Though followers of A Track of Ice and Fireplace may nonetheless be hankering for the long-delayed subsequent e-book within the collection, bestselling sci-fi/fantasy writer George R.R. Martin has as an alternative added a distinct merchandise to his lengthy checklist of publications: a peer-reviewed physics paper simply printed within the American Journal of Physics that he coauthored. The paper derives a formulation to explain the dynamics of a fictional virus that’s the centerpiece of the Wild Playing cards collection of books, a shared universe edited by Martin and Melinda M. Snodgrass, with some 44 authors contributing.
Wild Playing cards grew out of the Superworld RPG, particularly a long-running marketing campaign game-mastered by Martin within the Nineteen Eighties, with a number of of the unique sci-fi writers who contributed to the collection collaborating. (A then-unknown Neil Gaiman as soon as pitched Martin a Wild Playing cards story involving a principal character who lived in a world of desires. Martin rejected the pitch, and Gaiman’s concept grew to become The Sandman.) Initially, Martin deliberate to put in writing a novel centered on his character Turtle, however he then determined it could be higher as a shared universe anthology. Martin thought that superhero comics had far too many sources of the numerous totally different superpowers and wished his universe to have one single supply. Snodgrass prompt a virus.
The collection is principally an alternate historical past of the US within the aftermath of World Conflict II. An airborne alien virus, designed to rewrite DNA, had been launched over New York Metropolis in 1946 and unfold globally, infecting tens of hundreds worldwide. It is referred to as the Wild Card virus as a result of it impacts each particular person in another way. It kills 90 p.c of these it infects and mutates the remaining. 9 p.c of the latter find yourself with disagreeable circumstances—these persons are referred to as Jokers—whereas 1 p.c develop superpowers and are often known as Aces. Some Aces have “powers” which can be so trivial and ineffective that they’re often known as “deuces.”
There was appreciable hypothesis on the Wild Playing cards web site discussing the science behind that virus, and it caught the eye of Ian Tregillis, a physicist at Los Alamos Nationwide Laboratory, who thought it’d make a helpful pedagogical train. “Being a theoretician, I could not assist however marvel if a easy underlying mannequin may tidy up the canon,” Tregillis mentioned. “Like all physicist, I began with back-of-the-envelope estimates, however then I went off the deep finish. Ultimately I prompt, solely half-jokingly, that it is perhaps simpler to put in writing a real physics paper than one other weblog submit.”
A Physicist Walks Right into a Fictional Universe …
Tregillis naturally engaged in a little bit of keen suspension of disbelief, provided that the query of how any virus may give people superpowers that defy the legal guidelines of physics is inherently unanswerable. He centered on the origin of the Wild Playing cards universe’s 90:9:1 rule, adopting the mindset of an in-universe theoretician eager to construct a coherent mathematical framework that would describe the viral conduct. The final word aim was to “show the wide-ranging flexibility and utility of physics ideas by changing this imprecise and seemingly unapproachable downside to a simple dynamic system, thereby placing a wealth of conceptual and mathematical instruments at college students’ disposal,” Tregillis and Martin wrote of their paper.
Among the many points the paper addresses is the issue of Jokers and Aces as “mutually unique classes with a numerical distribution attainable to the roll of a hundred-sided die,” the authors wrote. “But the canon abounds with characters who confound this categorization: ‘Joker-Aces,’ who exhibit each a bodily mutation and a superhuman means.”
In addition they counsel the existence of “cryptos”: Jokers and Aces with mutations which can be largely unobservable, comparable to producing ultraviolet racing stripes on somebody’s coronary heart or imbuing “a resident of Iowa with the facility of line-of-sight telepathic communication with narwhals. The primary particular person could be unaware of their Jokerism; the second could be an Ace however by no means recognized it.” (One may argue that speaking with narwhals may make one a Deuce.)
In the long run, Tregillis and Martin got here up with three floor guidelines: (1) cryptos exist, however what number of of them exist is “unknown and unknowable”; (2) observable card turns could be distributed in keeping with the 90:9:1 rule; and (3) viral outcomes could be decided by a multivariate likelihood distribution.
The ensuing proposed mannequin assumes two apparently random variables: severity of the transformation—i.e., how a lot the virus modifications an individual, both within the severity of a Joker’s deformation or the efficiency of an Ace’s superpower—and a mixing angle to deal with the existence of Joker-Aces. “Card turns that land sufficiently shut to at least one axis will subjectively current as Aces, whereas in any other case they are going to current as Jokers or Joker-Aces,” the authors wrote.
The derived formulation is one which takes under consideration the numerous other ways a given system can evolve (aka a Langrangian formulation). “We translated the summary downside of Wild Card viral outcomes right into a easy, concrete dynamical system. The time-averaged conduct of this technique generates the statistical distribution of outcomes,” mentioned Tregillis.
Tregillis acknowledges that this may not be train for the start physics scholar, provided that it entails a number of steps and covers many ideas that youthful college students may not totally comprehend. Nor does he counsel including it to the core curriculum. As an alternative, he recommends it for senior honors seminars to encourage college students to discover an open-ended analysis query.
This story initially appeared on Ars Technica.
