It’s not every day that a well-known author writes a physics paper. But George R R Martin, who is best known for his Song of Ice and Fire series of fantasy novels, has co-authored a paper in the American Journal of Physics with the title “Ergodic Lagrangian dynamics in a superhero universe”.
Written with Los Alamos National Laboratory theoretical physicist Ian Tregillis, who is also a science-fiction author of several books, they have derived a mathematical model of the so-called wild cards virus.
The Wild Cards universe is a series of novels created by a consortium of writers including Martin and Tregillis.
Set largely during an alternate history of the US following the Second World War, the series follows events after an extraterrestrial virus, known as the Wild Card virus, has spread worldwide. It mutates human DNA causing profound changes in human physiology and society at large.
The virus follows a fixed statistical distribution of outcomes in that 90% of those infected die, 9% become physically mutated (referred to as “jokers”) and 1% gain superhuman abilities (known as “aces”). Such capabilities include the ability to fly as well as being able to move between dimensions. The stories in the series then follow the individuals that have been impacted by the virus.
Tregillis and Martin have now derived a formula for the viral behaviour of the Wild Card virus. “Like any physicist, I started with back-of-the-envelope estimates, but then I went off the deep end,” notes Tregillis. “Being a theoretician, I couldn’t help but wonder if a simple underlying model might tidy up the canon.”
The model takes into consideration the severity of the changes (for the 10% that don’t instantly die) and the mix of joke/ace traits. After all, those infected can also become cryto-jokers or crypto-aces – undetected cases where individuals have subtle changes or powers – as well as joker-aces, in which a human develops both mutations and superhuman abilities.
The result is a dynamical system in which a carrier’s state vector constantly evolves through the model space — until their “card” turns. At that point the state vector becomes fixed and its permanent location determines the fate of the carrier. “The time-averaged behavior of this system generates the statistical distribution of outcomes,” adds Tregillis.
The purpose of the paper, and the model, is also to provide an exercise in demonstrating how “whimsical” scenarios can be used to explore concepts in physics and mathematics.
“The fictional virus is really just an excuse to justify the world of Wild Cards, the characters who inhabit it, and the plot lines that spin out from their actions,” says Tregillis.
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