George RR Martin is a co-author of the scientific article

Fans though A song of ice and fire maybe still the long-overdue next book in the series, bestselling fantasy/fantasy author George RR Martin instead, he added a different item to his long list of publications: a peer-reviewed physics paper he co-authored, just published in the American Journal of Physics. A formula is derived to describe the dynamics of the so-called virus, which is the central part of the article Wild Cards A series of books edited by Martin and Melinda M. Snodgrass, a shared universe contributed by approximately 44 authors.

Wild Cards grew from Superworld RPG, a long-running campaign game especially in the 1980s directed by Martin and several original fiction writers involved in the series. (The then-unknown Neil Gaiman once called Martin a Wild Cards a story involving a main character living in a world of dreams. Martin rejected the pitch and It was Gaiman’s idea Sandman.) Originally, Martin planned to write a novel based on the Turtle character, 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 a single source. Snodgrass proposed a virus.

The series is basically an alternate history of the post-World War II United States. An airborne alien virus designed to rewrite DNA spread over New York City in 1946, infecting tens of thousands of people around the world. It is called the Wild Card virus because it affects each person differently. It kills 90 percent of the people it infects and mutates the rest. Of the latter, 9 percent end up with unpleasant conditions – these people are called Jokers, and 1 percent develop superpowers and are known as Aces. Some Aces have “powers” that are so insignificant and useless that they are known as “twos”.

There has been a lot of speculation about it Wild Cards A website discussing the science behind this virus caught the attention of Los Alamos National Laboratory physicist Ian Tregillis, who thought it might make a useful pedagogical exercise. “Being a theoretician, I couldn’t help but think that a simple basic model could tidy up the canon.” Tregillis said. “Like any physicist, I started with envelope-pushing guesses, but then I went deep. Finally, I half-jokingly suggested that it might be easier to write an actual physics article than another blog post.”

A physicist enters a fictional universe…

Given that the question of whether any virus could give humans superpowers that defy the laws of physics is essentially unanswerable, Tregillis was naturally concerned with suspending disbelief a bit. focused on the origin of Wild Cards the 90:9:1 rule of the universe adopts the mindset of an in-universe theorist who wants to construct a coherent mathematical framework that can describe viral behavior. The ultimate goal, Tregillis and Martin wrote, was to “demonstrate the wide flexibility and utility of physics concepts by transforming this vague and seemingly intractable problem into a simple dynamical system, thereby putting a wealth of conceptual and mathematical tools at students’ disposal.” in their paper.

Among the problems the authors mention in the paper is the Jokers and Aces problem “with mutually exclusive numerical distributions that can be obtained up to a hundred-sided die.” “However, the canon is rich with characters who confound this classification: ‘Joker-Aces’ who display both physical mutation and superhuman ability.”

They also suggest the existence of “cryptos”: Jokers and Aces with mostly unobservable mutations, such as producing ultraviolet racing stripes in someone’s heart or “infusing an Iowa resident with the power of line-of-sight telepathic communication with narwhals. The first individual would be unaware of their Jokerism, the second would be Ace, but he never knew it.” (One could argue that hanging out with narwhals can make a person a Deuce.)

In the end, Tregillis and Martin suggested three main rules: (1) cryptocurrencies exist, but how many exist is “unknown and unknowable”; (2) observable card turns will be distributed according to the 90:9:1 rule; and (3) viral outcomes will be determined by a multivariate probability distribution.

The proposed model assumes two seemingly random variables: the severity of the transformation—that is, how much the virus changes the person, either in the severity of the Joker’s deformation or the potential of Ace’s superpower—and the mixing angle to resolve its existence. Joker-Aces. “The card rotates so that it will be close enough to an axis subjectively are presented as Aces, otherwise they will present as Jokers or Joker-Aces,” the authors wrote.

The resulting formula is one that takes into account the many different ways a given system can evolve (aka a Langrangian formula). “We have transformed the abstract problem of Wild Card viral outcomes into a simple, concrete dynamic system. The average time behavior of this system creates a statistical distribution of results. Tregillis said.

Tregillis admits that it may not be a good exercise for a beginning physics student, given that it involves several steps and involves many concepts that younger students may not fully grasp. Nor does it 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 appeared first Ars Technica.