Although the fans A Song of Ice and Fire perhaps still hankering for the long-delayed next book in the series, best-selling science fiction/fantasy author George RR Martin has instead added another item to his long list of publications: a peer-reviewed physics just out 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 virus Wild cards book series, a shared universe edited by Martin and Melinda M. Snodgrass, with about 44 contributing authors.
Wild cards grew out of Superworld An RPG, specifically a long-running campaign game mastered by Martin in the 1980s, with several of the original sci-fi writers involved in the series. (The then-unknown Neil Gaiman once built Martin a Wild cards a story about a main character who lived in a dream world. Martin rejected the pitch, and Gaiman’s idea happened Sandman.) Martin initially planned to write a novel centered around 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 many different superpowers and wanted his universe to have one single source. Snodgrass designed the virus.
The series is essentially an alternate history of the US in the post-World War II era. An airborne alien virus designed to rewrite DNA was released over New York City in 1946 and spread worldwide, infecting tens of thousands of people worldwide. It is called a wild card virus because it affects each individual differently. It kills 90 percent of those it infects and mutates the rest. Nine percent of them end up with unpleasant conditions – these people are called Jokers – while 1 percent develop superpowers and are known as Aces. Some Aces have “abilities” that are so trivial and unnecessary that they are known as “Deuces”.
There has been considerable speculation about Wild cards website discussing the science behind the virus and caught the attention of Ian Tregillis, a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, who thought it might be a useful teaching exercise. “As a theorist, I couldn’t help but wonder if a simple basic model could clean up the canon,” Tregillis said. “Like any physicist, I started with back-of-the-envelope guesses, but then I went deeper. I finally suggested, only half-jokingly, that it might be easier to write an actual physics paper than another blog post.’
A physicist enters a fictional universe…
Naturally, Tregillis embarked on a bit of self-willed suspension of disbelief, given that the question of how any virus could give humans superpowers that defy the laws of physics is inherently unanswerable. He focused on origins Wild cards the cosmic rule of 90:9:1, which assumes the thinking of a theorist in the universe who wants to build a coherent mathematical framework that could describe the behavior of a virus. The ultimate goal was to “demonstrate the broad flexibility and utility of physics concepts by translating this vague and seemingly inaccessible problem into a straightforward dynamical system, thereby giving students a wealth of conceptual and mathematical tools,” Tregillis and Martin wrote. in their paper.
Among the issues addressed in the paper is that of Jokers and Aces as “mutually exclusive categories with a numerical distribution possible up to the roll of a hundred-sided die,” the authors wrote. “Yet the canon abounds with characters who confound this categorization: ‘Joker-Aces’ who exhibit both physical mutation and superhuman abilities.”
They also hint at the existence of “cryptos”: Jokers and Aces with mutations that are largely unobservable, such as creating ultraviolet racing stripes on one’s heart or imbuing an “Iowa resident with the power of direct telepathic communication with narwhals.” The first individual wouldn’t be aware of his joke, the second would be ace, but he’d never know it.” (One might argue that communicating with narwhals might make him a deuce.)
In the end, Tregillis and Martin came up with three basic rules: (1) cryptocurrencies exist, but how many exist is “unknown and unknowable”; (2) observable draws would be split according to the 90:9:1 rule; and (3) viral outcomes 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 the Joker’s deformity, or the strength of the Ace’s superpower – and the mixing angle to address the existence of the Joker Aces. “Turning a card that lands close enough to one axis of will subjectively present as aces, while they will otherwise present as jokers or joker aces,” the authors wrote.
A derived formula is one that takes into account the many different ways a given system can evolve (also known as a Langrangian formulation). “We have translated the abstract problem of wild card viral results into a simple, concrete dynamical system. The time-averaged behavior of this system generates a statistical distribution of results,” said Tregillis.
Tregillis acknowledges that this may not be a good exercise for a beginning physics student because it involves several steps and covers many concepts that younger students may not fully understand. He does not even suggest adding it to the basic curriculum. Instead, he recommends it for honors seminars to encourage students to explore an open-ended research question.
This story originally appeared on Ars Technica.