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Gonemad Since: Oct, 2015
Jan 17th 2024 at 10:31:26 AM •••

The game Portal's portals violate the 2nd law of Thermodynamics, or should spend a lot of energy to work. Consider the thought experiment:

You could put a portal on the bottom of a lake, on a chamber with a valve on top, with water draining throught it, and the other portal on a concrete surface feeding a hidropower turbine on top of the same lake, and let it fall a good height before reaching the turbine with extra energy. The forever stream of water falling through the portals back to the top and generating energy on the turbine suggests that either a teleportation portal like the one in the game is impossible, or it should spend an equal amount of energy to move anything up through it as the net gravitational "height" field between the portals, thus negating the net positive energy, or you'd get a Perpetual Motion Machine from the start.

Since the game allows opening a portal on the moon without extra energy, this thought experiment proves the game version of teleporting with portals would be impossible in real life. Admittedly, a version that spends a lot of energy to move stuff "up" on the gravity field would still be awesome and hella useful.

Another evidence of the game portals being impossible is that you can speed up indefinitely* with 2 aligned portals.

  • Limited only by the game's engine.

Edited by Gonemad
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