![]() ![]() Against all intuition, you then leap into the pit. How will you cross?įirst you open a portal that’s above and behind you on the wall. Picture the same test chamber, but with one difference: the walls, floors and ceiling by the exit are not “portal-able.” Certain surfaces are designed to be impervious to the portal effect. This means that gravity becomes your personal propulsion system. When you enter one portal, you emerge from the corresponding portal at exactly the same speed. For example, an important concept is the conservation of momentum. The game then begins to layer on more mind-bending situations that both elucidate, and take advantage of, basic physics. That’s easy, and that’s pretty much where you start in Portal 2. You walk through the hole beside you and pop out by your destination. All you have to do is create one portal on a wall next to you, then fire the gun across the chasm to create the corresponding portal on a wall next to the exit. Let’s say you are in a rectangular test chamber, standing on a platform separated from the exit by a deep pit that you cannot possibly leap over. It is as if the portals formed opposite sides of a trans-dimensional hole. When you pass through one, you emerge from the other, no matter how far away it is. But when you create the other portal, the two ovals become linked. ![]() One portal by itself does nothing it is merely a swirling oval about the height and width of an adult. Throw the same ball as hard as you can, and that dog or child will try to defend against it or dodge, instinctively understanding complex calculations of velocity and potential impact. Gently toss a ball to a dog or a small child, and he or she will catch it without the faintest conscious understanding of acceleration, momentum and gravity. Yet the brain seems to understand this science at a basic level. ![]() Instead, thinking of physics conjures nightmarish flashbacks of high school memorization. And while some folks can understand and even “speak” math at the level where nuance and beauty emerge (somewhere around integral calculus), a lot of us can’t. The problem with physics for many people is that it has always been explained in the language of mathematics. What it will test, in knee-slapping and grin-inducing fashion, is your mind. It will not test your reflexes or eye-hand coordination. If you don’t consider thinking hard to be an entertainment experience, Portal 2 is not for you. Or you could play Portal 2, the achingly brilliant new game from the Valve Corporation that wrings more fun out of physics than all of the shoot-’em-ups in the world. Physics - the basic behavior of this particular reality -can be beautiful. ![]()
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