George RR Martin co-author of a scientific article

Although fans of A song of ice and fire You Might Be Longing for the Next Book in the Series, Bestselling Sci-Fi/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 paper derives a formula to describe the dynamics of a fictional virus that is the centerpiece of the Wildcard Book series, a shared universe edited by Martin and Melinda M. Snodgrass, with some 44 authors contributing.

Wildcard grew from the Superworld RPG, specifically a full-length campaign game mastered by Martin in the 1980s, with several of the original science fiction writers who contributed to the series participating. (A then-unknown Neil Gaiman once pitched Martin A Wildcard Story involving a main character who lived in a dream world. Martin rejected the field, and Gaiman’s idea became the sandman.) Initially, Martin 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 for the 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, had been released in New York City in 1946 and spread globally, infecting tens of thousands worldwide. It is called the wild card virus because it affects each individual differently. It kills 90 percent of those it infects and mutates the rest. The latter nine percent end up with unpleasant conditions, these people are called pranksters, while the 1 percent develop superpowers and are known as ACEs. Some Aces have “powers” that are so trivial and useless that they are known as “Deuces.”

There has been considerable speculation on the Wildcard 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. “Being 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 verse estimates, but then I got off the deep end. I eventually suggested, only half-jokingly, that it might be easier to write a genuine physics paper than another blog post.”

A physicist enters a fictional universe…

Tregillis naturally engaged in a bit of 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 Wildcard Rule of the Universe 90:9:1, adopting the mindset of an in-universe theorist willing 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 inaccessible problem into a straightforward dynamical system, thereby putting a wealth of conceptual and mathematical tools at the disposal of students,” they wrote. Tregillis and Martin. in his role.

Among the problems the paper addresses is the jokers and aces problem of “mutually exclusive categories with a numerical distribution achievable for the roll of a hundred-sided die,” the authors wrote. “However, the canon abounds in characters who confuse this categorization: ‘Joker-Aess,’ who exhibit a physical mutation and superhuman ability.”

They also suggest the existence of “crypts”: pranksters and aces with mutations that are largely unobservable, such as producing ultraviolet racing streaks in someone’s heart or imbuing “an Iowa resident with the power of telepathic line communication.” vision with the narhos. The first individual would not be aware of his jokerism (One could argue that communicating with narwhal could turn one into a deuce).

In the end, Tregillis and Martin came up with three basic rules: (1) cryptos 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) viral results would be determined by a multivariate probability distribution.

The resulting proposed model assumes two seemingly random variables: severity of the transformation, 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 an angle of mix to address the existence of the existence of the existence of Joker-Eras. “Card spins that land close enough to an axis subjectively Present as ACES, while otherwise they will present as Jokers or Joker-Aches,” the authors wrote.

The derived formula is one that takes into account the different ways a given system can evolve (also known as A Langrangian formulation). “We translate the abstract problem of wildcard viral outcomes into a simple and concrete dynamical 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 he suggest adding it to the core curriculum. Instead, he recommends it for senior honors seminars to encourage students to explore an open research question.

This story originally appeared on ARS Technica.