Although fans of A Song of Ice and Fire might still be hankering for the long-delayed next book in the series, bestselling sci-fi/fantasy author George R.R. Martin has instead added a different item to his long list of publications: a peer-reviewed physics paper just published in the American Journal of Physics that he coauthored. 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. (A then-unknown Neil Gaiman once pitched Martin a Wild Cards story involving a main character who lived in a world of dreams. Martin rejected the pitch, and Gaiman’s idea became The Sandman.) Initially, Martin planned to write a novel centered on his character Turtle, but he then decided it would be better as a shared universe anthology. Martin thought that superhero comics had far too many sources of the many different superpowers and wanted his universe to have one single source. Snodgrass suggested a virus.
The series is basically an alternate history of the US in the aftermath of World War II. An airborne alien virus, designed to rewrite DNA, had been released over New York City in 1946 and spread globally, infecting tens of thousands worldwide. It’s called the Wild Card virus because it affects every individual differently. It kills 90 percent of those it infects and mutates the rest. Nine percent of the latter end up with unpleasant conditions—these people are called Jokers—while 1 percent develop superpowers and are known as Aces. 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. “Being a theoretician, I couldn’t help but wonder if a simple underlying model might tidy up the canon,” Tregillis said. “Like any physicist, I started with back-of-the-envelope estimates, but then I went off the deep end. Eventually I suggested, only half-jokingly, that it might be easier to write a genuine physics paper than another blog post.”
A Physicist Walks Into a Fictional Universe …
Tregillis naturally engaged in a bit of 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. He focused on the origin of the Wild Cards universe’s 90:9:1 rule, adopting the mindset of an in-universe theoretician keen to build a coherent mathematical framework that could describe the viral behavior. The ultimate goal was to “demonstrate the wide-ranging flexibility and utility of physics concepts by converting this vague and seemingly unapproachable problem to a straightforward dynamic system, thereby putting a wealth of conceptual and mathematical tools at students’ disposal,” Tregillis and Martin wrote in their paper.
Among the issues the paper addresses is the problem of Jokers and Aces as “mutually exclusive categories with a numerical distribution attainable to the roll of a hundred-sided die,” the authors wrote. “Yet the canon abounds with characters who confound this categorization: ‘Joker-Aces,’ who exhibit both a physical mutation and a superhuman ability.”
They also suggest the existence of “cryptos”: Jokers and Aces with mutations that are largely unobservable, such as producing ultraviolet racing stripes on someone’s heart or imbuing “a resident of Iowa with the power of line-of-sight telepathic communication with narwhals. The first individual would be unaware of their Jokerism; the second would be an Ace but never known it.” (One might argue that communicating with narwhals might make one 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. “Card turns that land sufficiently close to one axis will subjectively present as Aces, while otherwise they will present as Jokers or Joker-Aces,” 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 translated the abstract problem of Wild Card viral outcomes into a simple, concrete 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. Nor does he suggest adding it 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.
