minutephysics - 2022-09-01
Nebula Classes - Great classes by your favorite creators on a creator-owned streaming service: https://nebulaclasses.com/minutephysics This video is about what happens if you try to pass a portal (like in the video game Portal or Portal 2) through itself - do you get a paradox? Infinite recursion? Impossibility? Contradiction? The end of the world? Collapse of the wavefunction? Ultimately it ends up looking beautiful and weird and recursive and... just watch the video :) Support MinutePhysics on Patreon! http://www.patreon.com/minutephysics Link to Patreon Supporters: http://www.minutephysics.com/supporters/ MinutePhysics is on twitter - @minutephysics And facebook - http://facebook.com/minutephysics Minute Physics provides an energetic and entertaining view of old and new problems in physics -- all in a minute! Created by Henry Reich
I remember in the game "superliminal", when you put a portal in a portal, the world will crash and that is actually how you proceed with the game (to free yourself from a self-iterating room). Now I learn that the action will not cause the universe to crash :)
yea but thats because the portal is small
@@commandocat7675 Oh I see. One of the portal was smaller than the other, which was a different scenario.
Not crashing the universe is no fun though :(
Yeah superliminal is such a trippy game
Um… I thought this one out and what’s happening is you have a room that contains itself, so when you threw the room outside of itself it would’ve become an infinite amount of rooms in white space since there was nothing outside the room, or something like that. Hopefully Minute Physics makes a video on it, I would like to understand it more than just my drawings.
It’s shocking how well you explained such a trippy and abstract idea in such a short amount of time
"5 days ago" 💀💀💀💀
@@kavearn2 ... your point?
69th like
I think what I found to be the most unusual about this video is how intuitive it was once explained. I've often thought about this, myself, but could never mentally work out what kind of behavior we should expect from an interaction like this.
Lo and behold, as soon as it's explained here, it becomes obvious but I just couldn't wrap my head around it until it was explained.
This is a troubling thought that I had as a child ever since the release of Portal 2. Thank you so much for solving this 😊
I can see why the game designers avoided dealing with this through the simple expedient of making the portal close if it's moved.
movable portals are actually possible, and are only used once in portal 2
the reason you dont see it more often is because the physics are completely broken when you enter a moving portal
@@dkskcjfjswwwwwws413 This has to do with the fact that portals in the portal games have temporary invisible platforms generated to prevent players from getting stuck, among other generated structures that you can't see and often only exist for a few seconds, if even 1.
Technically all portals are moving because motion is relative. The portal to the moon was orbiting the earth portal
@@dkskcjfjswwwwwws413 Chop those neurotoxin tubes.
@@danielgreenwood793 in portal those are perfectly still.
Interesting that it always maintains its total surface area. That makes sense, of course - I just never even would've thought of it if you asked me this out of the blue.
How about: Out of the orange?
@@My_initials_are_O.G.cuz_I_am How about: Into the orange?
@@MichaelDarrow-tr1mn
That's just: Out of the blue, with extra steps.
Out of the Blue sounds like a documentary of the making of Portal tbh
@@My_initials_are_O.G.cuz_I_am exactly.
I like that Valve's Portals have just become the standard when animating/making portals. theyre always orange and blue ^^
It's a great artistic choice. They're opposites on the color wheel, making them complimentary. Complimentary colors almost always look good together and are known to attract attention.
welcome to “I don’t understand anything but this is cool”
I love how in the beginning MinutePhysics literally showed us what would happen if a portal went into a portal, and the rest of the video is him explaining what would happen, and giving another demonstration.
Yeah, any other video would talk about the entire universe before getting to the purpose of the video
I'd love for you to make a similar video about a more general problem with so-called scaling portals, i.e. those that vary in size, and when something falls into one portal, it comes out of the other with a proportionally changed size. For example - the blue portal is 7 times bigger than the orange one, which means that if a 1.75 meter tall man entered the orange portal, a 12.25 meter tall giant would come out of the blue one. However, if the same 1.75 meter tall man entered the blue portal, a 0.25 meter tall dwarf would emerge from the orange portal. My question is - what would happen if you threw a smaller portal into a larger one, and would it be possible to throw a larger portal into a smaller one if they had the right shapes, and if so, what would be the effect. You will make me very happy if you make a film about it.
Someone else mentioned a game called Superliminal where this is a puzzle solution... because you're trapped in a recursive set and need to destroy reality to continue.
Portals actually are everywhere, the problem is they're all back to back, with no way to separate them
just like ninjas...
what if 3d space is the portals
doors.
It is the same problem with monopoles.
Well, in a sense you are right. There are theories about how space emerges from tiny wormholes (ER = EPR). A portal is kind of a simplified wormhole, maybe 🙂
What would happen if the two portals were half-way intersected, then you went through at an angle such that you entered both portals simultaneously?
fictional science lab invents portal gun, random youtube commentor uses portal gun to create duplicates of themselves... quick someone write it as a plot device for Portal 3
You probably wouldn't be able to do so : your body parts would collide together and not let you in
@@gawkthimm6030 it would be called portal printer
(it prints you)
You would just fold yourself or tear yourself apart. But if you're just jumping in, you'd collide with yourself or the portal edge and fall away from the portals, no worse for wear. The gravity would make you puke though.
bad happens
This was great. It tackles geometry and physics rather than simple gamer problems.
Personally I think how portal the videogame works, "shooting a portal through a portal" should be 100% possible, but not either for game balance or programming reasons, maybe both.
In portal games, you have "a gun" that shoots portals, but they are formed from the shot, your shot does not shoot a flying hole that sticks to wall, it needs to travel, hit fitting material and form a portal. There should be nothing logically stopping you from shooting this portal forming force through two existing portals and have that force contact wall, which causes it to form a portal that also is what makes older iteration of the portal disappear. Almost same logic as "you can shoot a bullet that destroys the portal gun and likely it's portals (or the universe) through portals."
I love that you used the Companion Cube! The Portal references are amazing!
Can portals even move? Are they actually two separate entities, or are they just two sides of the same entity, forever locked to each other's relative position?
I think this would explain why portals collapse as soon as the wall it is attached to moves...
I think yes, but still, there can be a wall where the portal is located, and you can just move the wall
i like this theory!
then why do portals not dissolve instantly, they're constantly moving through space and the moon is drifting away...?
If they are two sides of the same entity, I think the concept "position" got broken...
It simply cannot "interact" with itself.
in portal 2 you place a portal on a moving wall to cut neurotoxin pipes with a laser
This is exactly the solution I came up with when I was little, but I've never seen it explained so clearly! Pretty dope
I'm convinced Henry is making real, working Portals and is posting videos of him testing new features for people to point out so he can fix it. Very effective debugging process.
Doubtful, as he is thinking of them as objects, while they're literally non-objects. It's like saying, I'm going to pass this void through this other void... There's nothing there, a hole is not an object.
@@livedandletdie when u r talking about passing portal through portal u have to assume them to be material
@@livedandletdie no he said they were on objects. The portal itself is not an object no shit it’s a wormhole
@@livedandletdie You can clearly see in the drawing that they are ontop of a metal plate
The blue portal is attached to the plate to the plate going through takes the portal with it
Mesmerizing. 👁👄👁 I was about to scroll past this video, but then I stopped and thought hard about the premise for a about a minute. I'm so glad you animated this! Cause my head couldn't produce a good image! :D
Once the distance between two portals becomes of the order of a few nanometers but before they intersect each other, the Casimir force between them becomes significant and causes the portals to collapse.
The Casimir force applies to physical objects made of matter though, but who says a portal needs to be made of matter?
The question then would be what kind of energy could they be made of which won't induce the Casimir effect?
I guess that begs the question of what a portal could be made of at all, which is kinda moot because the only similar thing that could actually exist would be wormholes, which would most likely be spheroidal, or nearly so, and thus not at all flat surfaces.
I guess if you made the distribution of negative energy that holds it open to flatten the surface of it, that could flatten the event horizon, but that's the kind of relativistic quantum inverse kinematics that asks for a PhD to proceed, so, oh well.
@@hermannbarbato well, afaik wormholes would need to be kept open by exotic matter, which is negative in mass
so we could start from there
It would have been nice if you put numbers on the orange portal too, that way we can keep track of which part of the blue portal the blue portal should be coming out of.
I love videos that explain niche questions that I will never use with an epic baseline throughout the whole thing.
the content i'm here for 👌
@@Jasnah.Kholin frfr 👌
This is one of the greatest videos I've ever watched.
Someone's been replaying Portal a lot haven't they?
I wonder who is that
Me, probably.
yep
Funny coincidence, I also just started back through the Portal series because I got my Steam Deck. Crazy timing.
Since Portal 2 will be given away for Xbox Live Gold users I'll go and play it one more time
I very much enjoyed this video! Thanks, minutephysics!
This sounds like the kind of paradox that would actually destroy reality
As a once engineering student, it always amazes me when someone make mathematical things visualized.
Amazing, something I've always wondered but quickly gave up trying to figure out.
So glad I found this channel 11 years ago lmao I can't believe it's been so long. You have always had this 'just your average guy' vibe about you while explaing very complex ideas, and yet still here you are after all the time views and surely(hopefully) money, just the same as I remember. Heck better
@ 1:26 Now the real question is what is the “top” and bottom of a portal, and what is the front and back side when they exist in free space 🤯
Portal physics must be the thing that keeps this guy up at night and he had to explain it or he would die from curiosity
😅
@@trout3685 ok trout.
You AGAIN ?
Your everywhere
@@Leptronium HIS everywhere?
This was a very nice and straight forward video. Amazing work!
This is one of those questions i never thought about but at the same time i always think about.
This video should be titled, ”How to break the universe and laws of physics”
Thinking with portals can truly lead to some interesting results! Gives me an odd craving for cake, too...
I see what you did there
This is a brilliant watch right before my exam day
I like how he just talks about Portals like the ones from the game are the universal standard when we talk about Portals.
Well what is ironic about that is the one from the game don't even function like this. So if he were going off the portals and the rules from that world, then this entire video is much like the cake, a lie.
What is different about the ones from the game?
@@xradar8349 the portals from the game have a certain set of rules and laws in adherence with the world of portal. When one portal is placed with no link to the other side, it remains closed until the second portal is on a stationary surface. So it is impossible to fire one side of a portal link into the other. Therefore this video is not going off the rules of the portals in the game. So no, the man doesn't talk about portals in the game being the universal standard, because if he were doing that then the entire video would be incorrect. Which it is, if based on a fictional idea in a fictional realm with already well established (albeit also fictional) rules for how those portals function.
The more I think about it the more this entire video irritates me hahah.
@@ggmann13 true but he talks about them being orange and blue and being connected to each other and stuff. A portal could be anything if you just call it a portal with no further specification like he did. Could be the portals from Rick and Morty for example or just a normal door. He just starts talking based on the game and makes an "what if the portals from the game where actually like this?" out of it.
@@electricpaisy6045 yes exactly he could have used portals from rick and Morty or just fictional portals full stop lol. But when he immediately pulled the portals from portal he fucked up by pigeon holing himself like he did.
This is so fascinating! My jaw has been on the floor for half of this video.
Amazing, the greatest solution in all of physics: "imagine the same thing minus one dimension."
with portal 3 we need it to use all of these portal paradoxes and questions for the hardcore science nerd out there
I started playing portal yet again and I stumbled across this masterpiece
I thought this was going to be an impossibility with a super complicated metaphysical answer.
Makes me think of when questions that seem complicated to us will one have a 4 minute explanatory video :)
I like the fact that if you're thinking with portals, they always will be blue and orange.
It's hard to imagine using other colors for em.
Ive always preferred purple for other reasons
Well They are really god fucking games
I mean, even in the game there's more than two colours. In co-op mode eventually there has to be 4 simultaneous portals.
@@snerttt Still works, each character is blue and orange respectively and has portal colours reflecting the components of that
Orange has red and yellow
Blue has cyan and indigo
@@tuser8 never thought of that!
i think the most interesting part about this video is that its literally making up physics for something thats probably impossible, basically answering scientific questions before we even find out how to make those questions even askable
Imagine the Danmaku potential this would have in 2hu if Yukari put her portals in portals.
oh god
I'd imagine the explanation would be "this strategy is so complicated that I can't even use it."
@@lpfan4491 knowing how powerful Yukari is.She would defitnaly make that move
Weapon Idea: 2 flat metal sticks that have sharp edges and portals on it
An important detail here is that each portal must have a backing that blocks entry such that entry is possible only through the coloured fronts of the portals. Changing that changes so much.
i love you companion cube, nobody knows me like you do.
i love how portal has completely changed how we interpret portals and we always see it as one orange and one blue one
Geometry dash portals also look like the Portal ones
Yeah
@@OLLGY69 and many many more, because of the game portal (which is way older than geometry dash)
@@angulinhiduje6093 Honestly, I'm still stuck on Diablo 1 and 2 portals, since, while looking like portal's portals, come so much earlier stylistically that I wonder if some design queues weren't derived from them
You're welcome. That is what we achieve at Aperture Laboratories. Making the impossible, possible.
I think a lot of paradoxes would really just sort themselves out. Like how you show passing a portal through itself is just fine.
@rebelgaming1.5.14 - 2023-01-25
I love how it's just generally accepted now that Portal's Portals are the only things we're allowed to use for diagrams with portals.
@ironicanimations - 2023-06-19
I mean, it’s a good design :D
@Netsuki - 2023-06-26
It's not only allowed, but it's just what people recognize. And simple color coding that exist so player could easily understand which one is which makes it good too. Darksiders have same colored portals, iirc. But they look a little difference. Valve was and still is good at making games.
@SRFriso94 - 2023-07-15
GLaDoS was right: "Now you're thinking with Portals."
@CrashSable - 2023-07-21
@@Netsuki Darksiders' portals are a direct reference to Valve's portals. If Vigil had never heard of Portal, they would have come up with a different design (or more likely, not have come up with the idea for the Voidwalker at all)
@Netsuki - 2023-07-21
@@CrashSable Everything is inspired by something. If Doom didn't exist, Half-Life would have never been made either. But from mathematical point of view, there is no "what if". It's everything that You can easily calculate. Or maybe not easily, because You have to start to think with portals, but that's just a math. If one point of first portal corresponds with one specific point of the other one, it's all calculable, computable. And we know how these portals work, so anything we don't know, can be just simply calculated.