Hi Mike, let me say your kids have chosen a good career path if that is
what they end up doing!! we in australia at the moment are glued to our
tv sets and radio's listening to the first ashes test (cricket, but not
the jumping kind) being played at the Oval surrey U.K.. wonderful
stuff!! c'mon aussies!! sorry about that embarrassing outburst of
nationalistic hubris.

As far as the three-body problem is concerned i would say its a good
candidate to extend the reach of the new method above the hydrogen atom
model which is essentially, at its simplest, a two-body problem. so
thanks for bringing it to mind; i knew about it from my supervisor who
is an 'astronomer' of world class pre-eminence.

btw i found this amongst your ref:

"In celestial mechanics, understanding the nature of chaotic
trajectories is important for predicting what could happen to
populations of small celestial bodies, such as near-Earth asteroids
that could threaten the planet, and for designing gravitationally
assisted transport of spacecraft. In the case of spacecraft, the tangle
of gravitational forces creates tubular "highways" in space along which
these vehicles can proceed with little expenditure of energy (see
"Navigating Celestial Currents" at
http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20050416/bob9.asp)."

this sounds very like the SFT streams!! the article's author may be
somewhat incorrect; it may be the ONLY practical way to move in deep
space; the highways could have been made from the beginnings of the
universe eh? we in our neck of the woods don't yet know how radiation
varies across the cosmos, but SFT suggests that there are streams
criss-crossing deep space, so what the background level of energy is we
don't know 'cos we're using 'classical' field-forms.