Long before Westeros, fantasy and science fiction author George Rr Martin helped create Jokersa 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 lockdown, as it is the basis of a new scientific paper, with Martin as co-author.
The premise of Jokers The universe is this: a stranger The race with a physiology similar 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, it is fatal. In nine of the non-ill cases, infected people acquire debilitating or repulsive physical conditions. They are called jokes. The 1 in 100 get superpowers and they are known as ACEs. There is also a subsection of aces called Deuces, where the powers are minor or insignificant.
Jokers Stories were written by several authors and edited by Martin and science fiction writer Melinda M. Snodgrass, who is the writer of, among many things, the Star Trek: The Next Generation Episode “The Measure of a Man”. On the official Jokers website, Physicist and series contributing author Ian Tregillis has written a series of blog posts on how to model the special nature of the virus with a physics formula. It turns out that despite the peculiar premise, it can be done.
“We translated the abstract problem of wild card viral results into a simple, concrete dynamic system. The time-averaged behavior of this system generates the statistical distribution of results,” said Tregillis, who works at Los Alamos National Laboratory, in a statement.
The video summary for the paper highlights 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 joker virus.
“Like any physicist, I started with back-of-the-envelope estimates, but went from the deep end. Eventually I suggested, half-jokingly, that it might be easier to write a real physics paper than another blog post,” Tregillis said. “Being a theoretician, I couldn’t help but wonder if a simple underlying model could put the canon in order.”
The pattern is indeed simple, but this might be more of an exception than a rule. To stick to Martin’s production, the researchers attempted to model the particular westeros climate In several ways (Two stars, one planet? Variable axial tilt?), none of them perfectly satisfactory.
“Good storytelling is about characters: their wants, their needs, their obstacles, their challenges, and how they interact with their world,” Tregillis said. “The fictional virus is really just an excuse to justify the world of Jokers, the characters who inhabit it, and the plots that spin from their actions.”
The document is published in the American Journal of Physics.