> Get Portal Gun > Build vertical, vacuum-sealed cylinder with a diameter large enough to contain portals, 1 meter tall. > suspend 1kg object in cylinder. Remove atmosphere. > Open portals at top and bottom of cylinder. > Drop object
If the object continues accelerating at 9.8 m/s it will reach light speed in 354 days. If not, what would prevent it? If so, from where does all that energy to accelerate the object come? Does it continue to accelerate beyond light speed since it's still falling? Does it ever stop accelerating?
It doesnt decelerate from entering a portal? Doesnt it already go ftl since it goes instantly from one portal to another?
Cooper Harris
science is so crazy
Cooper Nelson
idk. Don't the portals just bend and connect places in space like wormholes? In that way objects that pass through them only apparently move faster than light but otherwise no physical laws are being broken.
Tyler Nelson
gravity waves are exempt from entering the portal?? do you just not mention this crucial detail or are you an idiot dog, go perish you piece of shit
Kayden Cox
Any threads about portal physics are cancer. Its a video game brainlet.
Parker Martin
no, it never stops accelerating. but for us it wouldn't be 354 days, the object would at some point appear to start slowing, eventually coming to a standstill as it approaches light speed. question is what happens if you youch it with something.
Theoretically this would work, but don't be fooled into thinking you've created free energy. you've merely stored some of the earth's energy in the Aperture science paper displacement prevention object. If it were possible to measure the change, you'd see an equal difference in the kinetic energy of the earth and the object.
Creation of energy comes when you take this process and repeat it on the other side of the planet, either. while the earth doesn't gain any energy, and technically the energies of the two weights would cancel eachother out, it's still energy and would begin radiating as heat from friction (assuming a realistic vacuum). another, less circumnavigational creation of energy, though, would come if you take the poral off the ceiling and put it on the floor somewhere else. you have now changed the difference in kinetic energy of this system since initiation from 0 to twice whatever kinetic energy the cube has gained. of course, if you can create the equivelant of a tear in space-time such as an aperture science quantum tunnel, you would solve a lot of problems for the world.
An easier way to utilize the energy of the system would be to put a heavy wheel halfway through two vertical portals, then turn one upside down. from either reference frame, the wheel is being pulled down on one side and up on the other. attach a dynamo to it, and boom, free energy (if you don't mind adding to the earth's kinetic energy)
Grayson Russell
wormhole with a 2-dimensional entrance instead of a 3-dimensional one.
Aaron Taylor
Without a theory of quantum gravity we can't give a definitive answer to this question
Adam Wright
>the object would at some point appear to start slowing, eventually coming to a standstill as it approaches light speed. No, the objects acceleration would appear to slow down, but its speed would continue to increase. Given infinite time the speed of the object would continue to approach, but never reach, c.
Isaiah Fisher
The energy is just potential energy being converted into kinetic, however the potential energy is reset every time the object passes through the portal. As the object infinitely accelerates towards the Earth, the Earth will also infinitely accelerates towards the object. The objects mass is tiny, but given a long enough time the affect on the Earth will be measurable.
Parker Hughes
It will not reach the speed of light because it will drift eastward as it falls, colliding into the side of the cylinder at great speed.
Levi Lee
I get that 99% of anything mentioning a portal gun is trolling, but is no one going to mention terminal velocity?
Lincoln Wright
actually this
Jonathan Jones
It is vacuum bud. The only terminal velocity will be the relativistic one, which it will continuously approach depending on your assumptions.
Parker Murphy
vacuum
Jace Richardson
Consider your experiment, then contemplate Foucault's pendulum. Better set up your experiment on a non-rotating asteroid or something.
AN interesting side note -- as you test mass accelerates toward c, its mass becomes huge, and begins to pull on the asteroid or planet. Anchor your test chamber well, and you have a reactionless drive. Though one that is hard to steer, and would require some forethought to shut off.
It will approach the speed of light. Of far more interest is that you could create an infinite source of energy by making the object a magnet and wrapping the cylinder with copper wire. Which means that the portals themselves must require infinite energy to sustain if conservation of energy is true.
Eli Allen
Larry Niven covered all this in his article "On the Theory and Practice of Teleportation" decades ago. Every single thing the OP asked and everything others responded.
Yes, this would be a reactionless space drive. In time, you'd move the Earth as the ever-increasing mass of the weight attracted the planet. Not "practical" because tidal forces would begin to shred the Earth. Take a very long time though.
Unless there's a source of energy to lift objects from the lower portal to the upper one, it also violates energy conservation.
You have to build it at either the North or South pole or the Earth's rotation will cause the moving mass to rub against the sides of the cylinder within a an hour or so.
It never slows but it never reaches lightspeed either. No more than a continuous boost torchship would. Acceleration (as measured by someone standing next to the apparatus) continually decreases. An ant riding within the falling mass would never feel any acceleration at all.
You ARE creating free energy unless, as stated above, it takes energy to teleport "uphill" against the Earth's gravity. You are NOT tapping the Earth's kinetic energy since the Earth has none. Yes, I know we're circling the Sun. But KE can only be measured relative to something else. My laboratory says the Earth's not moving. Someone on Mars says it is. Someone on Jupiter gets still a different answer. They can't all be right. It happens that none of the observers are. KE is meaningless unless you interact with another object, even if it's only by passing through its gravitational field.
Never played the game. But none of the above conclusions change a whit even if teleportation isn't instantaneous, but only occurs at lightspeed.
Jaxson Carter
Free energy is obvious given that you are gaining gravitational potential energy for free everytime it teleports
Leo Ross
>gravity waves
Jordan Fisher
Every one ITT is a retarded nigger, gravity would act both ways through the portal, which would balance out in a vacuum sealed container, creating a weird area of zero gravity between the portal
Tyler Rodriguez
What if you put yourself in a capsule that got enough food to last for many years and you put it inside that chamber. After 354 days, somebody is at the moon and shoots with the portal gun at the surface of the moon where it points toward some random galaxy. How would this affect the gravitational pull of the earth and the moon with the capsule? And would this be a feasible way of space travel?
Grayson Torres
Even assuming portals work just like in the game (no conservation of energy, gravity doesn't interact through portals etc etc), you're still bound by Special Relativity. At relativistic speeds the formula F = ma breaks down. The force exerted by Earth is constant but the relativistic formula is F = dp/dt, or put simply Δp/Δt, that is force determines how fast momentum changes. However, momentum is a function of both speed and mass: p = mv. And it turns out, the faster you go, the heavier you are, so p = m (v) * v and F = dp/dt = m (v) * dv/dt + v (t) * dm/dt = ma + v*dm/dt. It turns out that the closer to the speed of light you are, the smaller the ma part is and the bigger the dm/dt part is. That is, at relativistic speeds most of the force of gravity is "spent" on increasing the mass of the object. It's speed asymptotically reaches the speed of light but its mass goes to infinity. And portals obviously don't conserve energy, as you can see: you can literally gather infinite kinetic energy with your setup. This is special relativity. Rule of thumb: if you think something will let you reach or breach the speed of light, you're forgetting to account for relativity somewhere.
Camden Martin
if grug let shiny rock fall past 354 moons, will shiny rock go faster than sunspeed?
What if we had the same cylinder set up, but we kept the atmosphere. Air would fall into the portal below...and air from above would push on the air in the cylinder....? Would it be infinite pressure ? rho*g*h. rho and g are constant, but the height of the slug of air is infinite? Or would it just create an infinite series of waves of wind ? Just whoosh whoosh whoosh.
Jonathan Stewart
>drop bowling ball through portal, let it fall till it reaches near c >Shoot entry portal onto another surface >bowling ball hits ground at 99.9999999999999999991% the speed of light What would happen?
Same user as Niven covered this too. In "All the Bridges Rusting" they put portals at both ends of a mass driver. They're sometimes called railguns and are used to accelerate objects by energizing magnets in succession. The limiting factor is that the rail has to be VERY long to achieve significant velocities without requiring accelerations which squash the passengers. They may be useful someday to shoot cargo off the surface of the moon without requiring rocket fuel. Inanimate objects can withstand 50 or 100 gravities.
With the portals though, the railgun has infinite length. You just keep re-using the same section of track over and over again. So, yes, you could shoot spacecraft to other planets or other stars. Of course, you have the problem of braking at the far end of the trip.
Incidentally, portals would also allow small particle accelerators. CERN is miles across because the magnets can only bend the track of near-lightspeed particles so much before they radiate away energy faster than you can pump it in. Whenever a charge is accelerated (going around a corner) is loses energy. If portals aren't "movement" in the ordinary sense, CERN could be reduced to cottage-size.
Camden James
>from where does all that energy to accelerate the object come?
from the part where portals aren't real. If they were, they would violate thermodynamics by their nature. This doesn't mean they aren't possible, but they would certainly cause some rewriting of textbooks
