Portals

[nillerz]

I'm really confused about these physics, even though they are, for the most part, science fiction.

 

These ideas are inspired by a video-game called "portal" where you solve puzzles with a portal gun, which fires an orange portal and a blue portal, which are essentially holes. Stick your arm through an orange portal, you see it going out the blue portal.

 

Here is a link to some gameplay footage, portals are hard to explain. May contain spoilers.

 

 

This, apart from being purely imaginary and far far into the future (if in it at all) make some interesting possibilities.

 

First off, all the amazing possibilities of infinite loops.

 

If you put a portal on the ceiling, and one directly below it on the floor, you make an "infinite loop", where you're constantly falling out of the one on the ceiling into the one on the floor. You can use this in the game to gain speed and shoot yourself over obstacles by repositioning the portal on the ceiling while falling, say, to the floor, and flying out of it at whatever speed you were going at when you entered the one on the floor. This has a flaw, it's creating energy out of nothing. I made a joke on my webcomic about it solving our energy problems.

 

Now, what if you did this with a heavy object, say, a boulder, and enclosed this infinite loop in a vacuum so it wouldn't have resistance? Essentially, you'd have a constantly accelerating object. How would this look to an outside observer (let's say the vacuum is enclosed by thick glass)? What speed would the boulder get before it stopped?

 

As I was thinking about this I decided to factor in the boulders gravitational pull on the Earth. Since the portals location is dependent on the Earth, and the constantly-accelerating boulder is pulling on the Earth, and also remembering that they will never meet due to the infinite loop, could we assume that the boulder is in essence dragging the earth on the earths own gravity? Consider also that as an object approaches the speed of light, it's mass increases. Eventually, the mass of the object would drag the earth at incredible speeds, or collapse in on itself or something, and that brings us into the world of black holes and I don't even wanna go there.

 

So, in short, someone has to build a portal gun, and we gotta test it on Mars before we even think about using it on earth.

[Daecon]

Now, what if you did this with a heavy object, say, a boulder, and enclosed this infinite loop in a vacuum so it wouldn't have resistance? Essentially, you'd have a constantly accelerating object. How would this look to an outside observer (let's say the vacuum is enclosed by thick glass)? What speed would the boulder get before it stopped?

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_velocity