Although the fans A song of ice and fire Still eager for the long-delayed next book in the series, bestselling science-fiction author George R.R. Martin has instead added a different item to his long list of publications: a peer-reviewed physics paper titled Recently published in the American magazine. Physics, which he co-authored. This paper derives a formula to describe the dynamics of a fictitious virus, which is the main axis wild card A series of books, A Shared World by Martin and Melinda M. Snodgrass edited, with about 44 authors.
wild card grew from the universe RPG, specifically a long-running campaign game mastered by Martin in the 1980s and several major science fiction writers who contributed to the series. (A then-unknown Neil Gaiman once played Martin A wild card A story about the main character who lived in a world of dreams. Martin rejected the pitch and Gaiman’s idea came to fruition sand man.) Originally, Martin intended to write a novel centered around the Turtles themselves, but then decided it would be better as a shared universe anthology. Martin thought that superhero comics had too many sources of different superpowers and wanted his universe to have a single source. Snodgrass proposed a virus.
The series is basically an alternate history of the United States after World War II. An airborne virus designed to rewrite DNA was released over New York City in 1946 and spread worldwide, infecting tens of thousands of people worldwide. It is called a wild card virus because it affects each person differently. It kills 90% of those it infects and mutates the rest. Nine percent of these people end up with unpleasant circumstances—these people are called Jokers—while 1 percent develop superpowers and are known as Aces. Some aces have “powers” that are so trivial and useless that they are called “deos”.
There is considerable speculation about wild card A website discussing the science behind the virus caught the attention of Ian Tergilis, a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, who thought it might be a useful educational exercise. “Being a theorist, I couldn’t help but wonder if a simple underlying model might sort out the law,” Tergilis said. Like any physicist, I started with back-to-back estimates, but then I ran out. Finally, I suggested, just jokingly, that it is easier to write an original physics paper than another blog post.
A physicist walks into a fantasy world…
Tergilis naturally engaged in a bit of suspension of disbelief, given that the question of how any virus could give humans superpowers that defy the laws of physics is inherently unanswerable. He focused on its origin wild card The 90:9:1 Universe Law Adopts the mindset of an introspective theorist eager to construct a coherent mathematical framework that can describe viral behavior. Tergilis and Martin wrote that the ultimate goal was to “demonstrate the flexibility and broad applicability of physics concepts by transforming this obscure and seemingly inaccessible problem into a simple dynamical system, thereby providing students with a wealth of conceptual and mathematical tools.” In his article
Among the issues the paper addresses, the authors wrote, is the problem of jokers and aces as “mutually exclusive categories with numerical distributions attainable by the roll of a hundred-sided die.” However, the canon is full of characters who defy this category: Joker-Ace, who exhibits both a physical mutation and superhuman ability;
They also suggest the existence of “cryptos”: Jokers and Aces with mutations that are mostly invisible, such as producing ultra-violet racing stripes in someone’s heart or imbuing “an Iowan with the power of line-of-sight telepathic communication with narwhals.” The first was unaware of his joker, the second was an ace, but never knew it. (One might argue that communicating with narwhals might make him a douchebag.)
In the end, Tergilis and Martin came up with three fundamental laws: (1) Cryptocurrencies exist, but their numbers are “unknown and unknowable.” (2) Visible card spins are distributed according to the 90:9:1 rule. and (3) viral outcomes are determined by multivariate probability distributions.
The resulting proposed model assumes two apparently random variables: the intensity of the transformation—that is, how much the virus changes the individual, be it the intensity of the Joker’s transformation or the strength of an Ace’s superpower—and a mixing angle to account for the presence of Joker-Ace. “The card brings that earth close enough to an axis Mentally The authors wrote that they are presented as aces, otherwise they are presented as jokers or joker-aces.
A derivative formula is a formula that accounts for the different ways a given system can evolve (known as Langrange’s formula). We translated the abstract problem of wild card viral consequences into a simple and concrete dynamical system. Tergilis said: The time average behavior of this system creates a statistical distribution of results.
Tergilis acknowledges that this may not be a good exercise for beginning physics students because it involves multiple steps and covers many concepts that younger students may not fully understand. Nor does he suggest adding it to the core curriculum. Instead, he recommends it for senior honors seminars to encourage students to explore an open research question.
This story appeared first Ars Technica.
