Jan 24, 2025 12:30:00

Game of Thrones author publishes physics paper on the behavior of an alien virus in a fictional universe

George R.R. Martin, author of ' A Song of Ice and Fire ,' the original novels that inspired the hit TV series ' Game of Thrones, ' and Ian Tregillis , co-author of the ' Wild Cards ' series, have published a paper presenting mathematical formulas to explain the dynamics of viruses in a fictional universe.

Ergodic Lagrangian dynamics in a superhero universe | American Journal of Physics | AIP Publishing
https://pubs.aip.org/aapt/ajp/article/93/2/127/3331568/Ergodic-Lagrangian-dynamics-in-a-superhero

Imagining the physics of George R.R. Martin's fictional universe
https://phys.org/news/2025-01-physics-george-rr-martin-fictional.html

George RR Martin has co-authored a physics paper - Ars Technica
https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/01/george-rr-martin-has-co-authored-a-physics-paper/

The Wild Cards series is a shared universe work created and edited by fantasy novelist Martin. The series is written by multiple authors, including many famous authors , including Martin. Wild Cards is based on an alien virus that mutates human DNA, and Martin and Tregillis published the behavioral equation of the virus that appears in the work in the American Journal of Physics, a peer-reviewed academic journal.

The idea to explore the science of alien viruses in Wild Cards apparently began with a series of posts on the Wild Cards official blog. 'Like any physicist, I started with rough estimates, but then I went too far. Eventually, half-jokingly, I suggested that it might be easier to write a real physics paper than to write it on a blog,' Tregillis said. 'As a theorist, I couldn't help but wonder if a simple fundamental model could sort out the norms,' he said, explaining that it was easier to publish his ideas as a physics paper than to describe them on a blog.

The equation that Tregillis derived for the behavior of the alien virus is

a Lagrangian formulation , which takes into account the various ways in which the system can evolve. Science media Phys.org pointed out that 'the Lagrangian formulation is a fundamental principle of physics, and the fictional examples are also a powerful teaching tool.'

Tregillis said that deriving the behavioral equation of the alien virus was a fun but never-ending puzzle. Martin and Tregillis explained that they arrived at the Lagrangian formulation after experimenting with models based on fractals and thermodynamic analogies. In the paper, they wrote, 'We transformed the abstract problem of the virus in Wild Cards into a simple, concrete dynamical system whose time-averaged behavior generates a statistical distribution of outcomes.'

The paper makes it possible to model the Wild Cards virus with physics, but Tregillis stresses that this is not an absolute rule in the original work: 'Good storytelling is about the characters - their wants, needs, obstacles, challenges, and how they interact with the world. The fictional virus is just a pretext to justify the world of Wild Cards, the characters who inhabit it, and the plot that emerges from their actions.'