Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Three-Body Problem, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Technology, Progress, and Destruction
Scientific Discovery and Political Division
Trauma and Cyclical Harm
Theory vs. Lived Experience
History and Legacy
Summary
Analysis
While Wang travels home, the events of the past two days and the knowledge he has just acquired about Red Coast start to blend together. He logs in to Three Body, creating a new ID for himself: Copernicus. The Western username transports him to a Western-style world with a Gothic palace and ancient Greek clothing. He enters the Great Hall of the palace to find several men sitting around a table. They introduce themselves as Pope Gregory, Aristotle, and Galileo.
Nicolaus Copernicus was a Polish astronomer in the Renaissance era. He was the first to accurately understand the solar system, realizing that the earth rotates around the sun (and not vice versa). In real life, Pope Gregory then used Copernicus’s calculations to create a reliable calendar. It makes sense, then, that Wang would choose Copernicus as his username, as he is similarly trying to understand this planet’s solar system and craft its calendar.
Themes
Galileo mocks the Eastern focus on “meditation” and “epiphany,” explaining that he prefers to understand the world “through observation and experiment.” Wang explains that Mozi also used observation and experiment, but the Western scholars scoff at this. Wang then tells the men that he has created a model of the universe; though he does not yet have a calendar, he hopes this model will allow them to predict the pattern of the sun.
Unlike Hairen, Copernicus is a Western name, and Wang is now clearly in the West—and surrounded by some of the greatest minds of Western science. Galileo’s dismissal of Eastern thought is blatantly prejudiced, but it also shows that the East/West divide at issue in the Cold War in fact stretches back centuries. And at the center of this political divide are competing claims to scientific method and truth. Specifically, Galileo (falsely) claims that Western schools work with data while Eastern scholars fail to incorporate observation into their theories.
Themes
Nervously, Wang argues that the world of the game has three suns. He suggests that “under the influence of [the suns’] mutually perturbing gravitational attraction, their movements are unpredictable—the three-body problem.” Stable Eras occur when the game planet revolves around one of the suns in a consistent orbit. But when one or more of the other suns comes too close, its gravitational pull disrupts the game planet’s steady orbit and sends it into a Chaotic Era. In other words, Wang says, “this is a football game at the scale of the universe. The players are the three suns, and our planet is the football.”
In this critical passage, Wang puts the various pieces of his experience together to form a theory of the game planet’s solar system: namely, it has three suns, each of which impacts the others’ trajectories. Wang’s reflection that society is like a football and the suns are the players emphasizes just how little agency individuals have. Instead, everyone is at the mercy of forces (like gravity) far beyond their control.
Themes
The scholars burst out laughing, and Pope Gregory orders his servants to burn Wang. Galileo questions why nobody has ever seen three suns; Wang explains that the flying stars in the distance are actually the other suns. Wang also explains why three flying stars in the distance make for extreme cold: that means all three suns are far away from the planet.
Like Mozi and Zhou, Pope Gregory is unwilling to be challenged. In real life and in the novel, ideas about the solar system are particularly fraught—since the sun is so essential to cosmology and religion, changes in solar science have profound philosophical impacts. Yet Wang’s theory is worth listening to because he assimilates all of the various observations he has made throughout his gameplay.
Themes
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Aristotle still pushes back; he argues that there cannot be three suns because no one has ever seen three suns in the sky at the same time. Leonardo da Vinci interrupts, suggesting that some societies may have seen three suns and just not lived to tell the tale. Wang agrees, arguing that “tri-solar days are the most terrifying catastrophes for our world.” Still, the scholars are not convinced, and Pope Gregory calls for Wang to be burned, with the same strange glee that King Zhou once had.
Though many characters have advocated for using experience to form theory, here, Aristotle takes that too far by arguing that something cannot be possible unless someone has seen it. Though Pope Gregory is similarly simplistic in his approach, da Vinci argues for more patience and complexity—perhaps because his background as an artist allows him to see things in a more multifaceted light.
Themes
As the scholars prepare to burn Wang, da Vinci explains that if Wang’s avatar is killed in the game, he can never log in again. But before Wang can be thrown into a cauldron, three suns appear in the sky, devastating the world. As the planet collapses, a message appears in the game, informing Wang that Civilization 183 was “destroyed by a tri-solar day.” But because Wang has “successfully revealed the basic structure of the universe,” he is now able to log on to the second level of the game.
Indeed, a terrifying tri-solar day arrives, proving Aristotle wrong. But perhaps more notable is the fact that once a player dies in the game, they can never log on again. Most games want players to engage as long as possible, but this one tries to weed them out—suggesting that there is something far more than entertainment at stake here.
Themes
