George R.R. Martin Coauthored a Scientific Paper
While fans of A Song of Ice and Fire may still be waiting for the next book of the series that has been delayed, sci-fi/fantasy bestselling author George R.R. The paper is a formula to describe the dynamics of a fictional virus that is at the center of the Wild Cards series of books, a shared universe edited by Martin and Melinda M. Snodgrass with 44 authors contributing. The paper derives a formula to describe the dynamics of a fictional virus that is the centerpiece of the Wild Cards series of books, a shared universe edited by Martin and Melinda M. Snodgrass, with some 44 authors contributing.
Wild Cards grew out of the Superworld RPG, specifically a long-running campaign game-mastered by Martin in the 1980s, with several of the original sci-fi writers who contributed to the series participating. The Wild Cards series was born out of the Superworld RPG, a long-running campaign game that Martin masterminded in the 1980s. Several original sci-fi writers contributed to this series. Martin rejected Gaiman’s pitch and Gaiman’s idea became The Sandman. Martin originally planned to write an entire novel about Turtle. However, he decided that a shared-universe anthology would be a better fit. Martin felt that comics with superheroes were awash in superpowers, and wanted to create a universe where there was only one source. Snodgrass proposed a virus.
The show is basically a alternate history of America in the years following World War II. In 1946, an alien airborne virus designed to rewrite the DNA was released over New York City. It spread worldwide, infecting thousands of people. The Wild Card virus is so named because it affects each individual differently. It infects 90% of people and then mutates the remainder. One percent develops superpowers, while nine percent suffer from unpleasant conditions. These people are known as Jokers. Some Aces have “powers” that are so trivial and useless that they are known as “deuces.”
There has been considerable speculation on the Wild Cards website discussing the science behind that virus, and it caught the attention of Ian Tregillis, a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, who thought it might make a useful pedagogical exercise. Tregillis, a theoretical physicist, couldn’t resist wondering if a simple model could be used to tidy up the canon. I began with some back-of the-envelope calculations, but I then went into the deep end. A Physicist Enters a Fictional World…
Tregillis was willing to suspend disbelief because the question about how a virus could grant humans superpowers which defy physics laws is unanswerable. He adopted the mindset of a theoretician in the Wild Cards universe, eager to create a mathematical framework that would describe viral behavior. The authors address a number of issues, including the issue of Aces and Jokers as “mutually-exclusive categories with a mathematical distribution that can be achieved by rolling a 100-sided die.” The canon is full of characters that defy this classification: “Joker-Aces,” who have both a physical mutant and superhuman abilities. “
They suggest that there are “cryptos”, Jokers and Aces who have mutations which are not easily visible, like putting ultraviolet racing stripes in someone’s heart. Or imbuing a “resident of Iowa” with the ability to communicate with narwhals through line-of sight telepathy. The first person would not be aware of their Jokerism, while the second individual would have been an Ace without knowing it. One could argue that talking to narwhals would make you a Deuce. )
In the end, Tregillis and Martin came up with three ground rules: (1) cryptos exist, but how many of them exist is “unknown and unknowable”; (2) observable card turns would be distributed 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 apparently random variables: severity of the transformation–i.e., how much the virus changes a person, either in the severity of a Joker’s deformation or the potency of an Ace’s superpower–and a mixing angle to address the existence of Joker-Aces. The authors stated that card turns that fall close enough to an axis would be perceived as Aces. Otherwise, they could appear as Jokers or Joker Aces. We translated the abstract problem Wild Card viral results into a concrete, simple dynamical system. The time-averaged behavior of this system generates the statistical distribution of outcomes,” said Tregillis.
Tregillis acknowledges that this might not be a good exercise for the beginning physics student, given that it involves multiple steps and covers many concepts that younger students might not fully comprehend. He does not recommend adding this exercise to the core curriculum. Instead, he recommends it for senior honors seminars to encourage students to explore an open-ended research question.
This story originally appeared on Ars Technica.
