George R.R. Martin Coauthored a Scientific Paper

Its fans though A Song of Ice and Fire The best-selling sci-fi/fantasy author may still be clamoring for the long-delayed next book in the series. George RR Martin Instead added a different item to his long list of publications: a peer-reviewed physics paper published in the American Journal of Physics that he co-authored. The paper develops a formula to describe the dynamics of a hypothetical virus which wild card The book series, A Shared Universe edited by Martin and Melinda M. Snodgrass, has about 44 contributing authors.

wild card increased from Superworld RPGs—especially long-running campaign games—were mastered by Martin in the 1980s, with several key sci-fi writers contributing to the series. (The then-unknown Neil Gaiman once at Martin wild card A story of a main character living in a dream world. Martin rejected the pitch, and Gaiman’s idea was done Sandman.) Initially, Martin planned to write a novel centered around his character Turtle, but then decided it would be better as a shared universe anthology. Martin thought that there were too many origins of many different superpowers in superhero comics and wanted his universe to have a single origin. Snodgrass suggested a virus.

The series is essentially an alternate history of the United States after World War II. An airborne alien virus, designed to rewrite DNA, was released in New York City in 1946 and spread worldwide, infecting tens of thousands of people worldwide. It is called a wild card virus because it affects each person differently. It kills 90 percent of those it infects and mutates the rest. The last nine percent 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”.

A lot of speculation has started wild card The website discusses the science behind the virus and it caught the attention of Ian Tregillis, 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 if a simple underlying model could tidy up the canon,” Dr. Tregillis. “Like any physicist, I started with back-of-the-envelope guesses, but then I went off the deep end. Finally I suggested, only half-jokingly, that it might be easier to write an actual physics paper than another blog post.”

A physicist moves into an imaginary universe…

Trigilis naturally engaged in a somewhat willing suspension of disbelief, given that the question of how a virus could give humans superpowers that defy the laws of physics is inherently unanswerable. He focused on its source wild card The 90:9:1 rule of the universe takes the mindset of a cosmologist interested in creating a coherent mathematical framework that can describe viral behavior. The ultimate goal was to “demonstrate the broad flexibility and utility of physics concepts by transforming this obscure and seemingly unreachable problem into a simple dynamical system, thereby putting a wealth of conceptual and mathematical tools at students’ disposal,” Tregillis and Martin wrote in their paper.

Among the topics the paper addresses is the problem of jokers and aces, the authors write, “mutually exclusive classification with a numerical distribution that is achievable up to the roll of a hundred-sided die”. “Yet the canon abounds with characters who defy 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 unseen, such as creating ultraviolet racing stripes in one’s heart or “imbuing an Iowa resident with the power of line-of-sight telepathic communication with narwhals. The first person they Unaware of Jokerism; (one could argue that contact with a narwhal can turn one into a deuce.)

Ultimately, Tregillis and Martin came up with three basic 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 outcomes will be determined by a Multivariate probability distribution.

The resulting proposed model assumes two seemingly random variables: transformation intensity—that is, how much the virus changes an individual, either in the severity of Joker’s deformity or Ace’s superpowers—and a mixing angle to address its existence. Joker-aces. “The card rotates that land substantially around an axis Subjectively present as Aces, otherwise they will present as Jokers or Joker-Aces,” the authors wrote.

A derived formulation is one that considers the various ways in which a given system can evolve (a.k.a. a Langrangian formulation) “We have 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 results, ” Tregillis said.

Tregillis admits that this may not be a good exercise for elementary physics students, given that it involves multiple steps and covers 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 Ars Technica.