Martin and “Wild Cards” author Ian Tregellis turn a scenario from the science fiction book series into the foundation for an exercise in open-ended problem solving.

Although fans of A Song of Ice and Fire might still be hankering for the long-delayed next book in the series, bestselling sci-fi/fantasy author George R.R. Martin has instead added a different item to his long list of publications: a peer-reviewed physics paper just published in the American Journal of Physics that he coauthored.

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,

It’s not every day that a well-known author writes a physics paper. But George R R Martin, who is best known for his Song of Ice and Fire series of fantasy novels, has co-authored a paper in the American Journal of Physics with the title “Ergodic Lagrangian dynamics in a superhero universe”.

Long before Westeros, fantasy and science-fiction author George R.R. Martin had a hand in creating Wild Cards, a shared science-fiction universe involving a pathogen called the "Wild Card" virus that has now spanned 32 books,