Although fans of A Song of Ice and Fire (Song of ice and fire) Keep wishing to be published the following book of the series that has been delayed for a long time, the successful author of science fiction and fantasy George RR Martin has added a different work to its long list of publications: a physics article reviewed by peers that It has just been published in the American Journal of Physics and of which he is co -author. The writing derives a formula to describe the dynamics of a fictional virus that is the centerpiece of the book series Wild Cards (Commodines)a shared universe edited by Martin and Melinda M. Snodgrass, with the collaboration of some 44 authors.
A physicist entered a fictional universe
Wild Cards It arose from Superworld, A long -term role -playing game directed by Martin in the 1980s, in which several of the original science fiction writers who contributed to the series participated. The then unknown Neil Gaiman proposed to Martin a story From Wild Cards that involved a main character who lived in a world of dreams. Martin rejected the proposal and Gaiman’s idea became The Sandman (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 from the different super powers and wanted their universe to have a single source. Then Snodgrass suggested “a virus.”
The series is basically an alternative history of the United States after World War II. An airborne alien virus, designed to rewrite DNA, had been released on New York City in 1946 And it spread throughout the world, infecting tens of thousands of people. It is called the “Wild Card” virus because it affects each individual differently. Kill 90% of those who infects and mutates the rest. 9% of the latter end with unpleasant conditions; These people are called ‘Jokers’, while 1% develop super powers and are known as ‘Aces’. Some aces have powers that are so trivial and useless that they are known as ‘deduces’.
On the website Wild Cards A lot has been speculated about the science behind that virus, and caught the attention of Ian Tregillis, a physicist of the National Las AlamosUSA, who thought it could be a useful pedagogical exercise. “As I am a theorist, I could not help asking me if a simple underlying model could put order in the canon,” says Tregillis. He adds that like any physique, he began with approximate estimates although he later uncontrolled: “I suggested jokingly that it could be easier to write a genuine physics article than another blog post.”
Tregillis promised to voluntarily suspend his disbelief, given that the question of how a virus can give humans overposters who challenge the laws of physics is, by nature, impossible. Focused on the origin of rule 90: 9: 1 of the universe Wild Cards, adopting the mentality of a theorist of the universe eager to build a coherent mathematical framework that could describe viral behavior. “The ultimate goal was to demonstrate the wide flexibility and utility of the concepts of physics, turning this vagus and apparently unabordable problem into a simple dynamic system, bringing a lot of conceptual and mathematical tools available to students,” wrote Tregillis and Martin in Your article.
Alright. We know that “the cat” does not exist, but it is an exceptionally long record that could lead us to more robust quantum devices.
Superhuman skills and ‘crypts’
Among the issues addressed by the article is the problem of Jokers and the Aces as “mutually exclusive categories with a numerical distribution attainable with the launch of a hundred -faced dice.” However, both authors explain, the canon abounds with characters that confuse that categorization: the ‘Jokers-Ases’ exhibit both a physical mutation and a superhuman ability.
They also suggest the existence of ‘Cryptos’: Jokers and Aces with mutations that are largely unobservablehow to induce “to a resident of Iowa the power of telepathic communication through the line of vision with narval”. The article prays that the first individual would not be aware of his ‘Jokerismo’; The second would be an ace but I would never know. It could be argued that communicating with Narvals could turn someone into a death.
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