Portal 2

I mean, if you've soldered the ends of a straight rod to each other. Like.

It'd be like if Chell grabbed hold of her own feet.

edited 31st Dec '15 11:17:19 AM by unnoun

Yes. It creates an infinite rod for as long as the portals remain stationary. Once you start messing with the portals, however, shit starts getting wrecked.

Physics are not considerate. They do not hesitate to f*ck someone or something up.

edited 31st Dec '15 11:20:28 AM by TobiasDrake

When the portal moves, the connection represented is severed, not maintained. So the rod would either be sheared off or expelled. The tricky part is that, in the latter case, the rod's dimensions are both finite and geometrically impossible. I imagine that it would experience infinite stress and snap, or emit a burst of particles that are undocumented by human science but undoubtedly lethal.

This demands testing.

Someone get me a portal gun, an aluminum pole, an orphan, and an amoral AI with a delicious voice and a dry sense of humor. It's New Years, so we can probably use a leftover Festivus pole. If you can't find an orphan, don't worry about it, we'll make one.

edited 31st Dec '15 11:29:03 AM by TobiasDrake

It's not strictly true that moving a portal-holding surface closes the portal. I can think of at least one special case where they had to break that rule (neurotoxin sabotage).

Also they have the safety mechanic of giving you a shove out whichever side there's more of you on if you throw a new portal while standing in one. Which admittedly wouldn't work with a straight rod welded end to end.

Case C is pretty easy, though. The rod would sever at the spot the portal was closed.

B is the one that's tricky, but once you allow portals to move (aside from that one instance of sabotaging the neurotoxin), you open up a whole new can of worms like if you were to shove the blue portal through the orange portal. THAT is a physics conundrum and a spatial paradox.

In the game, objects don't get cut in half by portals closing; they pop out of one side or the other.

That's likely just a gameplay convenience, though, so that you don't sever yourself or an important object in two.

Besides, you can "sever" the flow of gels, making them immediately stop rather than the portal forcing some last few globs through.

Plus, you also get into the problem of what constitutes an "object" for purposes of avoiding a Portal Cut.

Exactly.

Objects are just collections of particles in close proximity to one another. I don't think that a hole in space could, realistically, distinguish objects on a macrostructural level.

I can see the portal trying to shove the infinite rod through but still resulting in a Portal Cut due to the impossibility of the task.

Right. So if you ignore the "popping out" effect of objects in the game when a portal is closed, then the obvious answer is that whenever the portal is moved, it deactivates, shearing off the rod.

As I said above, the object in question undergoes infinite tensile stress and blows a hole in reality because the universe can't absorb that much energy in one place. So really, if you don't want to leave black holes wherever you go, it's best to go with the Portal Cut idea instead. Never mind that it's also an example of infinite stress... physics breaks down when you invoke teleportation.

edited 31st Dec '15 1:41:36 PM by Fighteer

The bigger issue is that A would allow for infinite kinetic energy. Unless gravity gets screwed up by the presence of a portal and the object simply hovers in place instead of falling infinitely, but the game has things fall.

edited 31st Dec '15 1:43:27 PM by Anomalocaris20

Which would result in...

...

Hold on, let me whip out my "never paid attention in science class" memory file.

...

Utopia?

That infinite kinetic energy is an explicit mechanic that's already in the game. If you fall through portals placed vertically opposite each other, you reach terminal velocity. It's a perpetual motion machine of the literal type. It's a wonder that Aperture never thought to build a power plant utilizing this concept. You don't even need a joined rod to make it work.

By their very nature, portals defy both conservation of energy and relativistic causality.

edited 31st Dec '15 1:44:37 PM by Fighteer

Let's not forget that the portal gun was originally conceived as a shower curtain for the army. Aperture is the KING of Misapplied Phlebotinum.

Oh, I know.

I'm on the Portal Cut team. Aperture (well, Cave) is also the king of Reed Richards Is Useless.

In other news this fandom is fucking tiny and the struggle of finding good fic is real. At least I'm in a gigantic fandom (Homestuck) as well to ease the pain.

edited 31st Dec '15 5:20:49 PM by SmartGirl333

It could THEORETICALLY have some Mundane Utility in being a shower curtain.

Put portals on the wall of a shower. Water, instead of hitting the wall and sliding down, will pass through the portal, maintain velocity, and then probably cover more of the body with water until it lands on the floor.

That'd be an interesting shower.

I always interpreted it as that you build a fully enclosed shower stall and put one portal on the inside and one on the outside when you want to enter or exit, then close them when the shower runs.

That would have some clausterphobia issues...

You could accomplish the same results with a door.

Wait, I thought they were producing shower curtain rods, not shower curtains.

Reviving this thread to say this:

I just realized that at least 2 Imagine Dragons songs fit this game a lot! Radioactive works pretty well with Portal 2's general plot (a full lyric-bit to plot-bit analysis is here), and Nothing Left To Say is like a second Exile Vilify in how it makes me cry. Seriously, look me in the eye and say the first and second verses of Nothing Left To Say don't fit Cave and GLaDOS. Just... try. You can't!

I bought Portal 2 and tried to get into it, but it was a little too complicated for me when I first got it. Maybe I could get through it now with a little help. Either way, it may just be one of those games I'll just watch things for that relate to its story. Regardless, G La DOS, Wheatley, and Cave Johnson are three of the best video game characters ever conceived.