Although lovers A Song of Ice and Fire The best-selling sci-fi/fantasy author is probably still mulling over the long-delayed next book in the series George R. Martin He instead added a different item to his long list of publications: a peer-reviewed physics paper that had just been peer-reviewed in the American Journal of Physics with which I was involved. The paper derives a formula to describe the dynamics of a fictional virus that is a hub Wild cards A series of books, a shared universe edited by Martin and Melinda M. Snodgrass, with about 44 contributing authors.
Wild cards grew from Superworld RPG, specifically a long-running campaign game by Martin in the 1980s, with many of the original science fiction writers contributing to the series. (Neil Gaiman at the time had set up Martin A Wild cards A story involving a main character who lived in a dream world. Martin rejected the pitch, and It became Gaiman’s idea SandmanInitially, Martin planned to write a novel centered on his character Turtle, but then decided that it would be better as an anthology for the shared universe. Martin believed that Supernatural comics had too many sources for different superpowers and wanted one source to have a single source. Snodgrass suggested a virus.
This 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, is unleashed upon New York City in 1946 and spreads globally, infecting tens of thousands worldwide. It is called the wild card virus because it affects each individual differently. It kills 90 percent of those it infects and converts the rest. Nine percent of the latter end up in unpleasant circumstances – they are called ACEs – while 1 percent develop superpowers and are known as ACEs. Some aces have “powers” so trivial and useless that they are known as “deuces”.
There was great speculation on Wild cards A website discussing the science behind this virus came to the attention of Ian Tregelis, a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, who thought it might represent a useful educational exercise. “Being a theorist, I couldn’t help but wonder if there was a simple underlying model that Sharia might entail,” Tregillis said. “Like any physicist, I started out with backward estimates, but then got off the deep end. Eventually, I suggested, only half-granted, that it might be easier to write a real physics paper than another blog post.”
A physicist enters a fantasy world…
Tregillis naturally engaged in a willing suspension of disbelief, given that the question of how any virus could give humans superpowers that defy the laws of physics is inherently unanswerable. Focus on origin Wild cards The 90:9:1 Universe Rule, which adopts the mindset of a universe theorist keen to build a coherent mathematical framework that can describe viral behavior. The ultimate goal was to “demonstrate the large-scale flexibility and utility of physics concepts by transforming this arcane and apparently inoperable problem into a straightforward dynamical system, thus putting a wealth of conceptual and mathematical tools at the disposal of students,” Treglis and Martin wrote in their paper.
Among the issues the paper addresses is the problem of jokers and aces as “mutual classes with a numerical distribution achievable on a two-sided hundredth roll,” the authors wrote. “However, the canon abounds with characters that confound this classification: ‘Joker-places,’ who display physical mutation and superhuman ability.”
They also suggest the existence of “cryptography”: Jokers and Aces with largely unobservable mutations, such as producing ultraviolet racing lines on someone’s heart or drinking an Iowan’s vigorously porcelain communication from a queue with Narwhals. The first person would be unaware of Jokerism. (One might argue that communicating with narwhals might make one deuce.)
In the end, Treglis and Martin came up with three rules of thumb: (1) they exist, but how many there are is “unknown and unknowable”; (2) The observable turns will be distributed according to the 90:9:1 rule; and (3) virologic outcomes will be determined by A Multivariate probability distribution.
The resulting proposed model assumes two seemingly random variables: the intensity of the transformation—that is, how much the virus alters the person, either in the severity of the clown’s disfigurement or the power of the ace’s superpower—and a shuffling angle to manipulate the presence of the Joker-places. “The card turns so that the ground is close enough to one axis Self “Attendees act as arcs, while they would otherwise be presented as standouts or jokers,” the authors wrote.
The derived formula is one that takes into account the many different ways a given system can evolve (aka a Langrangian formulation). “We have translated the abstract problem of the viral results of a wild card into a simple, concrete dynamic system. The average behavior in this system generates the statistical distribution of the results.” said tregillis.
Treglis admits that this may not be a good exercise for a beginning physics student, given that it involves multiple steps and covers many concepts that younger students may not fully understand. It is also not suggested that it be added to the core curriculum. Instead, he recommends it for senior seminars to encourage students to explore an open-ended research question.
This story originally appeared on ARS Technica.
