George RR Martin co-authored a scientific paper

Even the fans of A song of ice and fire You might also be longing for the long-delayed next book in the best-selling sci-fi/fantasy author’s series George RR Martin he instead added a different article 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 fictitious virus that is the center of the Wild Cards book series, a shared universe edited by Martin and Melinda M. Snodgrass, with approximately 44 contributing authors.

Wild Cards grown out of Superworld RPG, especially a long game campaign mastered by Martin in the 1980s, with many of the original sci-fi writers who contributed to the series participating. (A then-unknown Neil Gaiman once pitched Martin a Wild Cards story involving a main character who lived in a world of dreams. Martin rejected the pitch, and Gaiman’s idea became The Sandman.) Initially, Martin planned to write a novel centered around his character Turtle, but later decided it would be better as a shared universe anthology. Martin thought that superhero comics had too many sources of so many 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 over New York City in 1946 and spread around the world, 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 those it infects and mutates the rest. Nine percent of the latter end up with 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 “deuces”.

There has been considerable speculation about the Wild Cards website discussing the science behind that virus, and it caught the attention of Ian Tregillis, a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, who thought it might make a useful pedagogical exercise. “Being a theorist, I couldn’t help but wonder if a simple underlying model could clean up the canon,” said Tregillis. “Like any physicist, I started with back-of-the-envelope estimates, but then I went off the deep end. Finally I suggested, just by way of joke, that it might be easier to write a real paper of physics than another blog post.

A physicist enters a fictional universe…

Tregillis naturally engaged in a bit of voluntary 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, using the mindset of a theorist in the universe eager to construct a coherent mathematical framework that could describe viral behavior. The ultimate goal was to “demonstrate the flexibility and broad utility of physics concepts by converting this vague and seemingly inaccessible problem into a simple dynamical system, thereby placing a wealth of conceptual and mathematical tools at the students’ disposal,” Tregillis and Martin wrote. in his paper.

Among the problems that the document addresses is the problem of Jokers and Aces as “mutually exclusive categories with a numerical distribution attainable by rolling a hundred-sided die”, the authors wrote. “Yet the canon abounds with characters who confound this categorization: ‘Joker-Aces,’ who exhibit physical mutation and superhuman ability.”

They also suggest the existence of “cryptos”: Jokers and Aces with mutations that are largely unobservable, such as the production of ultraviolet racing stripes in someone’s heart or imbuing “a resident of Iowa with the power of telepathic communication in line of sight with the narwhals. The first individual would not be aware of his Jokerism, but he never knew it. (One could argue that communication with narwhals could make one un Two.)

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) the observable card turns will be distributed according to the 90:9:1 rule; and (3) viral results will be determined by a multivariate probability distribution.

The resulting proposed model assumes two seemingly random variables: the severity of the transformation—that is, how much the virus changes a person, whether in the severity of a Joker’s deformity or the power of an Ace’s superpower—and a mixing angle to address the existence of Joker-Aces. “The card turns that land pretty close to an axis at will subjectively present as Aces, while otherwise presenting as Jokers or Joker-Aces,” the authors wrote.

The derived formula is one that takes into account the many different ways that a given system can evolve (aka a Langrangian formulation). “We have translated the abstract problem of Wild Card viral results into a simple and concrete dynamic system. The average time behavior of this system generates the statistical distribution of the results.” said Tregillis.

Tregillis acknowledges that this might not be a good exercise for the beginning physics student, as it involves many steps and covers many concepts that younger students may not fully understand. Nor do I 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 Ars Technica.