Although fans of An ice and fire song It is possible that he is still yearning for the next book of the series, so delayed, of the best -selling science fiction and fantasy author. George Rr Martín Instead, he added a different element to its long list of publications: an peer -reviewed physics article that has just been published in the American Journal of Physics of which he is co -author. The article derives a formula to describe the dynamics of a fictional virus that is the centerpiece of the Commodines Book series, a shared universe edited by Martin and Melinda M. Sodgrass, with the contribution of about 44 authors.
Commodines It arose from the Supermundo RPG, specifically a long -term campaign game dominated by Martin in the 1980s, with the participation of several of the original science fiction writers who contributed to the series. (A then unknown Neil Gaiman once offered Martin a Commodines History that involves a main character who lived in a world of dreams. Martín rejected the offer and the idea of Gaiman became The sand man.) Initially, Martin planned to write a novel focused on his character turtle, but then decided that it would be better as a shared universe anthology. Martin thought that superhero comics had too many sources of different super powers and wanted their universe to have a single source. Sodgrass suggested a virus.
The series is basically an alternative history of the United States after World War II. An alien virus transported by the air, designed to rewrite DNA, was released in New York City in 1946 and spread throughout the world, infecting tens of thousands of people around the world. It is called Wild Card virus because it affects each individual differently. Kill 90 percent of those who infects and mutates the rest. The nine percent of the latter ends up in unpleasant conditions (these people are called Jakers), while 1 percent develop super powers and are known as Aces. Some aces have “powers” that are so trivial and useless that they are known as “two.”
A lot has been speculated on the Commodines Website that analyzes the science behind that virus, and caught the attention of Ian Tregillis, a physicist of the National Laboratory of Los Alamos, who thought it could be a useful pedagogical exercise. “As theoretical, I could not help asking me if a simple underlying model could order the canon.” Tregillis said. “Like any physique, I started with preliminary estimates, but then I lost myself. In the end I suggested, half jokingly, which could be easier to write a genuine physics article than another blog post. ”
A physicist enters a fictional universe …
Naturally, Tregillis was involved in a certain voluntary suspension of disbelief, given that the question of how any virus could give super powers that challenge the laws of physics is inherently incontestable. Focused on the origin of the Commodines Rule 90: 9: 1 of the Universe, adopting the mentality of a theorist of the universe eager to build a coherent mathematical framework that can describe viral behavior. The ultimate goal was to “demonstrate the wide flexibility and utility of physics concepts by converting this vagus and apparently unabordable problem into a simple dynamic system, thus putting a large number of conceptual and mathematical tools available to students,” wrote Tregillis and Martin. In your newspaper.
Among the issues addressed by the article is the problem of the wildcards and the Aces as “mutually exclusive categories with a numerical distribution attainable by launching a hundred -sided dice,” the authors wrote. “However, the canon abounds in characters that confuse this categorization: ‘Joker-Ice’, which exhibit both a physical mutation and a superhuman ability.”
They also suggest the existence of “crypts”: jakers and ACES with mutations that are largely unobservable, such as producing ultraviolet stripes in someone’s heart or imbue “a Iowa resident with the power of telepathic communication power line of vision with Narvals The first individual would not be aware of his bromism; (It could be argued that communicating with Narvals could turn it into a death).
In the end, Tregillis and Martin proposed three basic rules: (1) cryptocurrencies exist, but how many of them exist is “unknown and unknowable”; (2) Observable letters would be distributed according to rule 90: 9: 1; and (3) viral results would be determined by a multivariate probability distribution.
The resulting proposed model assumes two seemingly random variables: the severity of the transformation (that is, how much the virus changes to a person, either in the severity of the deformation of a Joker or in the power of the superpower of an ACE) and a mixture angle to address the existence of Joker-Ice. “Letters of cards that fall close enough of an axis subjectively They will present themselves as Aces, while otherwise they will be presented as Jokers or Joker-Ace, “the authors wrote.
The derived formula is one that takes into account the different ways in which a given system can evolve (also known as Langrangian formulation). “We traded the abstract problem of the Wild Card viral results in a simple and concrete dynamic system. The averaged behavior in the time of this system generates the statistical distribution of the results ”. Tregillis said.
Tregillis acknowledges that this may not be a good exercise for the beginner student of Physics, since it implies multiple steps and covers many concepts that younger students may not understand completely. Nor does it suggest adding it to the basic curriculum. Instead, he recommends it for last year honors seminars to encourage students to explore an open research question.
This story originally appeared in Ars Technique.