Ragebait answers only
Portals don’t stay on moving platforms.
But if they did, it would be A as the cube itself has no momentum.
A if it’s a cube. B if it’s beans.
Edit: Obligatory bean tax
I don’t know enough about space-time. Does distorting space transfer energy to the matter in that space? How about time? I think it must be A, out of the options.
Otherwise the future of man is less ‘sustained ftl travel’, and more ‘giant space slingshot’.
I choose A because that would mean I could use the portal to fuck myself in the ass easier.
“Plop”
Since nobody seemingly posted link to this absolute … Idk, gold? It’s about actually simulating space(-time?) with portals: https://youtube.com/@optozorax_en I see offspec’s comment is mentioning the guy, yeah. Tldr answer is complicated. …
Ah, ragebait answers only. Ugh, worm! Arrrr! I am so angry roar grrrr.
This is clearly an unbirth scenario and the A and B things are unrelated. Either way, your baby is companion cube and GladOs is the father.
Thanks for coming to my Ted X talk.
If we’re only supposed to do ragebait answers, then anyone who passed 3rd grade science would be able to tell you the answer is obviously B
If you actually played the game, and paid attention in physics class in highschool, then you would know the answer is clearly A, and everyone who says it is B really needed the simplified explanation from GLaDOS to understand how to play the game.
Ragebait successful. College physics here. The only correct answer is B. You can only get A if the box is securely anchored to the pillar then released after the portal stops.
I love the games, but you can’t trust a game physics engine to properly track what’s going to happen with moving and especially accelerating portals. They (usually) track an entire object from one reference point against one absolute world grid.
Think of a portal as moving a plane of particles from one location to another. An entire object passing through a portal is just a bunch of successive planes being moved. One particle plane entering the portal plane on one side must displace the previous particle plane at the same rate on the exit side. Therefore, an object’s speed through a portal must remain consistent relative to the portal on both sides, and with nothing to magically cancel that inertia, that motion will continue even after the object has completely left the portal.
Incorrect. The answer is A, and here is why.
GLaDOS specifically states “Momentum, a function of mass and velocity, is conserved between portals.” If scenario B was correct (which it is not) then if the portal was put on an object lighter than the box and then quickly moved over the box, the box would be launched at a speed equal to the speed of the lighter object, while it has more mass, this is not a conservation of momentum.
The best way to explain movement through portals is that momentum is only conserved from a perspective that encompasses all of the objects involved, this is true for regular physics as well actually. Consider this, what if the portal was shoved very quickly over the box down to it’s halfway point? The obvious answer is that the box would only appear halfway out of the other portal, but if you subscribe to the “logic” that leads to answer B, then the box is actually sucked up by the portal, while the actual logical and intuitive answer is that only half the box sticks out of the portal, and it stays where it was placed.
Portals aren’t objects, they don’t have mass, or even a velocity, they are a shortcut in space, and that was what GLaDOS was explaining when she said that momentum was conserved. Although B seems to initially make sense, it is not correct from a game lore perspective, nor from an actual physical perspective.
I’ve played the game, you maintain speed whether you jump or fly in using your jet pack, no idea who this GlaDOS character is or what that funky cube is though. Abyss is the best map.
“speedy thing goes in, speedy thing comes out.”
So stationary thing goes in, stationary thing comes out.
Speedy or stationary relative to what?
To the portal if course. That’s why it comes out speedy at the other end.
But the game treats the portals as holes in reality. If a whole falls on you do you suddenly pop up out of the other side? No.
It would plop. It would only fly up if the platform the cube was on moved up towards the portal.
I think the game treating portals as fuzzy holes in reality is more just a limitation or oversight in the physics engine. It completely ignores relativity and makes the portals no longer logically consistent and pointless to argue about. Velocity and angle conservation relative to the portal is established elsewhere though, so running with that gives you the “fly up” result.
A 🔥
If you come out stationary wont you become a pancake of all your z axis compressed into a single infinitely thin plane? Also i think when the game calculates this it treats you as a point travelling through the portal plane and adds the plop worth of momentum as a compensation to not break the physics. Also if you think about it a lot of different situations already lead to extra momentum out of nowhere(classic portal above and below infinite loop as an example) so the portal in this case adding momentum doesnt break physics cause portals already break it. Also theres a problem of some people answering with the game physics in mind and other with the real world interpretation of it so this really is the perfect ragebait.
Extra momentum out of nowhere (classic portal above and below infinite loop as an example)
Does that actually loop infinitely? Don’t you just reach a terminal velocity and then maintain that momentum?
Terminal velocity is only reached because the object (or player) is colliding with the air. Momentum is still being added. It’s just also transferring out into the air. You can kind of think of the object as being a fan blade running on zero power. It’s technically a source of infinite energy, but it might be hard to extract from that exact setup. If we could do this in the real world, we’d tweak it to just be water in a vertical pipe with a turbine extracting the free momentum.
I mean yeah thats true but that still means the cube would heat up or something and then you could use that to generate infinite energy. The point is you can accelerate something to a speed without putting in the energy needed to accelerate it.
The cube wouldn’t necessarily heat up much while approaching terminal velocity.
Its close to infinite energy because you never have to reach the ground, so you technically have infinite potential energy but when you convert that potential energy into kinetic or some other type of energy, the vast majority of that potential will disappear instantly
Edit: in other words, you could generate incredibly large bursts of energy but not sustained energy with this kind of portal loop
The entire pedestal the cube is on comes through the blue portal and the cube slides to the floor
There’s a guy on YouTube with excellent portal simulations that’s been working on the theory of portal physics for a while named optozorax
This was answered decades ago
wikipedia.org/wiki/Steamboat_Bill,_Jr.
Nearly a century ago. Fun fact, this movie inspired Steamboat Willie, the very first appearance of Micky Mouse.
In that situation both portals (the inside and the outside window frame) have equal, but opposite velocities and therefore cancel out any momentum from the person.
When dealing with OP’s scenario, only one portal is moving.
The problem with this analogy is that both sides of the window are at the same point in space so there is no pressure differential. What if the blue portal was at the bottom of the Mariana’s Trench? What force displaces the water to place the cube on the other side?
It wouldn’t. Same as if the other side of the portal was a brick wall. It wouldn’t go through or would be smooshed by whatever force is driving the portal.
Momentum is conserved when passing through a portal. In the reference frame of the out portal, the object has no momentum, so it plops out.
I reject your reality and substitute my own.
The correct answer is C: the cube plops out and the object to which the blue portal is affixed flies off in the southwest direction.
