It's no different than if you place P1, go have dinner, watch a movie, get a good night's rest, take a shower, eat breakfast, and then place P2. Going through the portal will not take you back to the previous day just because you placed them at different times. The portal itself would have to time travel before we could even begin to consider whether portals could be used for that purpose.

Think of it like this:

P1 exists in the present
P2 is in the future

your great-great-great grandson exists in the future
You are in the present

Now, you can't walk into P1 to travel forward in time to exit from P2 the same way as you can't talk or interact with your future great-great-great grandson.

espen180 wrote:
Assume you placed 0 in the future. When you come back and place 0, 0 would be closed. as 0 has not yet been created. However, when you reach the point in time when you placed 0, 0 will open and join a link between 0 and 0

This is an awesome formatting convention to make talking about this stuff a bit easier to read. I hope this idea is widely copied.

I agree with espen and Shmitz. The portals' behavior is consistently matter-of-fact, even blas?, with regard to time. To put it succinctly:

Two linked portals exist iff (which means "if and only if") both the blue portal and the orange portal are deployed on nonmoving surfaces simultaneously.

When they exist, any object that passes through one will appear at the other in the same instant in time.

When only one portal is deployed, it is clouded, and cannot be entered.

The key word up there is simultaneously. If we're supposing that you're able to time travel, and deploy the portals at different times, that's great. As soon as they are both deployed at the same moment, they will open and be passable as an instant bridge through space. They will not open before, and they will not transport you through time.

espen180 wrote:
Think of it like this:

P1 exists in the present
P2 is in the future

your great-great-great grandson exists in the future
You are in the present

Now, you can't walk into P1 to travel forward in time to exit from P2 the same way as you can't talk or interact with your future great-great-great grandson.

But if its like this:

P1 is in the past
P2 is in the present

That is different

No it's not. It's the exact same thing. We're just the great-great-great grandson.

Duffedwaffe wrote:
Yes, but what would happen if you went through the portals?

No see understand that if you place the Blue Portal in the past and then the Orange Portal in the future, than once you step through the Orange portal you arrive in the blue portal, within the same time period, the blue portal just stays there, and ages. Theres no time travel at all. Instead the blue Portal will update with time itself, and you will arrive in the area that the blue portal sent you, in the current time.

username wrote:
If a portal is simply a fold in some higher dimension, wouldn't that mean that there would be some pairs of portals that would be impossible? Imagine a two dimensional universe on a sheet of paper (if you grab a sheet of paper, this is a lot easier). We create a portal from the upper-left corner to the center. Once we fold the universe that way, I can't see how you could make a portal from the lower-right corner to a point in between the upper-left corner and the center.

In essence, folding 3d space between a pair of portals creates a cube between them (with the portals being oppisite points on the cubes) that "fold cubes" created by other portal pairs cannot cross. This still allows two portals inside the cube, and (usually) two portals outside the cube, but a portal in the cube and a portal outside the cube is a no-no. Anyone get what I mean?

I've got more to add to this theory. This only holds if the fabric of the universe is inflexible. However, if the universe is flexible, the ASHPD would use incredible amounts of power to squeeze two points together.

Also, if you had one O and two Os, I believe anything sent through the blue portal would come out one of the orange portals, but not both; Much like the double slit experiment in quantum mechanics.

Does that mean that an item would go through both when it's not being observed?

Exactly. Though the collisions between molecules in the object is enough to constitute an "observation".

youme wrote:
But if its like this:

P1 is in the past
P2 is in the present

That is different

Nope. It's the same, as Schmitz stated, we're just the great-great-great grandson. In our time, our great-great-great grandfather exists. He has aged through time and existed a long time before you came to be. You can talk to him (through his burial place), as you can walk from O to O.

Please don't let this die.

I have a couple of posts planned... I want to revisit Player1's thought experiment on how a cube-shaped volumetric portal would differ from a cube made out of three pairs of square-shaped portals. Like I said before, though, I think I need diagrams for this, and I haven't gotten around to doing it yet.

I've been really busy the last few weeks (I just started a new job), but I have a little break over <Holiday Name Here>. I hope to whip up some pictures and make a new post or two in this thread in the next three or four days.

Someone should make a map with six rooms that use a central cube with three pairs of interlinked (Though, sadly not square. Silly engine limitations) portals.

nods

DelphiAegis wrote:
Someone should make a map with six rooms that use a central cube with three pairs of interlinked (Though, sadly not square. Silly engine limitations) portals.

I thought each map had only 2 portals, one O *** and one O***.

My concept is that it's a power limitation.

After all, per Niven, if you put a portal on the floor and one on the ceiling, you've discovered perpetual motion. So my theory is that somewhere, GlaDOS is on top of a fusion power plant that does nothing but juice the portals.

Without enough power, the portal would fail - you couldn't exit. (or maybe you exit, but you freeze, or some of you doesnt' make it due to being converted to pay the energy debt).

Back to the spirit of the original post, what happens if you turn off a portal with something half in it?

I tried 'floating' a cube in a pair of floor portals then shooting the portal at the wall, and of course the cube just pops out. But if you watch a pair of portals, when you shoot a new one, the complimentary portal 'fades' for a second while the new portal is being shot.

So ... where's the other half of the cube during that process?

Other weird thoughts:

What if you had 2 portal guns, would they be on the same frequency or different? In other words, would it just be 2 guns both shooting the same 2 portals, or 2 totally different portals? And can we set this up with a Map?

== John ==

Ok is it possiable for some one to have a small peice of wall large enough to place a portal on it and then give that wall the propertie to be capable of being held via the portal gun??

What I am thinking is what if you took that piece of wall that had a portal on it and put it in another portal WHILE IN GAME!!!

That would be intresting if it could be done, no???

Would the game crash or something???

could it fit through the other portal?

nevermind, i guess it could if you put it through sideways and not straight up

sKoToSa wrote:
Ok is it possiable for some one to have a small peice of wall large enough to place a portal on it and then give that wall the propertie to be capable of being held via the portal gun??

What I am thinking is what if you took that piece of wall that had a portal on it and put it in another portal WHILE IN GAME!!!

That would be intresting if it could be done, no???

Would the game crash or something???

We have to assume that all portal physics that are currently in-game are static. I.E., portals on (relative) moving surfaces.

But assuming that portals could be placed on relative moving surfaces, just thinking about it for a minute or two, eventually there would come a point where it is far enough through that it would not fit correctly. Even sideways.. since it's coming out the portal on the object that is going through the blue portal.

Though perhaps my thoughts aren't explained very well.

Here's my thought for the day: Would it be possible via a confluence of portals to give yourself a blow-job? Mods may strike me down horribly if this is a bit risque, but honestly, if you could... wouldn't you?

Edit: Super awesome additional thought. What if (Like in the original Narbacular Drop) you could fire portals through other portals (Similar to the walk-barely-through-and-fire trick but without the walking barely through part). A lot of puzzles would be easier, perhaps, but.. more/less fun?

Hmm, if you're halfway a portal when it closes, the fold that was made in the 4th dimension, would disappear. But since you're at 2 places in threedimensional timespace at once, wouldn't those remain connected? Personally I think the portal would be forced to remain open, but perhaps for as far as your body size. Maybe it would lead to extreme stress on your body, enough for it to collapse (cut in 2). That is determined by wheter you need energy to keep a portal open once it's created. If that's so, and the energy is no longer supplied by an external source, it will have to be supplied by whatever is inside the 4th dimension (halfway the portals) (hence the extreme stress on your body). That demand of energy would probably grow so big, it would tear your body appart...

I just realize what I wrote above is total nonsense and I've wasted 5 minutes of my life writing it... whatever...

Ricotez wrote:
Hmm, if you're halfway a portal when it closes, the fold that was made in the 4th dimension, would disappear. But since you're at 2 places in threedimensional timespace at once, wouldn't those remain connected? Personally I think the portal would be forced to remain open, but perhaps for as far as your body size. Maybe it would lead to extreme stress on your body, enough for it to collapse (cut in 2). That is determined by wheter you need energy to keep a portal open once it's created. If that's so, and the energy is no longer supplied by an external source, it will have to be supplied by whatever is inside the 4th dimension (halfway the portals) (hence the extreme stress on your body). That demand of energy would probably grow so big, it would tear your body appart...

I just realize what I wrote above is total nonsense and I've wasted 5 minutes of my life writing it... whatever...

lol, I tried to make sence of what you posted, but I can't lol. I don't get the jist of what it is you are trying to say? First off, the 4th Dimension is TIME and the 3 Dimensional TimeSpace that you use is only 3 Dimensional Space, for our 3 Dimensions ocupy the space of Length, width, and Depth, but not time. Only the one Dimension of time ocupys the space and time or space-time.