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Re:Over 150 new families of Newtonian periodic planar three-... by MichailP on Saturday May 06, 2017 @10:57AM (#14280504)
That sounds really impressive. I jumped to comment before reading the paper. I found a nice gem in David Tongs lectures [1] in chapter about Dimensional analysis. He mentions Planck legnth Lp ~ 10^-35m, for which "All indications are that this is the shortest distance scale possible; at distances shorter than Lp, space itself is likely to have no meaning". So 10^-70 sounds like a nice margin.

[1] http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/tong/relativity/dynrel.pdf

Re:Over 150 new families of Newtonian periodic planar three-... by privong on Saturday May 06, 2017 @01:14PM (#14281253)
> He mentions Planck legnth Lp ~ 10^-35m, for which "All indications are that this is the shortest distance scale possible; at distances shorter than Lp, space itself is likely to have no meaning". So 10^-70 sounds like a nice margin.

That's an apples-to-oranges comparison, though. The 10^-70 number is a relative error while the planck length is just a length. The numerical computations in the paper were likely done in a system of "simulation units" where the actual lengths, velocities, forces, etc. are normalized to values of order unity. This has advantages for the numerical aspect, in terms of preserving floating point accuracy. But it also means that to translate it to a physical system (e.g., a triple system of stars), the simulation needs to be scaled to physical units. The 10^-70 that's quoted just means that the values should be numerically accurate to 1 part in 10^70.

If you wanted to compare the (floating point) accuracy of the simulation with the Planck length, you would need to scale the simulation to a physical size and see what the 10^-70 fractional error would translate to in physical units.

Re:Over 150 new families of Newtonian periodic planar three-... by azernik on Saturday May 06, 2017 @09:33PM (#14283358)
10^-70 would get you below the Planck length for any length scales lower than 10^35m, which is 10^9 times the diameter of the observable universe.
Re:Over 150 new families of Newtonian periodic planar three-... by DamonHD on Saturday May 06, 2017 @01:00PM (#14281176)
Lovely: a completely 'practical' bound on a totally theoretical numeric problem.