I love how it's just generally accepted now that Portal's Portals are the only things we're allowed to use for diagrams with portals.

Portal physics must be the thing that keeps this guy up at night and he had to explain it or he would die from curiosity

It’s shocking how well you explained such a trippy and abstract idea in such a short amount of time

0:12 R.I.P Bob 2022-2022

I can see why the game designers avoided dealing with this through the simple expedient of making the portal close if it's moved.

I like how he just talks about Portals like the ones from the game are the universal standard when we talk about Portals.

This is a troubling thought that I had as a child ever since the release of Portal 2. Thank you so much for solving this 😊

I'd love for you to make a similar video about a more general problem with so-called scaling portals, i.e. those that vary in size, and when something falls into one portal, it comes out of the other with a proportionally changed size. For example - the blue portal is 7 times bigger than the orange one, which means that if a 1.75 meter tall man entered the orange portal, a 12.25 meter tall giant would come out of the blue one. However, if the same 1.75 meter tall man entered the blue portal, a 0.25 meter tall dwarf would emerge from the orange portal. My question is - what would happen if you threw a smaller portal into a larger one, and would it be possible to throw a larger portal into a smaller one if they had the right shapes, and if so, what would be the effect. You will make me very happy if you make a film about it.

I'm convinced Henry is making real, working Portals and is posting videos of him testing new features for people to point out so he can fix it. Very effective debugging process.

Portals actually are everywhere, the problem is they're all back to back, with no way to separate them

I love that you used the Companion Cube! The Portal references are amazing!

Very well explanada and simplified

I like the fact that if you're thinking with portals, they always will be blue and orange. It's hard to imagine using other colors for em.

Glad to see Portal and Portal 2 are still iconic enough to be the way portals are drawn in 2022

Great Videos, keep it up!!!

An important detail here is that each portal must have a backing that blocks entry such that entry is possible only through the coloured fronts of the portals. Changing that changes so much.

i love how portal has completely changed how we interpret portals and we always see it as one orange and one blue one

Making this animation seems more difficult than making an actual portal. Very good job

I thought this was going to be an impossibility with a super complicated metaphysical answer. Makes me think of when questions that seem complicated to us will one have a 4 minute explanatory video :)

thank you for this explanation

Crazy how simple the explanation for this is, it really makes it feel like an actual science

Several things to mention: 1. I loved the explanation, super clear and logical, every part made sense. 2. The animations are beyond my comprehension, this is absolutely fascinating to me how smooth and accurate they were. 3. I guess you're really into portal physics, huh.

this makes so much sense

you always deliver content that's both thought-provoking and enjoyable!

Someone's been replaying Portal a lot haven't they?

I remember in the game "superliminal", when you put a portal in a portal, the world will crash and that is actually how you proceed with the game (to free yourself from a self-iterating room). Now I learn that the action will not cause the universe to crash :)

This is one of the greatest videos I've ever watched.

This was extremely entertaining and hilarious! Great idea

I would love to know what happens when you enter the portal that is half immersed in the other portal

Rest in Peace editor of this vid, the pain you went thru was not in vain. Good video.

Thx for this amazing video!

Thank you for making this video it was so cool 😎

I love it when someone adds complete science to science fiction. So intriguing.

This was actually a plot point in Problem Sleuth, where portals inside window frames (powered by electric plugs) were a recurring device. If you put a window through its counterpart, the stuff in this video happens, but since the windows have the same physicality as what you'd get at the hardware store, they clunk up against themselves and prevent infinite recursion... unless forced together with sufficient force. Then they explode. Violently.

I literally have always had this question. So many thanks!

welcome to “I don’t understand anything but this is cool”

can't wait for real portals to be invented just for either this to happen something catastrophic that breaks all laws of physics

This is probably your best video in years. It helps solve one of those nagging annoying ideas in the back of your head that you can't visualise yourself but is definitely possible to investigate and find a conclusion to. I feel like years of a little nugget of stress in my mind has vanished. This video is a god damned public service.

This was the questions ive being looking for

It was pretty interesting to watch. Thanks!

I was having a hard time following why the blue portal "bent" along the surface of the orange portal, so I had to draw it out myself continuing the blue portal through the orange portal in a "virtual space" where I could see how the angle of the blue portal loops in on itself and thus comes out of the orange portal at that lower angle.

These portal videos are a triumph

This was super entertaining, thank you

This is exactly the solution I came up with when I was little, but I've never seen it explained so clearly! Pretty dope

I like how this question is easier to answer than the question about the trajectory of the cube.

“Placing a *portal* within a *portal* instantly destroys both items and opens a gate to the Astral Plane. The gate originates where the one item was placed inside the other. Any creature within 10 feet of the gate is sucked through it to a random Location on the Astral Plane. The gate then closes. The gate is one-way only and can't be reopened.”

Amazing, very good.

Thank you for answering tbis question i had this question for a while

If a blue portal comes through an orange portal, it then comes through itself. However, the new, rotated part of the blue portal must also have itself passing through. Krzyhau simulated this in Triple Laser, and the game crashed because the blue portal had to rendered through the orange portal infinitely many times.

Now for the real question: How would the momentum of a portal passing through itself affect its trajectory?

A wonderful explanation

Cool video, thanks!

1:07 Blue Portal got a stiffy

Portal was based on Narbacular Drop, and you can shoot portals through other portals in that game. Valve hired the entire staff that made Narbacular Drop and they made Portal.

ive rewatched this video so many times

Thanks for the clues science steve

Warning ⚠️: Thinking with portals may blow your mind. Aperture Science would like to take this opportunity to stress it upon you that they are not responsible for any cranial mishaps due to rapid expansion of the brain. Thank you and good luck testing out there. I always love these portal paradox videos, although I guess this one isn't really a paradox like the others 🤔 still super interesting to see it fully rendered, you did a great job with that 👍 👏

I think what I found to be the most unusual about this video is how intuitive it was once explained. I've often thought about this, myself, but could never mentally work out what kind of behavior we should expect from an interaction like this. Lo and behold, as soon as it's explained here, it becomes obvious but I just couldn't wrap my head around it until it was explained.

TRES TRES BONNE VIDEO, GRACE A ELLE JAI SEDUIT LA FEMME DE MA VIE, MERCI

Finally, someone finally answered a thought I had since a child!

This explains the extremely recursive fractal effects and that video about being squished between two portals

I am so glad someone started doing the calculations on this question BEFORE i thought of asking it!

i love the companion cube reference

This is a brilliant watch right before my exam day

“If you put them back to back you shouldn’t be able to tell there is a portal at all and they retain this behavior…” is one of the most physicist ways of describing something.

Interesting that it always maintains its total surface area. That makes sense, of course - I just never even would've thought of it if you asked me this out of the blue.

i made eggs while watching this. best eggs ive ever made. thank you, you are very talented and i love your cooking/interdimentional portal theory

That explains why spot got so powerful

My question is: are there any unique portal 'paradoxes' or thought experiments which involve movable "co-op portals" from the sequel? I.e., cyan-purple linked portals and yellow-red linked portals working together. It seems like it would be easy to put a nonlinked portal through a portal, but I'm wondering if there's any situations where Interesting Things Happen when you have two pairs of portals. What about more than two?

I feel as though there will be some real world counterparts behind this logic and it could be useful.

This came into my had at 2AM. Thanks

It's crazy how im learning way more from these weird videos rather than in school or at math

I like that Valve's Portals have just become the standard when animating/making portals. theyre always orange and blue ^^

At first it was really hard to imagine, but adding the numbers helps make it easier to understand. It definitely gets super trippy when you started changing the directions it could go through the other portal.

It's like a reflection has to move parallel to the surface a little bit first before bouncing off

Awesome, thanks.

this is so cool. man. glad you had this idea to share- its really satisfying too when you see it all animated, like it just makes sense. very very cool.

Did this in unreal engine a few years ago and it was super trippy, exactly like this demonstration shows.

Well done.

im subbing, you're actually cooler than i thought

1:05 man why does shit like that make me giggle

this process may get even more chaotic in the face of attempting to pass solid objects or just to see Einstein cry, fluids, nutonian or otherwise for extra fun through said cascading portals. nonnutonian fluids may just be a messy idea.

best sponsor ever, at the end of the video

It would have been nice if you put numbers on the orange portal too, that way we can keep track of which part of the blue portal the blue portal should be coming out of.

I'm giggling so much at the animation @1:10

Impressive. Most impressive. Mid-way through the vid, I imagined (in my own thought experiment) the portals could go crazy, flapping about trying to equalize, then spin along each other, eventually blowing up.

Think makes so much sense once you start to think about it

This concept really screws with my mind.

Now you're thinking with portals

I used to think about this a ton as a kid. Thought it would be possible if you slid the portal in at a shallow angle facing itself, but I couldn't have simulated it as well as this!

Thanks for figuring it , now I may be able to go back home 👽

Man, thank you now I can sleep peacefully

I like how we are still asking (and answering) questions related to impossible to represent in reality subjects, such as portals. This of course is not limited to portals, but I have mentioned it to stay on topic.

did see a screenshot once from the portal game where someone had managed to make the portals overlap a little bit. it looked like an infinite number of portals, I dont know how the game managed that without crashing, unless it all counts as the 2 original portals and what is seen is just visual effect and doesnt cause any strain on the engine.

This feels like the DND equivalent of turning a bag of holding inside out

Actual version:**SNAP**

I love how in the beginning MinutePhysics literally showed us what would happen if a portal went into a portal, and the rest of the video is him explaining what would happen, and giving another demonstration.

me rotating my blanket at night be like: 2:55

Very cool and interesting 👍

It produces exactly the same result as passing a Dalek through a Flying Spaghetti Monster. Just an unholy mess which is invisible, inaudible, and indescribable.