Although fans of A song made of ice and fire Maybe he still longs for the long postponed next book in the series, bestseller science fiction/fantasy author George RR Martin Instead, he added another article to his long list of publications: a physics article examined by experts, which was particularly published in the American Journal of Physics and whose co -author he was. The article derives a formula to describe the dynamics of a fictitious virus that represents the heart of the virus Wildcards Book series, a common universe, published by Martin and Melinda M. Snodgrass, in which around 44 authors are involved.
Wildcards grew out of the Super world Role playing, especially a long-standing campaign game that Martin developed in the 1980s and in which several of the original science fiction authors who have participated in the series are involved. (A Neil Gaiman, who was unknown at the time, once threw Martin A Wildcards Story with a main character lived in a world of dreams. Martin rejected the pitch and Gaiman’s idea was The sandman.) Originally Martin had to write a novel that revolves around his figure Turtle, but then he decided that it was better than a common universe anthology. Martin was of the opinion that superhero comics had far too many sources for the many different superpowers and wanted his universe to have a single source. Snodgrass suggested a virus.
The series is basically an alternative history of the United States after the Second World War. A extraterrestrial virus in the air was released in 1946 over New York City and had spread worldwide, infected tens of thousands of people worldwide. It is called wildcard virus because it affects everyone differently. It kills 90 percent of the infected and mutates the rest. Nine percent of the latter suffer uncomfortable conditions – these people are called joker – while 1 percent develop superpowers and are known as aces. Some aces have “forces” that are so trivial and useless that they are known as “two”.
There was considerable speculation about it Wildcards Science was discussed behind this virus on this website, and Ian Tregillis’ attention, a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, was aware that it could be a useful pedagogical exercise. “As a theorist, I had to ask myself whether a simple underlying model could clean up the canon.” said Tregillis. “Like every physicist, I started superficial estimates, but then I got off the wrong end. After all, only half of the joke suggested that it might be easier to write a real physics work than another blog post. ”
A physicist enters a fictional universe …
Of course, Tregillis could be dissolved a little willing to do so when you consider that the question of how a virus could give people super forces that contradict the laws of physics is fundamentally unalterable. He focused on the origin of the Wildcards The 90: 9: 1 rule of the universe is based on the way of thinking of a theorist in the universe who is careful to create a coherent mathematical framework that could describe the viral behavior. The ultimate goal was to “demonstrate the far -reaching flexibility and usefulness of physical concepts by converting it vague and apparently inaccessible problem into an uncomplicated dynamic system and thus providing the students an abundance of conceptual and mathematical tools,” wrote Tregillis and Martin in their work.
One of the topics with which the paper deals is the problem of jokers and aces as “mutual categories with a numerical distribution that can be achieved by the throw of a hundred -sided cube”, the authors wrote. “Nevertheless, there are many characters in the canon that change this categorization: ‘Jokerass’ that have both a physical mutation and superhuman abilities.”
They also indicate the existence of “cryptos”: joker and aces with mutations that are largely not observable, such as the production of ultraviolet racetracks on the heart of a person or the award ceremony “of a resident of Iowa with the power of telepathic communication Narwalen in the line of sight ”. The first individual would not be aware of his jokerism; The second one would be an ace, but never knew it. ”(You could argue that communication with Narwalen could make you a deut.)
In the end, Tregillis and Martin have set up three basic rules: (1) Cryptos exist, but how many of them exist is “unknown and not recognizable”; (2) Observable card trains would be distributed according to the 90: 9: 1 rule; and (3) viral results would definitely be done by a Multivariate probability distribution.
The resulting proposed model assumes two apparently random variables: the severity of the transformation – how much the virus changes a person, either in the severity of the deformation of a joker or in the strength of the superpower of an asses – and a mixing angle to the existence to take into account this change. “Cartrights that will land sufficiently close to an axis.” subjective are shown as aces, otherwise they are shown as a joker or joker mass, ”the authors write.
The derived formula takes into account the many different options of how a certain system can develop (also known as: Long -ranking wording). “We have translated the abstract problem of viral wildcard results into a simple, concrete dynamic system. “The behavior of this system, which has averaged time, creates the statistical distribution of the results.” said Tregillis.
Tregillis admits that this may not be a good exercise for prospective physics students, since it includes several steps and covers many concepts that younger students may not fully understand. He also does not suggest included it in the core curriculum. Instead, he recommends it for Senior Honors seminars to encourage students to examine an open research question.
This story originally appeared on Ars Technica.
