Although fans of A Song of Ice and Fire perhaps still yearning for the long-delayed next book in the series, bestselling science fiction/fantasy author George RR Martin has instead added another item to his long list of publications: a peer-reviewed physics paper just published in the American Journal of Physics which he co-authored. The paper derives a formula to describe the dynamics of a fictitious virus that is the center of the Wild Cards series of books, a shared universe edited by Martin and Melinda M. Snodgrass, with some 44 contributing authors.
Wild Cards grown out of the Super world 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 called 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.) Martin initially planned to write a novel centered on his character Turtle, but 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 proposed 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, was released over New York City in 1946 and spread worldwide, 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 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” so trivial and useless that they are known as “deuces”.
There has been much speculation about 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 theorist, I couldn’t help but wonder if a simple underlying model could clean up the canon,” Tregillis said. “Like any physicist, I started with back-of-the-envelope estimates, but then I went off the deep end. Finally, I suggested, only half-jokingly, that it might be easier to write a genuine physics paper than another blog post.”
A physicist steps into a fictional universe…
Tregillis was obviously engaging in a bit of willing suspension of disbelief, since the question of how a virus can 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, which assumes the mindset of an in-universe theorist who would like to build a coherent mathematical framework that can 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 intractable problem to a simple dynamical system, thereby making available to students a wealth of conceptual and mathematical tools ,” Tregillis and Martin wrote. in their newspaper.
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 is full of characters that confound this categorization: ‘Joker-Aces,’ who display both a physical mutation and a superhuman ability.”
They also suggest the existence of “cryptos”: Jokers and Aces with mutations that are largely undetectable, such as producing ultraviolet racing stripes on someone’s heart or “imbuing an Iowa resident with the power of telepathic communication with narwhals. The first individual would be unaware of their joker; the second would be a bait, but never knew it.” (One could argue that communicating with narwhals can make one a Deuce.)
In the end, Tregillis and Martin came up with three ground rules: (1) cryptos exist, but how much exists is “unknown and unknowable”; (2) observable card turns will be split according to the 90:9:1 rule; and (3) viral outcomes will be determined by a multivariate probability distribution.
The resulting proposed model assumes two seemingly random variables: severity of the transformation – ie how much the virus changes a person, either in the severity of a Joker’s deformity or the strength of an Ace’s superpower – and a mixing angle around the existence of Joker-Aces. “Map turns that land close enough to one axis will subjective present as Aces, whereas they would otherwise present as Jokers or Joker-Aces,” the authors wrote.
The derivative formula is one that takes into account the many different ways in which a given system can evolve (also known as a Langrangian formulation). “We have translated the abstract problem of Wild Card viral outcomes into a simple, concrete dynamic system. The time-averaged behavior of this system generates the statistical distribution of outcomes,” said Tregillis.
Tregillis admits that this may not be a good exercise for the beginning physics student, as it involves multiple steps and covers many concepts that younger students may not fully grasp. 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.