this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2023
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I think it has to be A. You figure that if it were B, the people on the track would suddenly be traveling at a high velocity, but the train's velocity wouldn't be impacted at all, since there was no impact between the train and the people. Wouldn't this mean that the portal had created energy, which is impossible?
But portals can create energy. Put one above the other face to face and drop an object into the bottom one, it now has infinite potential energy.
No way, the portal displaces space meaning it just allows gravity to work unimpeded adding more kinetic energy to the object. The potential energy during a "falling cycle" is infinite but infinitely removed when the spacial disruption is broken.
That's not how you calculate potential energy. If you were to put both portals on either side of a moving platform, you would pass right through it, because they are both moving at the same relative velocity. But if you make one of them stationary, you work like trowing a ball forward in a moving vehicle.
In this example, if you calculate as if both portals are stationary, the people are moving towards the portal, the portal isn't moving, and thus they fly out the other side.