Imagining the physics of George R.R. Martin’s fictional universe

WASHINGTON, Jan. 23, 2025 – Many science fiction authors try to incorporate scientific principles into their work, but Ian Tregillis, who is a contributing author of the Wild Cards book series when he’s not working as a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, took it one step further: He derived a formula to describe the dynamics of the fictional universe’s viral system.

In independent research published in the American Journal of Physics, from AIP Publishing, Tregillis and George R.R. Martin derive a formula for viral behavior in the Wild Cards universe.

Wild Cards is a science fiction series written by a collection of authors and edited by Martin and Melinda M. Snodgrass. Sitting at over 30 volumes, the books are about an alien virus called the Wild Card that mutates human DNA. Martin is credited as a co-author of the paper, making it his first peer-reviewed physics publication.

The idea to explore the science behind the fictional virus came from a series of blog posts on the Wild Cards website.

“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 formula he derived is a Lagrangian formulation, which considers the different ways a system can evolve. It’s also a fundamental physics principle, which also makes the fictional example a powerful teaching tool.

Tregillis shared that deriving this physical model was a fun but open-ended puzzle. After some trial and error of models based on fractals or thermodynamic analogies, he and Martin settled on the Lagrangian approach.

“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,” he said.

While the Wild Card virus can be modeled by physics, Tregillis emphasized that it isn’t a hard-and-fast rule in the canon.

“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.”

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The article “Ergodic Lagrangian dynamics in a superhero universe” is authored by Ian Tregillis and George R.R. Martin. It will appear in the American Journal of Physics on Jan. 23, 2025 (DOI: 10.1119/5.0228859). After that date, it can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1119/5.0228859.

ABOUT THE JOURNAL

The American Journal of Physics is devoted to the instructional and cultural aspects of physics. The journal informs physics education globally with member subscriptions, institutional subscriptions, such as libraries and physics departments, and consortia agreements. It is geared to an advanced audience, primarily at the college level. Contents include novel approaches to laboratory and classroom instruction, insightful articles on topics in classical and modern physics, apparatus, and demonstration notes, historical or cultural topics, resource letters, research in physics education, and book reviews. See https://pubs.aip.org/aapt/ajp.

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