Talk:Two-body problem

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After the section "Change of variables", the solving of the equation is not pursued. A detailed discussion on the subject may be found at Eric Weisstein's world of physics.  130.236.182.61 12:07, 25 October 2005 (UTC)
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message: I followed this link from another page, and from the first sentence, I was lost.  I'm not a physicist or a scientist of any sort. Can someone who understands this stuff please write a layman's description for the first sentence?  (I've noticed this happens a lot with physics-related articles, but this is the first time I've mentioned it.)
:Yeah, I know :(  I've been meaning to fix this article, but I've been busy with a few others lately.  Why don't you check back in a few days?  Thanks for being patient. :) WillowW 16:44, 13 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: P.S. If you find other physics articles that are too inscrutable, would you please let me know on my talk page?  You shouldn't be shy about asking for more intelligibility.  Sometimes it can't be helped; some topics are just hard to understand because they're so foreign to everyday life and also rely on lots of careful little definitions.  But I'm sure that there are many others that need only a little help to make them clear.  You could try some of the Physics articles mentioned on my User page; how about centripetal force?  Thanks for your help! WillowW 16:44, 13 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Huh? 

message: :Hi, rather than waiting, I decided to try my best at fixing the article now.  Please let me know if you like it as is, or if there are still confusing parts. I didn't tinker with the stuff at the very end; maybe someone else can decide whether it's worth keeping? WillowW 19:43, 13 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Yuh huh! :D

message: This article needs more prose. It should be intelligible for those with and without expertise in math. Not that the math is necessarily so complicated, but mathematical physics, even when it deals only with algebra, is too technical to stand alone in an article. Perhaps someone who's invested in this article and has a strong understanding of the two-body problem can expound upon the topic... ask123 (talk) 16:35, 24 April 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Too technical 

message: It is unclear from the article what applications there are for the general solution to the two-body problem other than for inverse-square laws like gravity. -- Beland (talk) 07:42, 2 December 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Generalize 

message: I think there should be added a sentence or two on the problem that sometimes is referred to als Two-body problem. I am however not really sure wether this sould be added to this page (the name is obviously derived from this one) or to make a redirection/disambiguation page. The last option however would mean a page specified to the social problem while I guess one could suffice with something like:
Sometimes the term Two-body problem is used for the problem that it is hard two  scientists which form a couple to both find a position at a distance which is such that they can still live together.
(I have to agree that this sentence may be splitted or so).
--yanneman (talk) 08:25, 25 March 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  "social" Tow-body problem 

message: I think it is important to recreate the GIF animations so that they also include a colored side of a possible result of tidal force resulting from the two-body system, especially when referring to planet-satellite or planet-planet situations.
____Ἑλλαιβάριος Ellaivarios____ 21:11, 25 February 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  TIDAL FORCE 

message: I don't believe that the potential function U is defined in the article.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.201.153.4 (talk) 20:40, 18 January 2016 (UTC)
thread_title: Laws of Conservation of Energy

message: I just did a pretty major rewrite of the overview parts of this article, trying to provide a general explanation of what's going on for more casual readers.
The rewrite was initially motivated by my own inability to easily find all the material on the problem from this article. In particular, this article presented a second-order differential equation that's at the center of the most important and interesting case, promised to show how to solve it... and then didn't. The actual solution is in other articles with counterintuitive names that didn't have any described links, just general "see also" references.
There's still a lot of work to do, and I'm not really qualified to do it. In particular, pretty much the same math is presented here, in Classical central-force problem, and in Kepler problem. Of the three, Classical central-force problem  looks to be most complete... but is misnamed, because it actually also covers the generalization to the full two-body problem. There's also Gravitational two-body problem, which gives solutions for the gravitational case but does not try to derive them.
I would suggest one of the following:
* Have two articles: split the math part from the popular part, but combine all of the math into one comprehensive article.
** Make the "Two-body problem" article just a general, mostly non-mathematical introduction, along the lines of what I've put into the intro.
** Update the "Classical central-force problem" article to cover any math that's in this article that it doesn't already cover, and remove that math from this article.
** Also fold in anything that's missing from the "Kepler problem" article.
** Rename "Classical central-force problem" to some more general title that makes it clear that it actually solves the general two-body problem, not just the central force problem.
** Replace the majority of math this article with a link to that article, and make the "Kepler problem" article a redirect to it.
** Merge Gravitational two-body problem, which is just a list of solutions without any explanation of how you get them, into one or the other article. I'm not sure which makes more sense.
* Merge all three into a single article under the title "Two-body problem", with a popular introduction at the top and everything else at the bottom. Present the central force problem as a stepping stone to the full two-body problem, and make "Classical central-force" problem a redirect to that section in the merged article.
76.10.176.53 (talk) 19:47, 6 June 2019 (UTC)
thread_title: Structural hackery done, more needed

message: 1 103.67.157.170 (talk) 17:30, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  To body problem