George RR Martin co-authored a scientific paper

Although fans of Song of ice and fire may still be craving the long-delayed next book in the series, bestselling science fiction/fantasy author George R.R. Martin Instead, he added another entry 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 that describes the dynamics of a fictional virus at its heart Wild card book series, a shared world edited by Martin and Melinda M. Snodgrass, with contributions from approximately 44 authors.

Wild card grew up from super world RPG, specifically a long-running campaign game masterminded by Martin in the 1980s, featuring some of the original science fiction writers who contributed to the series. (The then-unknown Neil Gaiman once threw Martin one Wild card The story involves a main character who lives in a world of dreams. Martin rejected the offer, and Gaiman’s idea became Sand People.) Martin initially planned to write a novel focusing on his character the Turtles, but he later decided that 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 suggests a virus.

The series is essentially an alternate history of the United States after 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% of those infected and mutates the rest. Nine percent of those then experience unpleasant conditions — these people are called Jokers — while 1 percent develop superpowers and are called Aces. Some Aces have such trivial and useless “strength” that they are called “deuces”.

There has been considerable speculation about Wild card The website discussed the science behind the virus, and it caught the attention of Ian Tregillis, a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, who thought it might be a useful pedagogical exercise. useful. “As a theorist, I can’t help but wonder whether a simple basic model could clarify the norm,” Tregillis he said. “Like any physicist, I start with final estimates, but then I get off track. Finally, I suggested, only half-jokingly, that writing a proper physics article might be easier than writing another blog post.”

A physicist enters a fictional universe…

Tregillis is naturally willing to suspend disbelief, because the question of how any virus can give humans superpowers that defy the laws of physics is inherently unanswerable. He focuses on the origin of Wild card the 90:9:1 rule of the universe, applying the thinking of an in-universe theorist who wishes to build a coherent mathematical framework that can describe the behavior of viruses. The ultimate goal is “to demonstrate the versatility and wide-ranging utility of physics concepts by converting this vague and seemingly inaccessible problem into a simple dynamical system, from which provides a wealth of mathematical and conceptual tools for students to use,” Tregillis and Martin wrote. in their article.

Among the problems the paper addresses is the problem of Jokers and Aces being “mutually exclusive categories with a numerical distribution obtainable by rolling a hundred-sided dice,” the authors write. “However, the canon is full of characters that confuse this classification: ‘Joker-Aces’, who display both physical mutations and superhuman abilities.”

They also hint at the existence of “cryptocurrencies”: Jokers and Aces with mutations that are largely unobservable, such as creating ultraviolet racing stripes on someone’s heart or transmitting to “Iowa residents have the power to communicate telepathically with narwhals. The first will be unaware of their Jokerism; the second will be Ace but have never known it.” (One could argue that communicating with a narwhal could cause one to become Deuce.)

Ultimately, Tregillis and Martin came up with three basic rules: (1) cryptocurrencies exist, but the amount of them that exists is “unknown and unknowable”; (2) observable card turns will be allocated according to the 90:9:1 rule; and (3) the viral outcome will be determined by one multivariate probability distribution.

The resulting proposed model assumes two explicit random variables: the severity of the transformation—that is, the degree to which the virus changes a person, or the severity of the deformation of Joker or Ace’s superpower potential—and the mash-up angle to address the existence of Joker-Aces. “Cards that turn lands close enough to an axis will subjectively present as Aces, while otherwise they will present as Jokers or Joker-Aces,” the authors write.

A derived formula is a formula that takes into account the many different ways a given system can evolve (also called a Langrange formula). “We turned the abstract problem of Wild Card viral outcomes into a simple, concrete dynamic system. The time-averaged behavior of this system produces a statistical distribution of outcomes,” Tregillis said.

Tregillis admits that this may not be a good exercise for beginning physics students, as it involves many steps and includes many concepts that younger students may not fully understand. Nor did he recommend 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 originally appeared on Ars Technica.