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Was GLaDOS Wrong About Science? - Momentum & Physics in Portal - Extra Credits
🕑 Added 2020-10-20 21:16:36 +0000 UTCSo this is a very cool science lesson but most importantly the end credits music is a JAM
Comments
Extra History
There's nothing in the video that is plot relevant, we're just using Portal's mechanics as a way to talk about momentum and conservation of energy.
Brandon Quinn
No, I don't think it will impact your enjoyment of Portal 2.
HamHamJ
The most obvious flaw in this analysis is that the portal gun is doing something. Like, if the you instead lifted the cube up then the fact that it gained potential energy would not be an issue. The portal gun presumably must be using energy when it twists spacetime into a pretzel and makes the cube gain potential energy. So you can't say if conservation of energy was observed without knowing the actual mechanism involved in creating the portals.
That One Artist
Should I wait until I beat portal 2 to watch this?
Brian Rose
I think this explanation, at best, is flawed -- because unless you can say how Aperture Portals would "actually" operate if our intuition is wrong, it seems it would be more accurate to say they pose a "paradox" -- which is to say, either the portals (as broadly conceived here) are simply impossible, or the Newtonian physical laws are inadequate for accounting for their possibility.
