The Three-Body Problem (Remembrance of Earth's Past)

Author: Cixin Liu

• “Intellectuals always make a fuss about nothing,” he muttered.

• Silent Spring, she read on the cover, by Rachel Carson.

• The use of pesticides had seemed to Ye just a normal, proper—or, at least, neutral—act, but Carson’s book allowed Ye to see that, from Nature’s perspective, their use was indistinguishable from the Cultural Revolution, and equally destructive to our world.

• He took out a few fresh sheets of paper to make a clean copy of the draft. But his hands shook so much that he couldn’t form any characters. This was a common reaction after using a chain saw for the first time.

• Whatever they were dealing with was too important for them to care about keeping up appearances.

• You must know that a person’s ability to discern the truth is directly proportional to his knowledge.”

• “All right, then. Do you play pool?” Ding walked to the pool table. “I used to play a little in college.” “She and I loved to play. It reminded us of particles colliding in the accelerator.”

• “She and I loved to play. It reminded us of particles colliding in the accelerator.” Ding picked up two balls: one black

• “These high-energy particle accelerators raised the amount of energy available for colliding particles by an order of magnitude, to a level never before achieved by the human race. Yet, with the new equipment, the same particles, the same energy levels, and the same experimental parameters would yield different results. Not only would the results vary if different accelerators were used, but even with the same accelerator, experiments performed at different times would give different results. Physicists panicked. They repeated the ultra-high-energy collision experiments again and again using the same conditions, but every time the result was different, and there seemed to be no pattern.”

• “It means that the laws of physics are not invariant across time and space.”

• “It means that laws of physics that could be applied anywhere in the universe do not exist, which means that physics … also does not exist.”

• In his mind, the city, as it awoke from its slumber, seemed to be built on quicksand. The stability was illusory.

• Can the fundamental nature of matter really be lawlessness? Can the stability and order of the world be but a temporary dynamic equilibrium achieved in a corner of the universe, a short-lived eddy in a chaotic current?

• In the shooter hypothesis, a good marksman shoots at a target, creating a hole every ten centimeters. Now suppose the surface of the target is inhabited by intelligent, two-dimensional creatures. Their scientists, after observing the universe, discover a great law: “There exists a hole in the universe every ten centimeters.” They have mistaken the result of the marksman’s momentary whim for an unalterable law of the universe.

• The farmer hypothesis, on the other hand, has the flavor of a horror story: Every morning on a turkey farm, the farmer comes to feed the turkeys. A scientist turkey, having observed this pattern to hold without change for almost a year, makes the following discovery: “Every morning at eleven, food arrives.” On the morning of Thanksgiving, the scientist announces this law to the other turkeys. But that morning at eleven, food doesn’t arrive; instead, the farmer comes and kills the entire flock.

• King Wen now pointed at Wang, his eyes sparkling. “Now you know the goal of this game: to use our intellect and understanding to analyze all phenomena until we can know the pattern of the sun’s movement. The survival of civilization depends on it.”

• Cosmic microwave background radiation very precisely matched the thermal black body spectrum at a temperature of 2.7255 K and was highly isotropic—meaning nearly uniform in every direction—with only tiny temperature fluctuations at the parts per million range.

• But I hope that you will explain the truth to me when you feel the time is right. If this phenomenon should lead to some research result, I won’t forget you.”

• “Anything sufficiently weird must be fishy.”

• But pseudoscience is afraid of one particular type of people who are very hard to fool: stage magicians. In fact, many pseudoscientific hoaxes were exposed by stage magicians.

• Compared to Yang, Lei was closer to her image of a real military officer, possessing a soldier’s frank and forthright manners. Yang, on the other hand, was nothing more than a typical intellectual of the period: cautious, timid, seeking only to protect himself.

• “No, emptiness is not nothingness. Emptiness is a type of existence. You must use this existential emptiness to fill yourself.”

• Everyone seems to believe that Poincaré proved that the three-body problem couldn’t be solved, but I think they’re mistaken. He only proved sensitive dependence on initial conditions, and that the three-body system couldn’t be solved by integrals.

• The real solution to the three-body problem is to build a mathematical model so that, given any initial configuration with known vectors, the model can predict all subsequent motion of the three-body system.

• However, because he married a woman who had been deemed to be a counter-revolutionary, he was viewed as politically immature and lost his position as chief engineer.

• These are the rules of the game of civilization: The first priority is to guarantee the existence of the human race and their comfortable life. Everything else is secondary.’

• “Everything you see before you is the result of poverty. But how are things any better in the wealthy countries? They protect their own environments, but then shift the heavily polluting industries to the poorer nations.

• The focus of Christianity is Man. Even though all the species were placed into Noah’s Ark, other species were never given the same status as humans. But Buddhism is focused on saving all life. That was why I came to the East. But … it’s obvious now that everywhere is the same.”

• The most surprising aspect of the Earth-Trisolaris Movement was that so many people had abandoned all hope in human civilization, hated and were willing to betray their own species, and even cherished as their highest ideal the elimination of the entire human race, including themselves and their children.

• Unlike how they would be imagined later, most of them were realists, and did not place too much hope in the alien civilization they served either. Their betrayal was based only on their despair and hatred of the human race.

• The Redemptionists didn’t appear until long after the ETO’s founding. This group’s nature was a religious organization, and the members were believers in the Trisolaran faith.

• Trisolaran religion—which really had nothing to do with religion on Trisolaris—was born. Unlike other human religions, they worshipped something that truly existed. Also unlike other human religions, it was the Lord who was in crisis, and the duty of salvation fell on the shoulders of the believer.

• Let’s look at the current composition of the ETO. The Adventists would like to destroy the human race by means of an alien power; the Redemptionists worship the alien civilization as a god; the Survivors wish to betray other humans to buy their own survival. None of these is in line with your original ideal of using the alien civilization as a way to reform humanity.

• “I am tired of Trisolaris. We have nothing in our lives and spirit except the fight for survival.”

• For me, the most intolerable aspects are the spiritual monotony and desiccation. Anything that can lead to spiritual weakness is declared evil. We have no literature, no art, no pursuit of beauty and enjoyment. We cannot even speak of love.… Princeps, is there meaning to such a life?”

• “I just want to ask the two of you one question: Is the technological gap between humans and Trisolarans greater than the one between locusts and humans?”