Although fans of A Song of Ice and Fire may still be curious to see the long-delayed next book in the series, best-selling sci-fi/fantasy author George RR Martin has instead added a different item to his long list of publications: peer- physics papers which he reviewed was published only in the co-authored American Journal of Physics. The paper produces a formula to describe the dynamics of the fictional virus that is the center of the Wild Cards book series, a universe edited by Martin and Melinda M. Snodgrass, with some 44 contributing authors. Wild Cards grew out of Superworld. RPGs, specifically campaign games, were long mastered by Martin in the 1980s, with some original sci-fi writers contributing. to the participating series. (A then-unknown Neil Gaiman pitched Martin a Wild Cards a story involving a main character living in a dream world. Martin rejected the pitch, and Gaiman’s idea became The Sandman.) Initially, Martin planned to write a novel focusing on him. character Turtle, but then decided it would be better as an anthology of the connected universe. Martin thinks that superhero comics have too many sources of different superpowers and wants the universe to have one source. Snodgrass suggests a virus. The series is essentially an alternate history of the US 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 around the world. It is called the Wild Card virus because it affects each individual differently. It kills 90 percent of the infected and mutates others. Nine percent of the end end up with an unpleasant situation – these people are called Jokers – while 1 percent develop superpowers and are known as Aces. Some Aces have a trivial and useless “power” called “deuces.” There was much speculation on the Wild Cards website discussing the science behind the virus, and it caught the attention of Ian Tregillis, a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, who thought it might be a useful pedagogical exercise. “Being a theorist, I can’t help but wonder if a simple basic model can clean up the canon,” Tregillis said. “Like any physicist, I started with an envelope estimate, but then I went backwards. In the end I suggested, only half-jokingly, that it would be easier to write an original physics paper than another blog post. defying the laws of physics is unanswerable. He focuses on the origin of the 90:9:1 rule of the universe, adopting the mindset of the universe that wants to build a coherent mathematical framework that can describe the behavior of viruses the main thing is to “demonstrate the flexibility and utility of physics concepts by converting these obscure and intractable problems into straightforward dynamical systems,” Tregillis and Martin wrote in the paper discussed in the paper is the problem of Jokers and Aces as “mutually exclusive categories with numerical distributions. can be achieved up to a hundred-sided die roll,” writes the author. “But the canon is full of characters that confuse this categorization: ‘Joker-Aces,’ which show physical mutations and superhuman abilities.” He also suggests the existence of “cryptos”: Jokers and Aces with mutations that are generally invisible, such as generating ultraviolet racing lines in people’s hearts or creating “Iowa residents with the power of line-of-sight telepathic communication with narwhals who at first did not know about Jokerism, but did not understand. (One can argue that interacting with narwhals can make one Deuce.) In the end, Tregillis and Martin came up with three basic rules: (1) cryptos exist, but how many there are “unknown and unknown”; (2) the turn of the observed cards will be distributed according to the rule 90:9:1; and (3) the result of the virus will be determined by a multivariate probability distribution. The proposed model produces two apparently random variables: the severity of the transformation-that is, how much the virus changes people, in the degree of severity of the Joker’s deformation or Ace’s potential superpower-and the unifying angle to address the Joker’s existence – Aces. “Cards that land close enough to one axis will be subjective now as Aces, when they are used they will be shown as Jokers or Joker-Aces,” the author wrote. The derived formula is one that takes into account the many ways a certain system works. develop (aka Langrangian formulation). “We translate the abstract problem of the Wild Card virus results into a simple concrete dynamic system. The time-averaged behavior of this system produces a statistical distribution of the results,” said Tregillis. with understanding. Nor do they recommend adding it to the core curriculum. Instead, he recommends for senior honors seminars to encourage students to explore open-ended research questions. This story originally appeared on Ars Technica.
