Ensign Kepler Navigates the Oreo Nebula

2017

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To return to his base, Ensign Kepler must find his way through the notorious Oreo Nebula. Even though his charts are filled double-stuffed with data, a crisp path is not there in black and white.

 

But our young officer remembers his Isaac Newton! Sir Isaac found that the motion of two orbiting bodies have neat equations with closed-form solutions. However, Newton also discovered that the equations of motion for three or more orbiting bodies, like the Oreo Nebula, have no such neat solutions. Motions there are not readily predictable! The interactions can be chaotic.

 

In this kinetic sculpture, the chaotic motion of three mutually balanced, offset pendulum rotors represents orbits within the Oreo Nebula.  The balanced but offset rotors sometimes interact during slow motion to become chaotic: essentially unpredictable and not repeatable.   

 

Ensign Kepler takes a Newtonian approach to his navigation. Having cleared the cookies from his computer, he programs a sweet iterative solution to crunch the data. No half-baked navigation for our Ensign!  Enjoying a glass of milk, his mission is complete.