Dear Valve,
That’s right, you heard me!
Valve!
Purveyors of every game on the planet that isn’t gobbled up by EA and Ubisoft’s shitty
frontends.
You know why I’m writing to you today.
You’ve probably been wincing for months, expecting my content-hungry gaze to fall upon
you.
Or you’ve been too busy hiding from your problems behind the giant stack of money you’ve
accrued from your invention of Steam.
In either case, I’m writing to you today about Half-Life.
Not, of course, to pester you about Half-Life 3.
I’m reasonably certain that’s never going to happen.
I mean, by now our expectations would be absurdly huge.
There’s no possible way you could conclude the series without disappointing an assload
of people.
WHICH IS WHY YOU SHOULDN’T HAVE WAITED SO LONG IN THE FIRST PLACE.
I MEAN WHO THE FUCK DOES THAT JESUS FUCKING CHRIST.
Anyway.
I’m not here for that.
Even though I’m pretty sure “Half-Life 3” would make some fucking brilliant clickbait
in the thumbnail.
Will I find a way to fit it in there?
WHO KNOWS.
That’s a job for Future Austin to worry about.
I’m here to tackle the big one.
The topic that has come up in the comments of almost every video I’ve done.
People want, nay, need to know about one thing: the Gravity Gun.
And you know what?
I’m fucking ready.
Does your Gravity Gun hold up to Scientific rigor?
Let’s find out!
Now, I have to say that I dug deep into gravity while researching this topic, and in order
to move forward, we have to talk about a few things.
There are a few core ideas we have to understand in order to move forward and talk about how
one could possibly utilize gravity as a force--well, sort-of-force, more on that in a bit--to move
something else.
Gravity is kind of a big deal in our every day lives.
Newton’s first law of motion asserts that an object in motion remains in motion unless
acted upon by an outside, or net force.
Gravity, therefore, is the outside force that keeps us from zipping off into the abyss of
outerspace whenever we jump.
It’s also what keeps our atmosphere from floating away, and, ultimately, holds our
planet together.
Speaking of Newton, Isaac Newton is credited for developing our very first fundamental
conceptions of gravity with the development of the Universal law of gravitation, F equals
m1 times m2 divided by R squared times G, where F is the force of gravitation, G is
the Gravitational constant, m1 and 2 are the masses of the two objects, and r is their
distance apart from one another.
This law, this rule that Isaac Newton established over 300 fucking years ago before spaceships
or penicillin or computers existed has withstood the test of time and has been used to accurately
predict and model the gravity of every planet in our solar system.
Isaac Newton was a motherfucking badass.
Of course...well.
It’s not perfect.
Don’t get me wrong, Newton is incredible, and Newtonian concepts are perfect under most
normal gravitational circumstances and conditions.
Sometimes, though...well.
Sometimes the universe is fucking weird.
For instance, there’s Mercury.
F equals m1 times m2 divided by R squared times G works perfectly when it comes to measuring
every single planet in our solar system--in fact, it was even used to predict the existence
and location of Neptune before it was actually discovered in 1846.
That is, except for Mercury.
You see, every single planet could be predictably modeled within, like, inches using Newton.
Considering we don’t know the exact universal distribution of mass, this is pretty damned impressive.
Mercury, though, well.
Things were off.
Off for reasons we didn’t quite understand.
And then there’s light.
Ooooooh light, you tricksy minx.
Nothing makes folk madder on this channel than when I talk about light.
But today we gonna do it.
We must!
Bring that formula up again.
Alrighty.
So look at this.
According to this, everything in the Universe has gravity.
Which is true!
Let’s take me, for an example.
I weigh approximately 61 kilograms, and the earth weighs a buttload of kilograms.
5.972 yottagrams to be precise.
My center of gravity is 637100 meters from the center of the Earth.
Taking this, and plugging in the gravitational constant, we get a gravitational force of
601 Newtons, which if we did our math right, should equal the same amount of force as me
accelerating at 1 G, or 9.8 meters-per-second squared.
And it is!
So this makes sense.
Just standing on the ground, I exert 601 Newtons on the ground.
Pretty cool, huh?
You can do this math, too.
So...what about light?
Well, photons have no mass SHUT UP NO THEY DON’T, so they shouldn’t be affected by
gravity, right?
Well, that’s the theory.
But, unfortunately, this is not the case.
Light is totally affected by gravity.
This was first noticed by Scientists during a solar eclipse, when the light of the sun
was blotted out.
Folk noticed they could actually see a star that should have been behind the sun, but
instead it looked like it was slightly to the left.
What was happening was the light was shining and actually bending around the sun due to
gravity, and looping back to us.
And according to Isaac Newton, this shouldn’t be possible.
If you pop a zero in for you Mass 2, it doesn’t matter how massive your Mass 1 is, the measure
of gravitational force will always, ALWAYS be zero.
Light has perpetually been a tricky conundrum to physics.
A stick in the mud, if you will, going all the way back to the very first theory of relativity:
Galilean Relativity is a bit complex, but can be pretty easily summarized with the train
analogy.
If you’re standing in a train going a consistent 100 kilometers an hour and throw a hotdog
down the hallway at 30 kilometers an hour, since you’re not accelerating, to your frame
of reference, the hot dog will be traveling at only 30 kilometers an hour.
However, if someone is standing outside of the train happens to look in the window just
as you pass them, they’ll measure the hotdog as traveling down the hallway at 130 kilometers
an hour.
And if someone were, I don’t know, immortal and were were standing on the surface of the
sun and had the best eyesight ever and could see the hotdog from 100 million kilometers
away, they’d perceive the hotdog as traveling between 109470-109730 kilometers an hour depending
on which direction the train was traveling, taking into account the rotation of the earth
and the speed of its orbit around the sun.
Photons, though, are tricky.
If the people on the train were to do the same thing they did with the hotdog, but used
a flashlight, they’d measure the photons as traveling at 299 thousand meters-per-second.
The person standing outside?
The same damned thing.
No matter how you slice it, with velocity, acceleration, or gravity, light just wants
to take a big old shit on classic physics.
These problems literally broke the brains of physicists for fucking years until one
man busted in like the goddamn Kool-Aid man and blew everyone’s fucking minds:
Albert Einstein.
It’s impossible to overstate Einstein’s contributions to physics.
Most great thinkers of the modern era are satisfied completely revolutionizing a field
in just one way, but Einstein redefined both physics and the entire universe as we think
of it.
My favorite thing about Einstein, if I can be real for a second, is his particular methodology
for working through problems.
Einstein more or less showed that anybody could be a genius,
if they’d only adjust how they approach problems.
Before he ever proved anything using decades of difficult math, he first sat down and just
thought about stuff, asking himself “What makes sense?”
He said to himself, “If you were in a box with no windows, you wouldn’t be able to
tell the difference between being in outer space and accelerating at acceleration G,
9.8 meters-per-second squared, and sitting still on the surface of the Earth, which pulls
you down with a ‘force’ of G.”
This is called the “principle of equivalence.”
Furthermore, if you were to shine a light in Box A, the one traveling through space
and were somehow able to measure its position as it traveled, it would appear to bend, as
light travels in a straight line, but you are accelerating forward.
So to that end, as you traveled forward, the light would be, relative to you, traveling
downward and would appear to curve.
And since both Box A and Box B are functionally the same, the same should happen in Box B
under Earth’s Gravity.
And guess what?
It fucking does.
After more or less working through this on a napkin, Einstein devoted his entire career
into discovering why this is, and developed two major, groundbreaking theories: Special
Relativity, and General Relativity.
This is a bit of an oversimplification, but General Relativity, which came later, tends
to deal more with gravity in regards to spacetime, and Special Relativity deals more with the
behavior of light, but they’re both consistent with one another.
In his work, Einstein figured out that Gravity actually isn’t a force at all, like Newton
thought it was.
Instead, Gravity is in fact the distortion of spacetime by energy.
And “energy” is a very, very specific term and is incredibly important here, because
it’s not just about mass.
For the most part, mass and energy are interchangeable, and a somewhat archaic and mostly unused term
by modern physicist, but still correct, is “Relativistic Mass.”
For example, in the case of me and the Earth, both my body and the Earth have mass under
the laws of Newton, and so we both attract to one another.
Einstein says, nah nah nah, it’s not a force of attraction, instead what’s happening
is the energy of you, the youness, is actually bending spacetime around your body.
The earth, being way more massive than you, is bending it a hell of a lot more.
Being adjacent to one another, both me and the earth kind of fall into each others curved
local spacetimes.
Obviously, with the Earth having WAY more mass, and by extention WAY more energy, I
have pretty much negligible impact on its life.
And this is why light bends in spite of having no mass, in the classical sense.
As it travels in a straight light through space, it hits localized Spacetime ripples
and, traveling in that straight direction, follows the curves of spacetime.
And it’s due to this effect that we were off when it came to measuring Mercury’s
orbit.
Since it’s so close to the sun, it’s affected by the deeper spacetime curvature.
Interestingly enough, this actually means that light actually has gravity, since it
has energy.
It weighs zero kilograms and moves fast-as-fuck, but it can distort spacetime.
What’s really fucking cool, though, is if you work your way through Einstein’s incredibly
complicated field equations, you actually find that, under normal gravitational circumstances,
they actually resemble Newton’s very own laws of gravitation, albeit with way, WAY
more moving parts.
It’s actually pretty incredible, because this actually means that Einstein proved Newton
right, as long as you’re within the normal constraints of Newtonian physics.
People often act like Einstein usurped Newton, but in reality he just expanded upon his previous
work and made it more broadly applicable.
Isn’t that fucking incredible?
Which brings us, at last, back to the Gravity Gun.
We more or less know everything we need to know in order to figure out how this fucking
beast works.
So...how does it?
Well, using a complex method of measurement involving standardized legal-sized filing
cabinets, wooden planks, and an antique 15 tube radiator that’s 67 centimeters high,
82 centimeters wide, and 18 centimeters deep, comprised of 5% cast iron with a density of
6800 kilograms-per-cubic-meter for a total estimated mass of 340 kilograms, I was able
to determine the gravitational spacetime curve strength of the gravity gun with SCIENCE.
And the SCIENCE is GOD.
DAMNED.
TERRIFYING.
This radiator accelerates at 91.36 meters-per-second squared over a distance of 2 meters in .15
seconds.
Now, following normal gravitational rules as we know them, in order to pull these kinds
of forces, which are more powerful than the Earth’s gravity by a factor of ten, the
gravity gun would have to be generating a mass-energy of 5 PETAgrams at 707 petagrams-per-cubic-meter,
700,000 times the density of a fucking White Dwarf star.
But whatever.
This is a world where fucking teleportation exists.
I’m not going to say this is impossible.
Hell, Gordon Freeman was put into super stasis for 20 years somehow.
The thing is called a “zero point energy field manipulator,” so it’s possible it’s
pulling this kind of energy out of currently-unexplored quantum vacuum energies.
Let’s just presume the energy-and-mass requirements aren’t bullshit.
I’m an asshole, not a monster.
Of course, something of this mass would pull all things in around it.
Walls, boxes, in a perfect sphere, everything would come collapsing inward.
Anybody who’s played Half-Life 2 will know that this isn’t how the Gravity Gun works.
It pulls stuff from in front of it.
I’ll be honest, according to modern understandings of how spacetime curvature works, this is
fucking impossible.
But whatever, let’s fucking try it, who gives a shit.
Let’s pretend it’s possible.
Moving outward and moving in a cone in front of you, the effective gravity field actually
takes up only 5% of the space it would if it affected a sphere around you, which means
that our energy requirements drop an assload to...oh, huh, only 300 teragrams.
What’s that in normal english?
Three quarters of the total mass-energy of the ENTIRE human population, all condensed
into this tiny little fucking gun.
Instead of being 700,000 times the density of a white dwarf, it’s only 36,000 times
its density!
Yee-haw!
But whatever!
We found out how the gravity gun works!
It simply has a huge fucking mass that weighs as much as nearly the entire human race, condensed
until its as tightly packed as a star.
No biggie.
I hope that thing never fails in any way, it’d probably crack the earth in half.
And presuming it doesn’t rip the entire city down along the path its fired along with
pulling whatever bullshit nonsense you’re using to chuck at literal monsters, and presuming
it somehow manages to negate its massive, um, mass enough to let you actually carry
it by creating a portal to a distant neutron star in space, it doesn’t even fucking matter.
Remember how I keep comparing it to white dwarf stars?
That’s because this thing is pulling incredible energy densities of spacetime that are fucking
terrifying.
And at these densities do you know what happens?
Fucking nuclear fusion.
Atoms are getting smashed together so tightly they’re crashing together to form brand
new elements.
This means that every time you fire this gravity gun, it’s going to be fusing atoms together
as soon as the local spacetime collapses to be as tight as a fucking star, sending gamma
and other terrifying forms of radiation flying in all directions.
Holy shit that’s why it’s called Half-Life!
Its implicit story is all about Gordon Freeman dying from acute radiation poisoning and never
saving the world like he was supposed to.
We’re never going to get a Half-Life 3 because Gordon Freeman is fucking dead from Super
Cancer.
I DID IT.
I SOLVED THE RIDDLE.
MUWAHAHAAHAHAA.
So now that we know how Gravity Guns would work, a word of caution: use the Gravity Gun
sparingly.
The damned things are dangerous.
Really ask yourself: is getting bathed in lethal doses of stellar radiation really worth
flinging an armoire at your enemies for the rebellion?
Sincerely, Austin
P.S.
Guess what, guys!
We’re moving!
Well, I mean, not really.
The show is.
To Wednesdays, instead of Mondays!
It’s just gonna make some stuff easier for us, but otherwise it’s the same thing.
Too many minutes of me making fanboys angry.
So when next Monday rolls around and this ain’t here, don’t panic.
It’ll just be two more days.
You can make it.
Also!
I’m actually going to be streaming Half-Life 2 RIGHT NOW.
Well.
Maybe right now.
Starting at 10 AM central standard time, head on over to twitch.tv/shoddycast and catch
me starting a new playthrough on the HARDEST POSSIBLE DIFFICULTY SETTING.
I will die.
A lot.
And rage at the shitty old puzzles.