For centuries, physicists have wrestled with the three-body problem — the wild, swirling gravitational dance of three stars or planets pulling on one another. Even though the laws governing them are simple, their motion becomes chaotic, unpredictable, and impossible to solve with perfect precision. But what if the problem has been hard not because of the physics — but because of how we think about time itself? This paper introduces a radical shift: time doesn’t flow smoothly; it only advances when the universe produces something genuinely new — at least one bit of distinguishable information. Instead of a continuous blur of motion, the system becomes a sequence of meaningful, information-rich moments. Quiet periods generate almost no new information and time “idles”; close gravitational encounters explode with new bits and time “rushes forward.” Chaos suddenly reveals a structure that was invisible before.
By reframing time as an informational process, the paper turns the three-body problem from an untameable storm into a crisp, step-by-step evolution governed by the creation of new distinguishable structure. This doesn’t change the underlying physics — the planets still move as they always have — but it transforms how we measure and understand their behaviour. Hidden beneath the chaos is a new kind of clock: one that ticks only when the system becomes more interesting. Remarkably, this informational clock links directly to famous measures of chaos like Lyapunov exponents, predicts where chaos spikes, and even reveals how patterns appear and vanish as the system moves through resonances. The result is a fresh, exciting way to study gravitational motion — one that makes the impossible feel newly solvable, and shows that the universe may keep time in a far more subtle and beautiful way than we ever imagined.