A bark is a sailing vessel with three masts. The three large British White Star liners "Titanic," "Olympic" and "Britannic" were the largest ships afloat for over twenty years between 1913 and 1935. Who were The Big Three during World War II?
The Terror of Threes in the Heavens and on Earth Physicists have long explored how phenomena in groups of three can sow chaos. A new three-body problem, they warn, could lead to not only global races for new armaments but also thermonuclear war.
By William J. Broad June 26, 2023 | Updated 1:52 p.m. ET
Isaac Newton was baffled. He was already famous for discovering how gravity holds the universe together and for using that knowledge to predict the movements of celestial bodies, such as the moon’s path around the Earth. Now, by taking the sun’s gravitational tugs into account, he sought to improve his lunar predictions. Instead, it made them worse.
The setback, Newton’s friend Edmond Halley reported, “made his head ache, and kept him awake so often, that he would think of it no more.” Newton felt his defeat so keenly that he recalled it more than once in his old age.
Today it’s called the three-body problem. Famous in science and science fiction for orbital perturbations and chaotic phenomena, it’s recently become a concern of atomic experts and military planners. As Beijing rapidly expands its nuclear arsenal, they warn that the world of atomic superpowers is about to escalate to three from two. The outcome, they add, compared with the Moscow-Washington standoff, now 70 years old, could represent a dangerous new kind of unthinkable.
The looming era could encourage “states to resort to nuclear weapons in a crisis,” Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr., a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, recently warned. He cited the natural instabilities observed by physicists and astronomers as a portent.
Experts say the tripolar age could put human survival at risk. But they also cite a number of three-body lessons from nature — starting with Newton’s — that illuminate the issue and suggest possible ways forward. So far, however, no answer stands out. The world’s nuclear thinkers are finding the knotty topic to be as intractable as it was for Newton.
“We have a conceptual problem,”
Ernest J. Moniz
“We have a conceptual problem,” said Ernest J. Moniz, a physicist who as the secretary of energy in the Obama administration oversaw the U.S. nuclear arsenal. “We’ve got to change the traditional approach of equalizing weapons or strategic delivery systems, but how to do that is still unclear.”
“Things are changing very rapidly”
France A. Córdova
France A. Córdova, an astrophysicist and past director of the National Science Foundation, said the study of three-body phenomena in the natural sciences could nonetheless help reveal the military risks. “Things are changing very rapidly,” she said. “Anything that helps in understanding that is great.”
Security-minded hawks want to expand the American arsenal in response to China’s nuclear rise and the threat of Beijing’s closing ranks with Moscow. Doves see a window for three-body downsizing. They want to break the problem into smaller and more manageable parts. For instance, they argue that Washington should deal with the two superpowers independently and seek diplomatic bonds that reinforce two-body stability.
Recently, the Biden administration called for a further simplification. Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, argued that the American response should focus less on the quantity of the nation’s nuclear arms than on their quality. To deter attacks successfully, he said in a speech, the American military has no need for arms that “outnumber the combined total of our competitors.”
A talk with Ben McKenzie about cryptocurrency. We made money up, it’s not real. It’s an elaborate system of IOU’s (I Owe You). Money is trust. “Crypto is not currency, they are securities”. It’s a Ponzi scheme.
Currency has three key features. See video 1 min 40 sec. View
Ric Elias had a front-row seat on Flight 1549, the plane that crash-landed in the Hudson River in New York in January 2009. What went through his mind as the doomed plane went down? At TED, he tells his story publicly for the first time.
Ric Elias is the CEO and cofounder of Red Ventures, a portfolio of fast-growing digital businesses.
Why you should listen
Ric Elias was given the gift of a miracle: to face near-certain death, and then to come back and live differently.
Video 4m 45s
Ric Elias – Ted Talks
A native of Puerto Rico, Elias attended Boston College and Harvard Business School before starting his career as part of GE’s Financial Management program. He cofounded Red Ventures in 2000, just months before the dot-com bubble burst. The company weathered the storm; by 2007 it was ranked fourth on the Inc. 500 list, and in 2015 the company was valuated at more than $1 billion. Elias has cultivated an award-winning company culture, ranking as a “Best Place to Work” in Charlotte, North Carolina, for ten years in a row.
Elias’s leadership style and personal life are deeply influenced by his experience as a survivor of Flight 1549, also known as the “Miracle on the Hudson.” He is devoted to using his platform to “leave the woodpile higher than he found it” — spinning out multiple nonprofits from Red Ventures over the years, all of which are aimed at creating educational opportunity and economic mobility for under-served groups. In 2018, Elias launched Forward787, a social enterprise committed to raising and deploying $100 million to build businesses in Puerto Rico that compete with the world’s top companies. In 2019, he launched a podcast, 3 Things with Ric Elias, as a continuation of the learning journey he shared on the TED stage.
