The Three-Body Problem began in 1967 during the early stages of the Cultural Revolution in China. On the exercise grounds of Tsinghua University in Beijing, Professor Ye Zhetai endures a “mass struggle session” for his crime of being a “reactionary bourgeois academic.” His former students and his peers—including his wife and colleague, Shao Lin—decry him for continuing to teach dangerous ideas, such as Einstein’s relativity and the Big Bang Theory. 

After Ye Zhetai is beaten to death by four female Red Guards, the crowd disperses. His daughter, Ye Wenjie, approaches his lifeless body, mourning in silence for a long time. 

Two years later, Ye Wenjie is axing down trees in the Greater Khingan Mountains. Despite her degree in advanced astrophysics, she now forcibly labors as a member of the Inner Mongolia Production and Construction Corps. One day, she meets Bai Mulin, a reporter who wishes to inform the central leadership in Beijing of the corps’ destructive deforestation efforts. He lends Ye Wenjie his copy of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, a collection of essays on environmental science. 

After Bai Mulin finishes his letter to Beijing, Ye Wenjie volunteers to rewrite it, as her handwriting is more legible. She is summoned to the corps’ headquarters three weeks later, having been framed by Bai Mulin for composing the letter herself. At the local detention center, a military representative urges Ye Wenjie to implicate officials her father had worked with in exchange for leniency. However, she refuses to take the deal. 

That night, Ye Wenjie passes out from the cold. Upon waking, she finds herself inside a helicopter en route to the Red Coast Base, a defense research facility atop a mountain in the Greater Khingan region. The base’s political commissar, Lei Zhicheng, offers her relief from prosecution if she aids them in their research. Chief engineer Yang Weining, whom she recognizes as one of her father’s former students, warns her that she may never be able to leave if she agrees. Ye Wenjie accepts their terms. 

While Yang Weining is preparing her living quarters, Ye Wenjie waits outside and hears the voices of technicians inside the main control room, preparing to direct transmission beams to the sky. She feels the presence of an electric field emanating from the large antenna dish at the top of the facility. Looking up at the sky, however, she sees no visible target for such a transmission. 

Forty years later, Professor Wang Miao, who works at the Nanotechnology Research Center in Tsinghua, is invited to a meeting with Major General Chang Weisi. At a building called the Battle Command Center, Wang sits with General Chang, Police Captain Shi Qiang (called “Da Shi”), other researchers and scholars, and even a few foreign officials, who present him with a list of famous scientists who have been found dead of apparent suicide in the last two months. 

One name on the list catches Wang’s eye—Yang Dong, a beautiful and brilliant theoretical physicist he once met while working on a high-energy particle accelerator project. Ding Yi, Yang’s partner, lets Wang read Yang Dong’s perplexing suicide note: “Physics has never existed, and will never exist.”

Wang realizes that all the deceased scientists on the list had connections to the Frontiers of Science, an international academic organization. General Chang asks Wang to join the organization and become their mole. While he initially refuses, Wang eventually relents.

After being escorted outside, Wang instructs his driver to take him to Ding Yi’s home. There, Ding tells him that he doubts the Frontiers of Science have anything to do with the recent deaths.

Over a game of billiards, Ding demonstrates how the laws of physics remain consistent across space and time. However, he then asks Wang how it is that high-energy particle accelerators across the globe have failed to produce consistent results with the same experiment. Referencing Yang’s suicide note, he insists that physics does not indeed exist. Before Wang leaves, Ding advises him to visit Yang’s mother.