Physics, With Wormholes by You

By SETH SCHIESEL

Physics — the basic behavior of this particular reality —can be beautiful. Read Newton or Einstein. 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.

Warning: This is a brain game. If you don’t consider thinking hard to be an entertainment experience, Portal 2 is not for you. It will not test your reflexes or eye-hand coordination. What it will test, in knee-slapping and grin-inducing fashion, is your mind.

The problem with physics for many people is that it has always been explained in the language of mathematics. 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. Instead, thinking of physics conjures nightmarish flashbacks of high school memorization.

Yet the brain seems to understand this science at a basic level. 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. 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.

In other words, we all know physics, even if we don’t know we know it. But how can it be made elegant and enjoyable without the math?

Enter Portal 2.

Valve released the original Portal in 2007 as part of a five-game bundle. This version — released recently for Windows, Mac OS, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 — is the full-fledged standalone sequel. The premise is that you are a woman trapped in the distant future in an abandoned robot factory buried miles beneath the Midwestern plains. The only other characters you encounter are two deranged artificial intelligences vying for control of the complex.

You must escape to the surface. And that requires navigating not only vast underground landscapes but also a series of meticulously designed test chambers that the robots have devised to measure human intelligence.

To achieve that you have two tools: your brain and the device called the portal gun, a unique concept in video games.

This is going to sound complicated, but stay with me. The portal gun emits a beam that can create two different portals — a blue one or an orange one — on a flat environmental surface, like a wall, floor or ceiling. You point the gun at, say, a wall across the room and pull either the blue trigger or the orange trigger, and the beam comes out, and the portal appears.

One portal by itself does nothing; it is merely a swirling oval about the height and width of an adult. But when you create the other portal, the two ovals become linked. When you pass through one, you emerge from the other, no matter how far away it is. It is as if the portals formed opposite sides of a trans-dimensional hole.

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. 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. You walk through the hole beside you and pop out by your destination. Voilà.

That’s easy, and that’s pretty much where you start in Portal 2. The game then begins to layer on more mind-bending situations that both elucidate, and take advantage of, basic physics. For example, an important concept is the conservation of momentum. When you enter one portal, you emerge from the corresponding portal at exactly the same speed. This means that gravity becomes your personal propulsion system.

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. How will you cross?

First you open a portal that’s above and behind you on the wall. Against all intuition, you then leap into the pit. As you fall, accelerating, you aim at the floor and open a portal where you are about to land and plummet through, only to be launched horizontally out of the portal you originally created. Your speed propels you across the pit to land by the exit.

That may sound impossibly complex and not at all fun. But Portal 2 is doing the math for you. Moreover, the game is presenting these puzzles in virtual three-dimensional environments that tap into our intuitive understanding of physics. Just as important, the game wraps these puzzles in a mordantly hilarious story line (who doesn’t like crazy robots?) distinguished by pitch-perfect voice acting.

Somewhere out there an innovative, dynamic high school physics teacher will use Portal 2 as the linchpin of an entire series of lessons and will immediately become the most important science teacher those lucky students have ever had. For those of us who have left school behind, Portal 2 is one of the finest brain games around.

You might even learn something.

Source: http://goo.gl/eWvC7

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