Although the followers of A Song of Ice and Fire may still be looking for the long-delayed next book in the series, bestselling sci-fi/fantasy author George RR Martin has instead added something unique to his long list of books: a peer-reviewed physics paper recently published in the American Journal. of Physics which he co-authored. The paper derives a formula to describe the evolution of a fictitious virus that is the core of Wild Cards book series, a shared universe edited by Martin and Melinda M. Snodgrass, with some 44 contributing authors.
Wild Cards grew from The Superworld An RPG, particularly a long-running campaign game by Martin in the 1980s, with several original sci-fi authors contributing to the series. (The then unknown Neil Gaiman once pitched Martin a Wild Cards A story involving a main character who lived in a fantasy world. Martin rejected the pitch, and Gaiman’s idea was born Sandman.) Originally, Martin planned to write a novel focusing on his character Turtle, but then decided it would be better as an anthology of a shared universe. Martin thought that superhero comics had too many sources for too many different realms and wanted his universe to have one source. Snodgrass suggested the virus.
This series is basically an alternate history of the US after World War II. An airborne virus, designed to rewrite DNA, was released in New York City in 1946 and spread worldwide, infecting tens of thousands around the world. It is called the Wild Card virus because it affects each person differently. It kills 90 percent of those it infects and mutates the rest. The last nine percent end up with unpleasant situations—these people are called Jokers—while one percent develop superpowers and are known as Aces. Some Aces are so “powerful” and so insignificant that they are known as “deuces.”
There has been a lot of speculation about Wild Cards A 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 would make a useful educational project. “Being a theologian, I couldn’t help but wonder if a basic model could fix the canon,” Tregillis said. “Like any physicist, I started with back-of-the-envelope measurements, but then I got out of the loop. Finally I suggested, just in jest, that it might be easier to write an actual physics paper than another blog post. “
A Physicist enters a fictional …
Tregillis is naturally involved in the voluntary suspension of disbelief, because the question of whether any virus can give humans superpowers that defy the laws of physics is inherently unanswerable. He focused on the root of the Wild Cards The universal law of 90:9:1, accepts the idea of ​​a universal theorist who is determined to develop a coherent mathematical framework that can explain the behavior of the virus. The ultimate goal was to demonstrate “the broad flexibility and applicability of physics concepts by transforming this abstract and seemingly intractable problem into a precise variable system, thereby placing a wealth of mental and mathematical tools at the disposal of students,” Tregillis and Martin wrote. in their paper.
Among the issues the paper tackles is the problem of Jokers and Aces “as distinct classes with numerical distributions accessible from a hundred-sided inheritance list,” the authors wrote. “Yet the literature is full of characters who confound this category: ‘Joker-Aces,’ who display both physical transformation and superhuman abilities.”
They also suggest that there are “cryptos”: Jokers and Aces have invisible genetic mutations, such as producing ultraviolet rays that race into someone’s heart or instilling “a citizen of Iowa with the power of telepathic communication with line of sight and narwhals. The first person did not know with their Jokerism; the second will be Ace but he never knows.” (One might argue that contact with narwhals might make him a Deuce.)
Ultimately, Tregillis and Martin came up with three basic rules: (1) cryptos exist, but how many of them exist is “unknown and unknowable”; (2) visible card turns will be distributed according to the 90:9:1 rule; and (3) virus effects will be determined by multiple probability distributions.
The resulting proposed model takes two virtual random variables: the difficulty of the mutation-that is, how much the virus changes the person, either by the difficulty of the Joker mutation or the great power of the Ace-and the mixing angle to deal with the presence of Joker-Aces. “The card turns that world close enough to the will of one axis humbly present as Aces, while 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 (also known as the Langrangian formulation). “We have translated the abstract problem of wild card virus effects into a simple, robust and powerful system. The time-averaged behavior of this system creates a statistical distribution,” said Tregillis.
Tregillis admits that this may not be a good exercise for a first-time physics student, as it involves many steps and covers many concepts that younger students may not fully understand. Nor does he suggest that it be added to the core curriculum. Instead, he recommends it to senior honors seminars to encourage students to explore an open-ended research question.
This story appeared first Ars Technica.
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