Dear Valve,
You know what's dangerous?
Mixing a local IPA, a 12-year-old Glenlivet,
and general relativity.
You thought I was out of control before?
Wait until I conduct Space-Time science while drunk
*Crazy Laughter*
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 make sense of your portal guns!
But thankfully, through a clever ingestion of ethanol and SCIENCE!
I have finally unraveled the obfuscient truths behind your portal guns.
And the truth is GOD DAMNED... wait, what?
I'm not... constantly yelling, am I?
*sigh*
All right. Fine.
I solemnly swear, for this entire video, I won't shout. Except for that... beginning... part.
I'm cutting myself off cold turkey
Anyway back to the thing
Portal
People been asking me to do the physics behind portal for like ages
It was one of the first requests I got
And it's one of the topics I've been the most loathed to do
other than tracer from Overwatch
beacause the science is freaking complicated, headache-inducing,
and is bound to bring arm-chair scientists out of the woodwork
to hurl their aggressive, "Um, actually's at me
With reckless abandon
But I'm here and I'm ready to do this because the consequences
of Portal may be utterly, Earth-shatteringly frightening,
but the science behind it is exciting, complex,
and one of the coolest things you can take back and repeat to your high-school physics teacher
to reveal how much they were paying attention in class in college.
So, enough dawdling
and let's get this frickin' thing started.
Exquisite Music
For the five of you who don't know,
Portal was the breakaway success that Valve tossed into the Orange Box
as an afterthought to fill out their bundle.
Built by developers from DigiPen
Who first made 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 you make portals
which connect to each other
so you can instantaneously move from one place to another
There are a few interesting applications of this mechanic
For instance, putting a portal at the bottom of a pit
and jumping into it in order to leap great chasms,
or, for those of you who are more perpetual motion machine inclined,
and have no fear of infinite heights,
you can place one right over the other and fall into it,
reaching terminal velocity and SOMEHOW not dying
when you hit the ground
Because of these things,
that I definitely don't have the time to get into right now.
And it's as simple as that!
Get from door to door, using the powers of this magnificent gun,
and take your check to the bank and cash it
because DAMN this game is amazing.
But these portals, these instantaneous gateways from point A to point B,
are completely absurd, right?
The answer may surprise you.
There's basically only one way, according to the laws of the universe as we understand them,
That these portals could possibly work.
Wormholes.
Worm holes are,
Uh, Ugh
Okay, you know what?
Let's just 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 gotta start with Einstein.
But I'll be brief because I talk about this guy a lot.
Einstein revolutionized the way we think about gravity,
but more importantly, space.
In order to figure out how it is that light moves at the same speed to all observers,
he came up with two theories about how the universe is structured
that prevailed 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 velocity,
don't really hold up on cosmic scales.
and are terrible at explaining how mass-less particles like photons behave.
Plus, you start getting into problems with speed.
Like if you're 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.
Relative to some dude standing outside of the train, it's moving at sixty-five meters per second
There's no such thing really as an objective speed or frame of reference
This is one of the problems that Einstein fixes
There's no longer any objective measuring points
Instead, what you have is inertial frames of reference
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 prove it works,
Einstein developed his famous field equations
Here it is! Right here! Look at it!
You think it's one of those simple equations where you just plug in your variables and hit enter?
Hell No.
Just one parameter of this damn thing can take a well studied mathematician the better part of an afternoon to solve.
They're non-linear, a pain in the as, and have like a thousand different portions that need double checked.
Still, they describes almost every large behavior observable in the universe
And smart as Hell people have used them to discover amazing things before they were ever directly observed
Like Black Holes which are a solution to the field equations
Discovered by Karl Schwarzschild while he was, get this
Busy fighting in the trenches in World War I
Because there wasn't really a lot for a warrior mathematician to do in his free time while waiting to die
Which, Schwarzschild did shortly after. Damn you universe you're stealing all the great minds of our world!
Black Holes, while seemingly fantastic, are pretty much 100% real.
Even though we have never directly observed them, we have seen their effects.
So we're pretty certain they're real.
But then, there's Wormholes.
Wormholes are another solution to the field equations and are frankly, kinda ridiculous. wow