytic solution” instead of “the end state is extremely sensitive to changes in the initial condition”, and the characters in the book (both humans and Trisolarians) spend eons trying to solve the problem mathematically.
But even if an exact solution was found—which does exist for some chaotic systems like logistic maps—it would have been useless since the initial condition cannot be known perfectly. This isn’t a minor nitpick like the myriad other scientific problems with the Trisolarian system that can be more easily forgiven for artistic license; this is missing what chaotic systems are about. Why even invoke the three-body problem other than as attire?
*not technically the title of the book series, but frequently referred to as such