You now know something even the smartest, most educated and enlightened people in the World didn’t know throughout all of Human history up until this generation.
* This incredibly beautiful and complex pattern is completely explained by F=ma in an inverse-square gravity field (f=GmM/r^^2). Solving those equations for anything more than two isolated bodies in space (the “three-body problem") hasn’t really been done, yet, by other than numerical methods (i.e. number-crunching by a computer). Even relatively simple Earth-Apollo-Moon navigation calculations were, by necessity, approximations. Now consider the awesome task of trying to do it with a gazillion bodies like this without knowing any initial conditions or the current nine-dimensional state matrices (location, speed, & acceleration in 3-D of each independent particle at an instant in time). Still, those two equations applied to a massive number of objects over time are all that are required to understand the dynamics, here. (Okay, that’s not quite true. One has to throw in the effects of gazillions of collisions between all that stuff, all based on other inherently simple laws; but you get the point.) This example of simple laws producing complex results helps us understand the difference between a natural pattern and a design.
Close the book.
DougM (constitutional fetishist) 
