Poincar\'e Work on Celestial Mechanics: Predictability versus Determinism in the Context of Restricted Three-Body Problem

TL;DR

This paper explores Poincaré's foundational work on the three-body problem, highlighting its role in the development of chaos theory and clarifying the distinction between determinism and predictability in celestial mechanics.

Contribution

It emphasizes Poincaré's early insights into chaotic behavior and distinguishes between determinism and predictability, advancing understanding of celestial dynamics.

Findings

Poincaré identified dynamical instability in celestial systems.

Chaotic deterministic behavior was recognized before Lorenz's work.

Determinism does not imply predictability in complex systems.

Abstract

The publication of Principia Mathematica in 1678 by Newton became known the celestial bodies motion laws, which characterize the Classical Mechanics. Thereafter made sense to search about the movement of these bodies from known initial conditions, particularly in the 3 body problem. In this paper it is exposed the influence of Poincar\'e work, in 1880, in this problem on the beginning of Deterministic Chaos Theory based on the development of several new qualitative tools. The application of such tools led him to the discovery of a special kind of behavior: the dynamical instability. Contrary to the common idea that this kind of behavior was first evidenced by Lorenz in 1963, the Poincar\'e theoretical research was sufficiently clear about the existence of chaotic deterministic behavior. Until the time of Poincar\'e, there was a tacit assumption that the uncertainty in the output does not arise from any randomness in the dynamical laws, since they are completely deterministic, but rather from the lack of the infinite accuracy in the initial conditions. In this paper it is emphasized that the issues of determinism and predictability are distinct.