Science Check: Portal 2 October 27, 2011

Sometimes, you’re forced to make some severe leaps of logic as to just how plausible a video game’s grounded reality can be.  Some things we’re willing to take for granted, like enemies will simply just carry health and ammunition supplies with them at all times, and you will be immediately able to make use of them.

But then sometimes there will be moments in gaming which skirt the bounds of reality and you are forced to ask yourself…COULD THAT REALLY HAPPEN?  Fortunately for me, I happen to have a bunch of friends on speed dial with science backgrounds and when I ask them questions, they have no problem filling me in on just what reality would do in these situations.

So this is Science Check, where I take a look at the leaps and bounds of scientific logic that games have made over the years and check if it would indeed work, or if you tried doing it in the real world, you’d be totally screwed.

Today, we’re going to be talking about the game that has been the most requested for this series.  Portal 2.  Don’t know anything about Portal?  Take a look.

First off, I want to tell everyone right now that this is going to be a very different Science Check than what I have done before.  Science Check has prided itself with grounding all components of scientific leaps in video games to what already exists, I am at a loss for what to write about here.  Portal prides itself with taking theories and putting their own theories on top of those for the sake of the fun of gameplay, and as a game it works fantastically.  In reality however, I honestly don’t know if it would work or not, and I don’t think any modern scientist could either.

In the game, the player has control of a Portal Gun created by the Aperture Science Enrichment Center.  The company was founded by Cave Johnson who believed in “throwing science to the wall and seeing what sticks.”  A noble endeavor, his company didn’t waste its time with theories on top of theories (like I’m going to have to with this article), his philosophy was to learn by doing.  If it works, make it better.  If it doesn’t work, throw it in an incinerator and board up access to all the lower floors it was developed on.  The gun allows the player to create two holes in space (on top of any compatible surface material, moon dust working the best) which automatically bridge between the two points, no matter how far away they were.  They could only be disrupted if the gun passed through a special field which if passed through, reset the gun and removed all existing open portals in the area.  Any momentum earned while passing through a portal (even in regards to orientation and gravity) would sustain itself on the other side, either to the benefit or despair for its user.

Now the closest thing that has been theorized to exist as a way to link two points that are great distances apart in space has been dubbed an Einstien-Rosen Bridge, or simply a Wormhole.  You’ve probably seen them or things like them in various science-fiction movies or shows.  Sometimes they are depicted in these fictional stories as existing naturally in space, and in others they can be created artificially by intelligent beings as a way to travel great distances.  In reality, an Einstien-Rosen Bridge is something that has not even been SEEN existing normally in the universe, nor has mankind been successful in creating one, and that is the basis of the problem I’m in right now writing about this.

I have no idea if a human would simply be able to pass through a naturally existing Einstien-Rosen Bridge let alone an artificial one without being killed in thousands of ways that are possible and even a few ways that may be impossible!  Since we haven’t found any, there are no studies I can look up.  It would be useful to know if probes survived going through them, if they could transmit from the other side.  Portal depicted going through one as instantaneous (and you would be able to see through to the other side).  For all we know, traveling through one could take thousands of years.  In Portal, momentum (either by human power or external forces like gravity) could be sustained for a time after going through.  There’s no way to know if momentum would continue to exist while passing through a portal, it’s just as likely momentum could be stopped completely at the moment the test subject entered!

Other interesting things to ponder would be about the device that created portals itself.  What could power something that powerful and yet be so small?  Older signs in the lower floors of the Enrichment Center depicted a portal gun much larger and bulkier than the sleek, handheld recent design you get to make use of, so like with everything techie, it can be made smaller over time.

The device would need to have some kind of internal memory for the spacial coordinants of where the portals are, because the portals will erase themselves when you pass through the force fields at the end of each testing area, showing that it is indeed the gun which is controlling them.  If the fields in question were electromagnetic in question, this might cause any internal power source to blink out for a second, erasing the internal memory in the gun and with it the control over the placed portals.  This is given credibility to the fact that the portals will only erase when going through the field, simply going around them will do nothing, and if you don’t pass through it, you would be able to place portals on either side of it without the danger of them getting erased.  It could also be blocking the wavelenths that the portal beams fire at (similar to how a pair of sunglasses block certain wavelenths of light), which is why you can’t fire a portal through them, but that’s just my theory (Looks like I got into theorizing myself now! -ed).

Moon dust in itself is quite reflective in nature.  We know this because we can see the moon at night so long as the light of the sun shines on it (the Earth will sometimes partially or fully block that sunshine).  We’ve even seen its effects in pictures taken by the men who visited the moon (that’s the reason there’s no dark shadow on the man on the ladder).  This could be the basis of why it is such a good portal conductor, but by that reasoning metallic glitter could be the absolute best, and I don’t think you could place a portal on a metallic surface.  You could however, place a portal on the moon itself (in SPACE!), which is what happens in the game’s finale.  However, if you look closely at that final puzzle moment, you’ll notice that Valve intentionally altered the perception of time at the moment the gun fires, you know, because of that whole speed of light thing.  Nice little touch.

I know it’s not as factual a Science Check as I usually do, but this is a game where the mechanics are based upon theories, which while may be scientifically valid, may be just as realiistically invalid.  Its still a fantastic game and a lot of fun, and I recommend it to anyone interested in picking it up!