• 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.

      • 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.