George R.R. Martin is best known as the author of the Song of Ice and Fire series, adapted by HBO as the TV show Game of Thrones. Since that show ended, he's best known as the author who still hasn't completed The Winds of Winter, the sixth book in his Song of Ice and Fire series. Fans have fun with the long wait, throwing up their hands whenever Martin works on anything other than The Winds of Winter. And he recently worked on something way out of left field.
Along with I. L. Tregillis, Martin cowrote a paper published in the American Journal of Physics entitled "Ergodic Lagrangian dynamics in a superhero universe." You can read the whole thing here, if you're able to understand all the math and technical language. The paper takes inspiration from Wild Cards, a superhero universe played out in novels and short stories that have been coming out for decades, written by many different authors. Martin edits the series with Melinda M. Snodgrass; he's actually been working on the series longer than he's been writing A Song of Ice and Fire.
I. L. Tregillis, who works as a physicist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, is himself a Wild Cards author, if you're wondering how this unlikely article came to be. Wild Cards takes place in a world where a virus has killed most people on the planet Earth, turned others into monsters, and transformed a small number into superheroes. Essentially, the paper tries to map out the progress of the virus mathematically in the hopes that it will help physics students engage with their education in a fun way. Or as the video introducing the paper puts it, "Our goal is to augment students' core physics and math education by presenting them an entertaining, open-ended research problem that offers no obvious path forward."
"At the outset, students might question the relevance of their physics education to such a fantastical scenario, but by the end they should appreciate the flexibility and power of their training as the seemingly irrelevant problem becomes a straightforward exercise in classical dynamics."
I'm not going to claim I understand what exactly that means, but if it helps physics students make sense of their studies, more power to it. Maybe it'll get some more press for Wild Cards as well, which at one point was going to be turned into a TV show, first at Hulu and then at Peacock. We haven't heard anything about it for a while, so who knows what state it's in?
As for how much writing Martin actually did on the paper, I'm going to guess he didn't do the lion's share, unless he has a lot more knowledge of physics than I assumed. Then again, The Winds of Winter still isn't out, so feel free to finger the siren song of math as the reason.
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h/t Forbes