Although fans of A song of ice and fire You may still be longing for the next book in the long-delayed series from the best-selling science fiction and fantasy author. George R.R. Martin Instead, he has added a different item to his long list of publications: a peer-reviewed physics paper just published in the American Journal of Physics that he co-authored. The article derives a formula to describe the dynamics of a fictional virus that is the centerpiece of the Wild cards Book series, a shared universe edited by Martin and Melinda M. Snodgrass, with contributions from some 44 authors.
Wild cards arose from the Superworld RPG, specifically a long-running campaign game mastered by Martin in the 1980s, featuring several of the original science fiction writers who contributed to the series. (A then-unknown Neil Gaiman once offered Martin a Wild cards Story involving a main character who lived in a dream world. Martín rejected the offer and Gaiman’s idea became the sandman.) Martin initially planned to write a novel centered on his character Turtle, but then decided it would be better as a shared universe anthology. Martin thought that superhero comics had too many sources of different superpowers and wanted his universe to have a single source. Snodgrass suggested a virus.
The series is basically an alternate history of the United States after World War II. An airborne alien virus, designed to rewrite DNA, was released in New York City in 1946 and spread around the world, infecting tens of thousands of people worldwide. It is called Wild Card virus because it affects each individual differently. It kills 90 percent of those it infects and mutates the rest. Nine percent of the latter end up in unpleasant conditions (these people are called Jokers), while 1 percent develop superpowers and are known as Aces. Some aces have “powers” that are so trivial and useless that they are known as “twos.”
There has been much speculation about the Wild cards website that discusses the science behind that virus, and caught the attention of Ian Tregillis, a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, who thought it could be a useful pedagogical exercise. “As a theorist, I couldn’t help but wonder if a simple underlying model could order the canon.” Tregillis said. “Like any physicist, I started with preliminary estimates, but then I got lost. In the end I suggested, half-jokingly, that it might be easier to write a genuine physics paper than another blog post.”
A physicist enters a fictional universe…
Naturally, Tregillis engaged in some willing suspension of disbelief, since the question of how any virus could give humans superpowers that defy the laws of physics is inherently unanswerable. He focused on the origin of the Wild cards the 90:9:1 rule of the universe, adopting the mindset of a universe theorist eager to construct a coherent mathematical framework that can describe viral behavior. The ultimate goal was “to demonstrate the broad flexibility and usefulness of physics concepts by converting this vague and seemingly intractable problem into a simple dynamical system, thereby making a wealth of conceptual and mathematical tools available to students,” wrote Tregillis and Martin. in your newspaper.
Among the issues the paper addresses is the problem of jokers and aces as “mutually exclusive categories with a numerical distribution achievable by rolling a hundred-sided die,” the authors wrote. “However, the canon abounds with characters who confuse this categorization: ‘Joker-Aces,’ who exhibit both a physical mutation and superhuman ability.”
They also suggest the existence of “cryptos”: Jokers and Aces with mutations that are largely unobservable, such as producing ultraviolet streaks in someone’s heart or imbuing “an Iowa resident with the power of line-of-sight telepathic communication with narwhals.” “The first guy would not be aware of his joke; the second would be an Ace, but he never knew it.” (One could argue that communicating with narwhals could turn one into a Deuce.)
In the end, Tregillis and Martin proposed three basic rules: (1) cryptocurrencies exist, but how many of them exist is “unknown and unknowable”; (2) observable card turns would be distributed according to the 90:9:1 rule; and (3) the viral results would be determined by a multivariate probability distribution.
The resulting proposed model assumes two seemingly random variables: the severity of the transformation (i.e. how much the virus changes a person, whether in the severity of a Joker’s deformation or the strength of an Ace’s superpower) and a mix angle to address the existence of Joker-Aces. “Turns of cards that fall close enough to an axis subjectively will be presented as Aces, while otherwise they will be presented as Jokers or Joker-Aces,” the authors wrote.
The derived formula is one that takes into account the different ways in which a given system can evolve (also known as Langrangian formulation). “We translated the abstract problem of Wild Card viral results into a simple and concrete dynamic system. The time-averaged behavior of this system generates the statistical distribution of the results.” Tregillis said..
Tregillis acknowledges that this may not be a good exercise for the beginning physics student, since it involves multiple steps and covers many concepts that younger students may not fully understand. Nor does it suggest adding it to the core curriculum. Instead, he recommends it for senior honors seminars to encourage students to explore an open-ended research question.
This story originally appeared on Ars Technique.