Ragebait answers only
I choose A because that would mean I could use the portal to fuck myself in the ass easier.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
“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. Terminal velocity just happens to be where the two rates match. 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
But that doesnt really matter cause my argument of it breaking physics still stands. Little infinite energy and a lot is the same.
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.
Neither, I’ve already gleefully incinerated that fucking cube before it got to this point.
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.
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.
A, momentum is in the portal, not the cube
B.
As the cube enters the portal, it will take on energy from the piston, slowing the piston down in the process, and that energy will propel it out. If it enters the portal fast, it has to exit the portal fast.
