WARNING: Portals Kill | The SCIENCE!...of Portal

Dear Valve: Do you know what is dangerous? Blending a local IPA, a 12 year old Glenlivet and general relativity. Did you think I was out of control before? Wait until I do space-time

science

while drunk *Crazy laughs* It may seem irresponsible to mix Einstein, Hawking, Planck and Durat with fermented hops and distilled wheat, but holy hell, you know what, Valve? Your game brought me to this point. A carefully measured and delivered application of mind-altering substances is the only way I can understand your

portal

weapons! But fortunately, through clever ethanol intake and SCIENCE! I have finally unraveled the confusing truths behind your

portal

weapons.

And the truth is DAMN GOD... wait, what? I'm not... shouting constantly, am I? *sigh* Okay. Good. I solemnly swear that during this entire video I will not scream. Except for that...beginning...part. I'm suddenly disconnecting. Anyway, back to the Portal thing. People have been asking me to do the physics behind Portal for years. It was one of the first requests I received. And it is one of the topics that I have hated the most. do anything other than Overwatch's tracker because

science

is insanely complicated, headache-inducing, and sure to make armchair scientists come out of the woodwork to throw their aggressive, "Um, it's actually at me with reckless abandon, but I'm here and I'm ready to do this because the consequences of Portal may be absolutely terrifying, but the science behind it is exciting, complex, and one of the most interesting things you can remember and repeat to your high school physics teacher. to reveal how much attention they paid in class in college.

So, enough wasting time and let's get this damn thing started. Exquisite music For the five who don't know, Portal was the big hit that Valve threw into the Orange Box as an afterthought last minute to complete your package. Created by the developers at DigiPen, who first created the game Narbacular Drop, Portal is a puzzle game where you navigate test rooms and avoid obstacles by making Einstein your (*noise *). And by that, I mean that you create

portals

that connect to each other. so you can instantly move from one place to another. There are some interesting applications of this mechanic.

For example, put a portal at the bottom of a pit and jump inside to jump large chasms, or, for those of you who lean more Perpetual Motion Machine, and are not afraid of infinite heights, you can place one just above the another and fall into it, reaching terminal velocity and SOMEHOW not dying when you hit the ground. For these things, which I definitely don't do. You have time to enter right now. And it's as simple as that! Go door to door, using the powers of this magnificent weapon, take your check to the bank and cash it because DAMN, this game is amazing.

But these

portals

, these instant doors from point A to point B, are completely absurd, right? The answer may surprise you. Basically, there is only one way, according to the laws of the universe as we understand them, that these portals can function. Wormholes. Wormholes are, Uh, Ugh Okay, you know what? Let's back up for a second, because the first thing wormholes are is a (*noise*) headache. And of course, like most of my topics lately, we must start with Einstein. But I'll be brief because I talk a lot about this guy. Einstein revolutionized the way we think about gravity, but more importantly, space.

To understand how light moves at the same speed for all observers, he devised two theories about how the universe is structured that prevail to this day. Before this, we had classical physics. You know Issac Newton, apples falling from trees, etc. The problem is that these rules for gravity, forces, and speed don't really hold up on cosmic scales. and they are terrible at explaining how massless particles like photons behave. Also, you start to have problems with speed. For example, if you are on a train moving at sixty meters per second and you throw a ball at five meters per second, relative to you, the ball is moving at five meters per second.

Compared to a guy standing outside the train, it moves at sixty-five meters per second. In reality, there is no objective speed or frame of reference. This is one of the problems that Einstein solves. There are no longer objective measurement points. what you have are inertial reference frames in a curved three-dimensional space called space-time, because space and time are inextricably linked. Mass causes exaggerated curves in space-time and acceleration also causes exaggerated curves in space-time. In order to explain this new concept and show that it works, Einstein developed his famous field equations. Here it is! Right here! Look at it!

Do you think it's one of those simple equations where you just plug in your variables and press Enter? Hell no. Just one parameter of this damn thing can take a well-studied mathematician most of an afternoon to figure out. They're not linear, they're a pain in the ass, and they have like a thousand different portions that need to be checked twice. Still, they describe almost all the important behaviors observable in the universe. And very smart people have used them to discover amazing things before they were directly observed, like black holes, which are a solution to the field equations discovered by Karl Schwarzschild while he was, get.

He was busy fighting in the trenches in World War I because there really wasn't much for a warrior mathematician to do in his spare time while he waited to die. Which, Schwarzschild did shortly after. Damn universe, you're stealing all the great minds from our world! Black holes, although they seem fantastic, are practically 100% real. Although we have never observed them directly, we have seen their effects. So we're pretty sure they're real. But then there are wormholes. Wormholes are another solution to the field equations, and frankly, they're a little ridiculous. Wow