9 Wicked Problems
John Kay and Mervyn King relate how in August 2004 NASA launched the probe Messenger towards the Mercury with the intention of entering its orbit and beginning its investigation of the planet.1 Six and half years later, having travelled 4.9 billion miles at a speed of 84,500 mph it succeeded, entering Mercury’s orbit at exactly the location NASA had anticipated. This remarkable feat of computation was possible because the underlying processes of planetary motion are almost completely understood and those processes are physical laws that remain constant over time. Critically, however, the motions of the planets are not significantly affected by human actions or at all by human beliefs about their ...
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