Although fans a song of ice and fire Still hankering for the long-delayed next book in the series, the bestselling sci-fi/fantasy author george rr martin Instead he has 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 co-hosted. The paper derives a formula to describe the dynamics of a hypothetical virus which is the center point of wild card Series of books, Martin and Melinda M. A shared universe, edited by Snodgrass, with contributions from some 44 authors.
wild card dropped out of superworld RPG, particularly in the 1980s with a long-running campaign game-mastered by Martin, with many of the original sci-fi writers who contributed to the series participating. (A then-unknown Neil Gaiman once pitched Martin wild card A story involving a main character who lived in a dream world. Martin rejected the pitch, and Gaiman's idea became the Sandman.) Initially, Martin planned to write a novel focusing on his character Turtle, but then he decided it would be better as a shared universe anthology. Martin thought that superhero comics had too many sources for too many different superpowers and wanted his universe to have a single source. Snodgrass suggested a virus.
The series is basically an alternate history of America after World War II. An airborne alien virus, designed to rewrite DNA, is released in New York City in 1946 and spreads globally, infecting thousands worldwide. It is called a wild card virus because it affects every person differently. It kills 90 percent of those it infects and mutes the rest. The latter nine percent end up with unpleasant situations – 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 much speculation about wild card The website discusses the science behind that virus, and it caught the attention of Ian Tregilis, a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, who thought it might make a useful educational exercise. “Being a theorist, I couldn't help but wonder whether a simple implicit model could clean up the canon,” Tregilis said“Like any physicist, I started with back-of-the-level guesses, but then I went into the deep end. Eventually I suggested, only half-jokingly, that it might be easier to write an actual physics paper than another blog post. ,
A physicist walks into an imaginary universe…
Tregilis naturally engaged in a willing suspension of disbelief, given that the question of what any virus could do to a human being that defies the laws of physics is inherently unimaginable. he focused on the original wild card The Universe's 90:9:1 Rule Adopting the mindset of an in-universe theorist eager to create a coherent mathematical framework that can describe viral behavior. The ultimate goal was “to demonstrate the broad flexibility and utility of physics concepts by converting this obscure and seemingly unsolvable problem into a straightforward dynamical system, thereby putting a wealth of conceptual and mathematical tools at students' disposal,” Tregilis and Martin wrote. . In their paper.
The authors wrote that the paper addresses the problem of jokers and aces as mutually exclusive categories “with numerical distributions obtainable for the roll of a hundred-sided die.” “Yet the canon departs from this classification with confusing characters: 'Joker-esses,' 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 unrepeatable, such as producing ultraviolet racing stripes on one's heart or “an Iowa resident with a line-of-sight with Narves.” A resident of Iowa with the power of telepathic communication. The first one would be unaware of his clownism; Is.)
Ultimately, Tregilis 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 will be distributed according to the 90:9:1 rule; and (3) viral results will be determined by a multivariate distribution,
The resulting proposed model considers two apparently random variables: severity of change—II, how much the virus changes a person, either in the severity of a clown's disfigurement or the strength of ACE's superpower—and the existence of A mix-up angle for the Joker-habitual. “The card replaces the land that would be sufficiently close to an axis subjective “present as ACES, whereas otherwise they would present as clowns or clown-habituals,” the authors wrote.
The derived formula is one that takes into account the many different ways a given system can evolve (aka a Lagrangian formulation“We translated the abstract problem of wild card viral outcomes into a simple, concrete dynamical system. The time-averaged behavior of this system produces a statistical distribution of outcomes,” Tregilis said,
Tregilis acknowledges that this may not be a good exercise for the beginning physics student, given that it involves many steps and involves many concepts that younger students may not fully understand. 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 tech technica,