Is it a circle, or a line? (Portal question)
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It's only one rope. To better clarify what you would need to do to get this to occur, you would need a) Working portals(2) b) A rope.The Bum said:
Okay, you make portals on a narrow hallway facing each other. You hold one end of the rope and toss it the other through the blue portal. Using your other hand, you quickly grab the end you just threw coming out of the orange portal. You then tie a not.
Technically, gravity would make it fall to the ground. Luckily the thing is flexible. What if you somehow got a huge metal bar and fed it into one portal at a slight angle!
I'd call it a straight line. A line continues infinitely in either direction from where you start and never bends otherwise it would eventually cross/intersect itself. The rope is straight and one can travel along it infinitely...wait wait wait. My bad, it's technically the same section of rope and by traveling along it you cross it an infinite number of times. So since you cross it, it is technically not a "line," but perhaps it is a "line segment" which is a concisely defined portion of a line from point A to point B, both of which are each portal. Also that rope had to get there somehow and since it is a human invention it could not be cut to an infinite length and must therefore be a piece that was thread through one portal and out the other to be tied upon itself. It's not so much that the rope has been extended, it's that our dimension(s) have been wrapped around the portion of rope. Think about if you took a piece of thread through a hole: -|- and folded reality 180 degrees perpendicular to the rope: |--| Then you have what that picture shows. Although the motion of folding space to connect to ends of the same line creates a circular motion within the context of our reality, the rope has not been extended and likely does not exist in the void created by the space folding (it can only be speculated what the true effects of space folding are at this current time).
Well, if you wrap a towel around you, you exert a force on the tower so it doesn't fall to the ground. In the portal picture, no force stops it from going down (given that gravity is present).Kjakings said:
Hint: Untie the knot and walk off with the rope. Now do that in reverse.Kris015 said:
OT: I think it's both, as the clever peeps at the Xkcd forums seem to have determined.
Unpossible! (It violates the laws of portals.) (But move the blue portal in your drawing downwards by about 1/4 of its length and it'd be fine, but not a particularly interesting variation on the problem in that case.)Kjakings said:What if you did this?
She called it "A triumph." I think something's wrong, though. She hasn't been the same since the upgrade.IckleMissMayhem said:
Have you ever played Portal? It's the same thing if you were to put the blue portal on one wall and the orange portal on the opposite wall straight across from the blue one. If you walk from one side of the room to the blue portal and come out of the orange portal and keep walking to the blue portal you could conceivably do this in a continuous "loop". For this kind of technology to work in the real world it would have to bend space around to the back side of the opposite portal.Kris015 said:
Edit: It seems that while I may be smart enough to understand the physics of a video game, I can't figure out how to put a picture into my post to illustrate what I'm saying.
Most roads in America do a curve to the left every few miles to account for curvature. Let me find you a Google maps picture. <url=http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Fresno+google+maps&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-USKjakings said:
fficial&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&hq=&hnear=Fresno,+CA&gl=us&ei=S6yzTOzTFoj4sAOT0omKCA&sa=X&oi=geocode_result&ct=image&resnum=1&ved=0CBsQ8gEwAA>Here's one.
SimuLord said:"My belt holds my pants up, but my belt loops hold my belt up. Who's the real hero here?" - Mitch Hedbergseckspest said:well in this dimension its a line, through the dimensionS its a circle.
What IS holding it up?LieutenantShwa said:
You win the debate.I don't care what it is anymore, I just like reading people's ideas about it, lol. I wonder what would happen if you pulled the knot straight toward yourself (from the perspective of the picture).
Yeah... If we get fuseable items in Portal 2, then I wanna try this and see what happens/Nazz3 said:
The best illustration of "space bending" that you can see simulated in the game is when you put the portals in a corner.Kris015 said:Yeah i've played Portal, but I don't understand the psychics. I'm not the sciency type but this seems simple and I see now that I was quite stupidsirkai007 said: