Long before Westeros, fantasy and science-fiction author George R.R. Martin had a hand in creating Wild Cards, a shared science-fiction universe involving a pathogen called the “Wild Card” virus that has now spanned 32 books, comics, and games. This fictional world has now breached containment, as it is the basis of a new scientific paper, with Martin as co-author.
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The premise of the Wild Cards universe is the following: an alien race with similar physiology to us sent a virus to Earth in the aftermath of World War II to test it on humans. The virus rewrites the DNA of those it infects. For 90 out of 100 people, this is deadly. In nine of the non-deadly cases, the people infected acquire debilitating or repulsive physical conditions. They are called the Jokers. The 1-in-100s get superpowers and they are known as the Aces. There is also a subsection of the Aces known as the Deuces, where the powers are minor or insignificant.
Wild Cards stories have been written by multiple authors and edited by Martin and science fiction writer Melinda M. Snodgrass, who is the writer, among many things, of the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Measure Of A Man”. On the official Wild Cards website, physicist and contributing author to the series Ian Tregillis wrote a series of blog posts about how to model the peculiar nature of the virus with a physical formula. It turns out that despite the peculiar premise, it can be done.
“We translated the abstract problem of Wild Card viral outcomes into a simple, concrete dynamical system. The time-averaged behavior of this system generates the statistical distribution of outcomes,” Tregillis, who works at Los Alamos National Laboratory, said in a statement.
The video abstract for the paper points out how this is a good exercise for students. Despite being a fictional scenario, it is possible to create a model of the effects of the Wild Card virus.
“Like any physicist, I started with back-of-the-envelope estimates, but then I went off the deep end. Eventually I suggested, only half-jokingly, that it might be easier to write a genuine physics paper than another blog post,” Tregillis said. “Being a theoretician, I couldn’t help but wonder if a simple underlying model might tidy up the canon.”
The model is indeed simple, but this might be more of an exception than a rule. To stick with Martin’s output, researchers have tried to model the peculiar climate of Westeros in multiple ways (two stars, one planet? Variable axial tilt?), none of them perfectly satisfying.
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“Good storytelling is about characters: their wants, needs, obstacles, challenges, and how they interact with their world,” Tregillis said. “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.”
The paper is published in the American Journal of Physics.
Source Link: Physics Can Model The Peculiar Spread Of A Virus In One Of George R.R. Martin's Fictional Universes
