Even if fans of A song of ice and fire might still be craving the long-delayed next book in the series, bestselling sci-fi/fantasy author George RR Martin instead added something different to his long list of publications: a peer-reviewed physics article 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 which is the centerpiece of the Wildcards series of books, a shared universe edited by Martin and Melinda M. Snodgrass, with contributions from some 44 authors.
Wildcards was born from Superworld RPG, specifically a long-form campaign game mastered by Martin in the 1980s, with the participation of several of the original science fiction authors who contributed to the series. (Neil Gaiman, then unknown, once gave Martin a Wildcards story involving a main character who lived in a dream world. Martin rejected the idea and Gaiman’s idea became The Sandman.) Martin originally planned to write a novel centered around his character Turtle, but then decided it would be better as a shared universe anthology. Martin believed that superhero comics had far too many source material for the many different superpowers and wanted his universe to have a single source material. Snodgrass suggested a virus.
The series is essentially an alternate history of the United States in the aftermath of World War II. An airborne alien virus, designed to rewrite DNA, was released over New York City in 1946 and spread globally, infecting tens of thousands of people 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. 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” so insignificant and useless that they are called “twos.”
There has been much speculation about Wildcards website discussing the science behind this virus, and it caught the attention of Ian Tregillis, a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, who thought it might be a useful educational exercise. “As a theorist, I couldn’t help but wonder if a simple underlying model could bring order to the canon. » Tregillis said. “Like any physicist, I started with back-of-the-envelope estimates, but then fell off the deep end. Eventually I suggested, half-jokingly, that it might be easier to write a real physics article than another blog post.
A physicist enters a fictional universe…
Tregillis naturally engaged in some voluntary suspension of disbelief, given that the question of how a virus could give humans superpowers that defy the laws of physics is inherently unanswerable. He focused on the origin of Wildcards the 90:9:1 rule of the universe, adopting the mindset of a theorist of the universe eager to construct a coherent mathematical framework that could describe viral behavior. The ultimate goal was to “demonstrate the great flexibility and usefulness of physics concepts by converting this vague and seemingly inaccessible problem into a simple dynamical system, thereby making a wealth of conceptual and mathematical tools available to students,” write Tregillis and Martin. in their newspaper.
Among the issues addressed by the article is the problem of Jokers and Aces as “mutually exclusive categories with a numerical distribution attainable by the roll of a hundred-sided die,” the authors write. “Yet the canon is full of characters who confuse this categorization: ‘Joker-Aces,’ who exhibit both a physical mutation and a superhuman ability.”
They also suggest the existence of “cryptos”: Jokers and Aces with largely unobservable mutations, such as producing ultraviolet stripes on someone’s heart or granting “an Iowa resident the power of line-of-sight telepathic communication with narwhals.” The first individual would not be aware of his jokerism; the second would be an Ace but would never have known it.” (One could say that communicating with narwhals could make him a Deuce.)
Ultimately, Tregillis and Martin proposed three basic rules: (1) cryptos exist, but their number is “unknown and unknowable”; (2) observable card tricks would be dealt according to the rule 90:9:1; and (3) 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 modifies a person, either in the severity of a Joker’s deformation or in the power of the super power of an Ace) and a mixing angle to address the existence of Joker-Ace. “Card tricks that land close enough to an axis subjectively will present themselves as Aces, when otherwise they will present themselves as Jokers or Joker-Aces,” the authors wrote.
The derived formula takes into account the many different ways a given system can evolve (i.e. a Langrangian formulation). “We translated the abstract problem of Wild Card viral results into a simple, concrete dynamic system. The time-averaged behavior of this system generates the statistical distribution of results. said Tregillis..
Tregillis acknowledges that this may not be a good exercise for the beginning physics student, given that it involves several steps and covers many concepts that younger students might not fully understand. Nor does he suggest adding it to the core curriculum. Instead, he recommends it for honors seminars to encourage students to explore an open-ended research question.
This story was originally published on Ars Technica.
