• Bizarroland@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      A, since portals cannot transfer momentum from the tram to the victims.

      To put it another way, if you were standing and the portal was pushed towards you by a tram, do you think you would be launched out of the other side at that rate?

      There might be some increase in momentum as the part of you that went through the portal first gets pushed forward by the parts of you that get pushed forward after, but it’s not going to be as dramatic as the momentum you would have received being hit by the tram.

      Most likely you would stumble forward and fall down or have to catch yourself.

      • Blakerboy777@feddit.online
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        1 year ago

        Portals maintain velocity. Velocity is relative. Therefore the velocity they maintain is the relative velocity of the portal and the subject. Any other way and there would be no consistent way to pass any moment when passing through a portal.

        • Catsrules@lemmy.ml
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          After thinking about it longer then i care to admit I think i finally agreed with you.

          As you said it is all relative, from the prospective of the moving portal. You could say it isnt moving at all but the entire world around it is moving, thus when people enter the portal from the portal’s prospective they people are the ones moving and will continue moving when they exist.

          Hmm tlnit that i typed this out I feel like i didn’t do a very good job. Owell the answer is B.

      • Neuron@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        The reason this is so confusing with different answers is that the portals don’t really exist, so inherently whether you say a or b is gonna depend on assumptions. In game they aren’t allowed to move so we have nothing to base it on to match game physics.

        Here’s my take, momentum is a product of velocity. Velocity needs a reference frame. Without it, there’s no real difference in saying the portal has a velocity of 0 and the people tied up have a the velocity and therefore momentum, or the other way around. If we assume velocity with respect to the portal is what matters and is the momentum carried forward, then it should be B. If it’s relative to the earth or tied up people, then A.

        • Bizarroland@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          If portals did not apply a transient vector to your momentum then you could not pass through a portal.

          Take for instance the many times Chell jumps through a portal. Her momentum is maintained as she passes through the portal, allowing her and her robot legs to do truly stupendous feats of gravity assisted acrobatics.

          If Chell was stationary and the portal fell on her, she would not be launched out of the other side with the momentum of the portal, she would just find herself sticking out of the other side of the portal.

          Similarly, if Chell were to ride a moving platform up into an overhead portal, we would expect the top half of Chell’s body to pop out of the portal without being accelerated by anything other than the moving platform on the bottom of her feet.

          Therefore, unless there is some strange unknowable physics that we will not be able to discover until we develop portals of our own, the most likely outcome is that the victims on the tram would not gain any momentum as the portal was pushed into them, and they would plop out safely on the other side.

          • Neuron@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            You can say you can expect, but you really can’t, because if you’re talking about momentum you’re talking about velocity and you need a reference frame to define velocity and therefore momentum. Let’s pick the sun for instance with the assumptions of A. So if we just have one portal pointing one direction and one portal pointing up and chell walks in, you should blast out straight up at 66,000 mph plus the speed she was walking then. I think you could make the reference Frame to earth and try and get a, but that would create problems too.

            I think B, velocity relative to the moving portal, would be the only way to maintain some kind of consistency in game if you were going to have moving portals. Your examples are most consistent with B. A portal falls on chell, how fast does she come out? The speed the portal fell on her of course. And then she stops going out once the portal stops moving because it hit the ground and has stopped moving and they no longer have any relative difference in velocity. You could also say in the platform example that the platform was sitting still and the portal was moving down, you would emerge out the portal at the speed the first portal was moving down. Both should be equally valid ways if you want to maintain some consistency. But all of this is probably why they don’t allow moving portals in the first place.

            In the end though these are definitely strange unknowable physics, portals don’t exist, so really you could make the game however you please, either one is perfectly valid, you could just say any velocity on the other side is whatever it was in relationship to the earth before going through, but that’d be weird, because how fast do the people move out of A then? Do they fly out at the speed of the moving portal and then suddenly stop mid air and plop straight down? If you’re not moving faster than a moving portal does is become brick wall and smash you out of the way so you don’t gain any velocity in relation to earth so A can be maintained? There’s no way to test it in the current games. Hence the endless arguing. But I think B would be most consistent and allow for some really interesting puzzles though, especially if you had two moving portals! Or maybe 3d portals that can sit in the air and allow full movement through them in any direction to help make it possible. Portal 3? In VR with depth perception to accommodate?

        • Rivalarrival@lemmy.today
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          1 year ago

          it’s relative to the earth or tied up people, then A.

          If it is relative to the earth, they would be crushed at an atomic level.

          Imagine the trolley-portal is passing around a tape measure at 10m/s. The tape measure is stationary on the earth. After 10 seconds, 100m of tape has entered the portal in a straight line. For me to have 100m of tape in a straight line at the exit, the end of the tape has to be moving away from the portal at 10m/s. Given that “crushed into a singularity” is not an option, we can assume the velocity cannot be relative to earth, and must be relative to the portal.

      • fidodo@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        C, it combines the victim into a horrible overlapping monster of body parts

      • whileloop@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        All motion is relative. To understand how the people will move, we need to look at them relative to the portal. If the trolly is moving at 5 m/s relative to the ground, then the people are moving at 1 m/s relative to it. So they enter the portal moving at 1 m/s and exit at the same speed.

      • Rivalarrival@lemmy.today
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        1 year ago

        If I stick my arm in a stationary (relative to earth surface) portal, I expect my arm to stick out of the exit portal. If the exit portal is moving at 10m/s over the earth, I expect my arm to also be moving 10m/s over the earth. My arm is stationary relative to the portal, but the portal is moving.

        If that portal is moving toward a standing person and I make a fist, I expect my fist to hit that person at 10m/s. I am stationary relative to the earth; they are stationary relative to the earth, but my fist is moving at 10m/s relative to the earth. From their perspective, I punched them. From my perspective, they ran into my fist.

        If I look through the portal, I will see them approaching me at 10m/s. They will see me inside the portal, approaching them at 10m/s. When the portal passes around them, they will not feel any change in their velocity, they will just collide with me immediately after the portal passes around them. To them, the earth will seem to suddenly be moving at 10m/s.

      • towerful@programming.dev
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        1 year ago

        I think Portal solved this conundrum by saying portals can’t move.

        Energy is relative when there is a frame of reference.
        When the tram-portal is the frame of reference, the person has the energy. And speedy thing goes in, speedy thing comes out.
        Using Portals canon, the person cannot be the frame of reference (ie 0 energy), because the portal has to move for that scenario - which is Portal-ly impossible. So the person has to come flying out.
        If you break Portals canon and say that portals can move, then then the person would likely be super-compacted (matter transporting on top of existing matter) into a singularity or just destroyed.

        • SuperIce@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Portal breaks its own canon on Portal 2’s neurotoxin implosion scene though.

          • Revan343@lemmy.ca
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            1 year ago

            Portals can move along the plane of the portal in that scene, but never forwards or backwards

        • greenskye@lemm.ee
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          There’s literally nothing in the universe that is ‘stationary’ so the entire concept is flawed.

          • towerful@programming.dev
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            1 year ago

            I mean, portals are flawed.
            Anything moving through a protal experiences acceleration, unless the exit-portal is at the instantaneously-exact position of the entrance portal.
            There has to be rules and limits that are ignored if portals are to exist, which is what the hypothetical situation is presentin5

        • Patapon Enjoyer@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          They totally can move though. In one of the puzzles there’s a button that makes part of a wall angle itself so that you can propel yourself forward, and the portal on it will move.

          • iAmTheTot@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            May be remembering wrong but I thought any wall movements like that one had to be done before you shoot a portal onto it, because if you do beforehand it’ll poof away when you move the wall.

          • towerful@programming.dev
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            1 year ago

            I remember that.
            It’s a timed puzzle.
            The wall moves on a button push, and moves back after an amount of time.
            The portal is destroyed when the panel moves.

        • Rivalarrival@lemmy.today
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          1 year ago

          It’s canon that they portaled between earth and moon. For a portal to be stationary relative to both, it has to be moving relative to its opposite end.

      • PatFusty@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Frames of reference matter. Whether the train or the people moving happened it doesnt matter to the portal. There is net movement and the momentum is the mass of the person moving x the speed of the train.

        Imagine the train was moving the speed of light. If the person exiting the other end of the portal wasnt coming out at the speed of light their body would come out like a soup. All the atoms in their body compressing to escape at some randomly low speed… actually it might make a tiny black hole on the other end as the atoms compress infinitely.

        • Bizarroland@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          A portal is as another commenter has framed it, essentially a hula hoop with a different space on the other side of it.

          It doesn’t matter how fast a hula hoop falls over your body. You are not going to be launched out of the other side of the hula hoop even if the hula hoop is moving at the speed of light.

          If the hula hoop is moving at the speed of light you are more likely to be killed by the shockwave of all of the atoms in front of the hula hoop compressing to adapt to the sudden intrusion of a lightspeed object with Mass, in which case it is very likely that you would pop out of the other side as some sort of soup, but that would not be because of your interaction with the portal inside of the hula hoop, or the acceleration of the hula hoop itself but rather the acceleration of the things around the hula hoop as it moved through space.

          • PatFusty@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            When im talking about speed of light i am assuming it will be in a perfect vacuum. If this was in ambient under normal conditions, a train going the speed of light would ionize all the air around it causing insane levels of heat.

            So with the thought of it moving in a vacuum, if you look at the portal on a frame by frame basis every nano second you would see either

            1. 1 nano second in his entire body is within some imaginary dimension between the 2 spaces

            2. The body gets infinitely squeezed in 1 space turning them into a mini black hole

            3. They leave the portal at the same rate they came in

            These are my 3 options, i dont see how it can be any other way.

            • Bizarroland@kbin.social
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              1 year ago

              I think that the velocity of the tram has nothing to do with the velocity the people it is running over until it actually runs them over and transfers momentum to them.

              The portal puts a gap in between the tram and the victims, so there is no physical contact to transfer momentum. Momentum is a physical property, it cannot be transmitted without contact.

              Therefore, in a frictionless vacuum the people must keep their original velocity and momentum regardless of the speed of the portal or whatever is pushing it forward.

              If it worked the other way, Chell could not have leapt off of a ceiling and been launched out of the other side in the game. If portals transmit momentum without touch, then Chell would have first impacted an unmoving object with the same force as hitting the floor.

              You can’t have it both left moving objects fly though unimpeded keeping their original momentum and also have unmoving objects suddenly gain momentum from a moving portal.

              The portal does not affect momentum, it is a break in momentum. Momentum does not transfer across portals.

              The momentum stays with the object that passes through the portal.

    • NoFood4u@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      yeah, all movement is relative, if it was B then the relative movement between the people and the train would have changed, if it’s A then it’s conserved

      • jemorgan@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        I would imagine that the relative motion between the entry/exit portal would be more important than the absolute motion of the two portals.

        • dragontamer@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Portal 2 ends with you (Chell) placing a entry portal on Earth vs an exit portal on the Moon.

          That means the portals were ~2236 mph (aka Mach3) relative to each other.

          • jemorgan@lemm.ee
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            Hmm well if an object passed through that portal and it wasn’t moving ~2236mph relative to the surface of the moon, then I guess the question from the OP has been answered already haha.

          • SuddenDownpour@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Wouldn’t that provoke all air in the Earth to get sucked to the Moon due to the difference in atmospheric pressure?

      • Bizarroland@kbin.social
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        So if portals didn’t have a distance maximum, assuming that they twist through some higher dimension or into an alternate universe and back or something like that, it would make sense that you could open a portal on Earth and on Mars and anything you push through that portal would maintain its velocity relative to Earth.

        Which could result in some hilarious events where things basically detonate the instant they are pushed through as they are slammed into the surface of Mars at potentially ten of thousands of miles an hour depending on the Earths and Mars’ relative velocities.

        Despite that, there would also undoubtedly be times where their velocities synchronize due to their varying rotational locations and orbital velocities around the solar system, during which times you could conceivably quite easily step from Earth to Mars in a single go.

        The safe thing to do though would be to decant from the Earth into a portal that is in orbit around Mars far enough away that at the worst you would experience some relatively gentle abrasion from the smattering of hydrogen atoms in the space surrounding Mars and then parachute down from orbit.

      • insomniac_lemon@kbin.social
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        Why the /s?

        It’s true. Obviously it makes for simpler puzzle design plus was easier to ignore the full capability (even the version in 2 seems to just work enough to allow the set-piece), so it seems silly to use developer limitation as a gotcha.

    • MagicPterodactyl@lemmy.ml
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      Yeah definitely A. The momentum of the object going through the portal matters not the objective that has the portal on it.

      • SuperIce@lemmy.world
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        But how would the objects get on the other side then? The receiving side isn’t moving, so the objects essentially need to be pushed through the portal at the speed at which the train is moving, resulting in B. The only way A could work would be both portals moving at the same relative speed.

        • MagicPterodactyl@lemmy.ml
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          I see it like throwing a hoola hoop around something. The object will pass through without having its speed affected.

      • Darkard@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Here’s how I always phase it. Imagine you have a shovel and you are using that shovel to flick some dog shit into your neighbours garden.

        With no portal the shit hits the shovel and you flick it, transfering the speed of the shovel into the turds. You stop the shovel and the turds fly away.

        Now imagine the shovel has a big rusty hole in it. So it’s like a n shape. No portal yet. You go to flick the dog dumps but you just pass straight over them with the hole and the dumps go nowhere. The dumps have gained no momentum because nothing touched them and transferred that to them.

        Now put a portal on the end of the shovel. As you sweep it over the cack has anything touched them? Has any object transferred it’s momentum to the dog eggs? No, so the dumps just gently tumble out of the other side of the portal.

        • Maticzpl@programming.dev
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          Imagine there being 2 portals on the shovel one on the front and one on the back Whatever passes through remains in the same place. THIS is the actual analoge for the rusty hole. Entering the first portal the shit gains the speed of the shovel but since the exit portal is also traveling with the same speed but facing the opposite direction, it effectively cancels out the previous speed gain. Imagine it like the first portal adding one unit of speed to it and the exit one adding minus one unit of speed because of the opposite direction.

          So now with one portal on the shovel and the other somewhere on a wall the shit gets accelerated and you will feel a force acting on the shovel that decelerates it’s swing.

          Velocity is relative and this is why it works. If velocity wasn’t relative then Einstein would be wrong and many of the effects we see in the real world could never happen.

        • haggyg@feddit.uk
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          1 year ago

          But even in the image example, how would that work? The people have no momentum, they wouldn’t flop out, just fall back through, and then stay half in half not. According to you, air resistance wouldn’t even push them out because as soon as it goes through the portal the air is not moving relative to the people. I think your blatant lack of respect for relativity is unnerving and gets super confusing very quickly.

      • kryptonianCodeMonkey@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Except the momentum changes with portals most of the time anyway. Momentum is a vector, not just a scalar, meaning momentum has both a scalar and a direction component. And that direction component usually must be conserved as well. But portals change the direction of momentum all the time relative to the orientation of the entering and exiting portals. If the direction of the momentum of the object is relative to the orientation of the portal, then it makes as much sense that the scalar of the momentum would be relative to the velocity of the portal as well.

        Energy is not conserved either, which is why the infinite falling box arrangement means the box keeps accelerating downwards gaining kinetic energy even though it started out with a much smaller, finite potential energy. Portals and conservation do not mix well.

      • HuddaBudda@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        As the people on the track are moving at an accelerated speed of 0 m/s, normally a train would apply the full force of the train moving to the meat bags human ethic problems on the tracks.

        As newton’s first law states F = m*a, or Force = Mass * acceleration

        F = x * 0 = 0 N of force

        thus, they could just plop out as if falling after having a chair removed.

  • GrimSheeper@lemmy.world
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    I think it has to be A. You figure that if it were B, the people on the track would suddenly be traveling at a high velocity, but the train’s velocity wouldn’t be impacted at all, since there was no impact between the train and the people. Wouldn’t this mean that the portal had created energy, which is impossible?

    • Dagrothus@reddthat.com
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      But portals can create energy. Put one above the other face to face and drop an object into the bottom one, it now has infinite potential energy.

        • Bizarroland@kbin.social
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          I mentioned this elsewhere but this line of reasoning may have a huge flaw, and that flaw is that energy has to be spent to maintain the portals operation. We do not currently know what the relationship is between the amount of mass that is moved through a portal and how much energy it takes to keep the portal operational.

          So when you take into account the total entropy of the system you also have to include the entropy of the earth and the entropy of the power systems that maintain the portals.

          As I said earlier, if you were to put a magnet inside of a vacuum tube that was welded to itself through the portal and then wrapped coils around that tube to drain the electromagnetic energy from the falling magnet, the energy that you were extracting from the system would come from either converting the mass of the planet into energy or it would be a total net loss as the amount of energy needed to maintain the portal would be greater than any amount of energy you could extract from the system no matter how fast the magnet inside of it was moving or how perfectly configured your coils were.

          After all, as the magnet approaches the speed of light eventually its mass would be come equal to or greater than the mass of the planet, and that would cause the portal to lift the Earth towards itself.

          However, coils on electromagnetics exert electromotive braking Force, and when you account for e that Force you can prevent the magnet from reaching luminal speeds, but I still don’t think you’re going to have an over-unity device.

      • H2207@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Think of a portal as a door, if someone brings an open door up to you (idk maybe it’s on wheels or something) and you go through it, you don’t suddenly fly through the frame.

        • potoo22@programming.dev
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          If the door is moving 1 meter per second, you are relatively moving 1 m/s towards the door even if you are stationary on the ground. You pass and, although you are still stationary to the ground, you are still moving 1 m/s in the same direction relative to the door. The door is the frame of reference, not the ground.

          • H2207@lemmy.world
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            Yes but relative to you the door is moving away and you’re stationary. In this example of the portal coming towards you, therefore upon paasing through the other side of the frame, the other portal, is moving away from you.

            In this diagram, it’s assumed that the person is the frame of reference, therefore I believe A to be the correct outcome.

          • Kyoyeou (Ki jəʊ juː)@slrpnk.net
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            But that would signify there is an impact? And that you are crashing at 1m/s, if you don’t enter in contact? If I’m in my house, I am not moving at 130km/h from the highway near my house?

            • Rivalarrival@lemmy.today
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              1 year ago

              If you are looking at someone through the portal, they will appear to be standing on a parade float. They are standing still on a surface, but that surface is coming at you.

              You won’t feel any change in momentum as the portal passes around you, but the ground will be suddenly moving under you.

      • Goldmage263@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        No way, the portal displaces space meaning it just allows gravity to work unimpeded adding more kinetic energy to the object. The potential energy during a “falling cycle” is infinite but infinitely removed when the spacial disruption is broken.

        • canni@lemmy.one
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          1 year ago

          By moving an object laterally into the portal falling loop, you would do no work and increase the potential energy of the object to effectively infinity. You would be creating energy.

          • Neve8028@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            I wouldn’t consider that the portal, itself, imparting the energy, though. It’s just facilitating an environment where an object can fall infinitely. The portal is outputting the same momentum that is inputted to it. The actual increase of energy happens while the object is falling between the portals.

            • canni@lemmy.one
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              1 year ago

              The portal teleports an object to a position in space with high potential energy, while apparently spending no energy of its own. This action creates energy.

      • Eufalconimorph@discuss.tchncs.de
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        Another violation is that they conserve speed, not velocity. Put 2 portals 90° apart. Travel into the first perpendicular to the surface. You’ll exit the second perpendicular to its surface. That means you accelerated to change direction, which takes energy. Portals don’t conserve momentum or energy.

    • aname@lemmy.one
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      In classical physics you would be right, but in modern physics there is no standard frame of reference. It’s equally correct to think that the people are still and portal is moving as it is to think that portal is still and people go in it immn fast speed.

      Regardless, people and portal have large speed difference going in, so there will be large speed difference going out.

      • VCTRN@lemm.ee
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        Fuck, you just made me question the whole thing. Cave Johnson must be turning in his grave.

    • Sylver@lemmy.world
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      This is how I always look at it. The portals don’t actually move what is behind them, they are just a portal to that place, so there is no momentum to impart

    • poke@sh.itjust.works
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      The matter has to move through the portal at the speed of the train, and it won’t suddenly lose all momentum when it’s done being pushed through. B imo.

    • Kaosmace@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Yeah but the thing isn’t moving the portal is, and the energy has to come from somewhere if the portal makes the thing go fast.

      • Duamerthrax@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        The energy would come from the trolley. The people would launch out at approximately the same speed as the trolley interacts with them and the trolley would slow down in response to how much kinetic energy was transferred to the people.

        • mctoasterson@reddthat.com
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          1 year ago

          This is correct. The motion of the people is relative to the Portal. It doesn’t matter if the trolley is accelerating the Portal towards them or something is accelerating them towards the Portal. Therefore they accelerate out of the other side with some retained momentum. Technically it probably resembles something in between pictures A and B.

          This reminds me of the experiment about whether an airplane could take off from a treadmill.

          • hemko@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            1 year ago

            Only if you assume the people will experience friction against the portal.

            If they would accelerate to the speed of the train within the time it takes them to go through it, they’d experience very high pressure change against the due to one part of body accelerating faster than the other. This would cause the bodies to explode out the portal

            • Natanael@slrpnk.net
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              1 year ago

              Yes, as I noted elsewhere in the thread, the part of the body exiting the portal will experience inertia as it enters into the space outside the second portal and it will be forcefully pushed by the next part of the body heading into the first portal and thus imparting momentum to the parts ahead.

              If this momentum has to be taken from anywhere its from the portal itself and by extension the train.

      • Natanael@slrpnk.net
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        1 year ago

        Then they can’t enter at all and have to be flattened by the portal, because they must have motion too exit the other portal

  • aggelalex@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Relative to the train, and by extension the portal, the people are moving towards it at the same speed as the train relative to the ground, since the people are tied to the ground. I’m gonna work with the definition of momentum that equals it to the velocity of an object times its mass, and with the assumption that the portals conserve mass and momentum of the objects during teleportation, or with negligible losses. Having found that the momentum stays constant, and given the mass before and after teleportation is constant, the velocities relative to the portal are gonna be constant too. (p1=p2 <=> mv1=mv2 <=> v1=v2). And since the velocity of the people relative to the portal is the velocity is the train relative to the ground, and the velocity of the train relative to the ground is far bigger than the velocity of the people relative to the ground, the answer is gonna be B, where the people shoot out of the portal with great speed.

    If the people actually go into the portal and not under it that is.

      • Bizarroland@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        They didn’t do the math.

        They just mentioned some of the formulas.

        It’s the difference between reading a book and knowing the book exists.

    • Goldmage263@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      If that is so, the train or portal would have to lose its momentum for the transfer to happen otherwise you’d be generating more relative velocity after the portal. I can’t imagine portals transfering monentum, only maintain it.

      • Natanael@slrpnk.net
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        1 year ago

        Think of it as a pole entering the portal, the end will have to exit at high speeds and so it will need to drag the rest of it out at that speed

        • Bizarroland@kbin.social
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          That might be the crux of it.

          If you replaced the people with a pole on a roller, you wouldn’t expect the pole to get sucked into the portal or to roll towards the tram as it advanced, right?

          That is what would happen if people were launched out of the other side of portal. The part of the pole that has been launched would drag the remainder of the pole with it.

          But that wouldn’t happen.

          The pole would just lay there until the tram passed it by, so the answer must be A. There’s no momentum added to the pole as the tram passes it by. The only thing that changed is the location of the pole.

          • ponfriend@sh.itjust.works
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            If the pole is entering the portal at the rate of 60 miles per hour, it must exit the portal at the same rate. After a minute, 1 mile of pole has entered the portal, and 1 mile has exited it. If it exits more slowly than it enters, where is the missing part of the pole?

            • Natanael@slrpnk.net
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              1 year ago

              And if it exits at the speed it enters, does it lack momentum despite clearly being in motion outside the second portal? Does it magically halt when all of it has passed through?

          • pankuleczkapl@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            1 year ago

            You almost arrived at the correct answer. The problem is that would happen. More specifically we know that four fundamental interactions can pass through the portals, e.g. a thing that is whole before passing through portals is still whole after passing through them, though for any pair of particles, atoms, neutrons and protons etc. there was a moment in time where they were separated by the portal. If you imagine the portal moving towards the pole at some speed and in the middle of it suddenly stopping, the momentum of the part on the other side would slightly pull on it, and the pole would still be moving at a reduced speed. The momentum of the second part cannot disappear and will pull on the first part. The only other reasonable option is that the pole gets split, but that obviously is not the case. So B it is

  • EmoDuck@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    B

    Lets say the train is moving with 10 meters per second. That means that the people will enter the portal with 10 meters per second. Therefore, they will leave the other portal with, you guessed it, 10 meters per second. Henceforth, they will be traveling with 10 meters per second after leaving the portal. 10 meters per second.

    • mexicancartel@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 year ago

      If the other portal is on back of the train, they they will stay at rest(might be displaced to back at lengthOfTheTrain distance

      • Natanael@slrpnk.net
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        1 year ago

        The train.

        As the object enters the first portal then the inertia of the far end of the object that is forced to pass through will need to be accelerated in the space outside the second portal to pass through, acceleration which is induced by being pushed by the other end of the object still outside the first portal.

        In other words, pushing a portal onto an object pushes that object with half the speed of the portal. This will likely require energy put into the portal itself to maintain it, which needs to come from the train.

    • Bizarroland@kbin.social
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      The would be moving at 10 meters per second in regards to the train that didn’t touch them, the same as the were before the train got close enough to touch them.

      Think of it the other way. If the went into the stable portal and came out I’m from of a moving portal, what would happen?

      The portal would move forward and swallow them up and spit them back out the way they came in.

      They would not have accelerated in the process. They wouldn’t fly out the portal they just walked in at the speed of the train. The train didn’t touch them so it can’t transmit any of its momentum to them.

  • Caboose12000@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I think B and maybe it’s easier to explain my reasoning with a more dramatic example. instead of people on a track, maybe the trolly is heading towards a 50 foot horizontal pole. when the trolly comes to the pole at 90mph, the pole is not moving. but after the trolley’s portal has “swallowed” 40 feet of the pole, all 40 feet of that pole are exiting the portal at 90mph, being pushed by the 10 feet of pole that the trolly is still “swallowing”, so the momentum of 40feet worth of pole would continue to launch the remaining mass of the pole out of the portal and it would be launched out instead of flopping to the ground.

    if we go back to our people on a track example, I think this would also kill them as for people on either side of the portal, it would feel like they’re being ran into at 90mph by the people on the other side of the portal.

    did that all make sense?

    • Natanael@slrpnk.net
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      Yes, I also thought of the pole example. It would feel like a wave of gravity suddenly shifting around them. I do think it would be less dangerous than a direct collision at the same speed, but only by a little - the danger with sudden deceleration isn’t the fact that it’s sudden, but that it is almost always uneven, it rips things inside you apart or collapse them together. But the portal would be a very clean uniform wave of pressure moving over you, so it could still cause damage by compression over one dimension (in the direction of portal movement) but most other forms of impacts will be missing

    • MJBrune@beehaw.org
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      Portal 2 even had sloped portal surfaces. Technically it’s not a or b but b is the closest.

      • Eufalconimorph@discuss.tchncs.de
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        But the orange portal is moving. The game code works more like A (it bugs out and the object bounces off the portal surface, but it uses a world-fixed coordinate frame that would match A for behavior). A (Newtonian) relativistic coordinate system would match B. For everything with non-moving portals A & B are equivalent.

        • MJBrune@beehaw.org
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          The game code works more like A (it bugs out and the object bounces off the portal surface, but it uses a world-fixed coordinate frame that would match A for behavior).

          Ah, I see what you are saying. They apply the velocity of the object again after teleporting rather than the difference between the velocities of the portal and the object. Thus the velocity of the train would be ignored. Well, B is wrong simply because the game engine doesn’t rotate characters in the teleport because that would ruin character physics. So B is wrong twice.

        • Natanael@slrpnk.net
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          1 year ago

          Yeah, most game engines like Portal’s uses absolute speed relative to the coordinate system (which doesn’t change when the coordinate values change), in addition Portal technically doesn’t actually implement “wormhole type” portals and instead superimpose a clone of the polygons near both portals behind the other (to preserve expected object collision behavior around the portal) plus doing tricks with virtual cameras, so if you fixed the bugs with moving portals then it would be A.

          But if you implemented proper relativistic physics with proper wormhole type portals you’d get B.

  • ArcheTelos@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    The train is not moving. The rest of the world is moving underneath it. Therefore, by the principle of “speedy thing go in, speedy thing come out”, the people will be launched.

  • De_Narm@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    B) The train transfers momentum to the things that pass through the portal. If it wouldn’t, the portal couldn’t exist since you need a certain amount of energy to displace the air on the other end.

    • Goldmage263@sh.itjust.works
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      I don’t agree. Inertia and momentum are not affected by a portal, even a moving one. If so, their legs would be stretched as they were partially through the portal till the body was being jerked away from the neck causing an even greated relative velocity compared to entering the portal.

      • De_Narm@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Let’s say the train moves at 100mph, therefore your body needs to exit the other portal at 100mph. Otherwise it would be compressed. What happens to the energy of this movement if you just stop on the other end?

        • InstructionsNotClear@midwest.social
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          1 year ago

          We also need to consider the air that is in front of the train as it moves forward. That air is going into the portal at the rate the train moves forward and therefore coming out the other portal at that rate.

  • labsin@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    If the train drives slow enough that is takes 3s between when your head gets through and your feed are trough, it also needs to take 3s on the other side or you are ripped to pieces or squashed.

    Now if it takes 0.1s, you also have to come out in this time and will have a velocity, the same as the train.