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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?
Portals already are infinite energy machines. Just out a portal up higher than the other one, and you get infinite energy generation via gravity.
dammit, you just explained why they can't exist
...
Fuck.
Portals already break the laws of physics. The virtual world inside the orange portal is moving at the same velocity as the trolley, think about how much kinetic energy that is
I don't think the portal contains anything within itself, though. The portal is a non-entity - it's just that if you pass through the portal, you suddenly find yourself in a different location, as if that location were right next to you. The portal itself has no other properties of its own, I'd think.
I think in the hypothetical scenario of a magically self sustaining portal that seemingly generates its own energy to keep active, energy would be applied to the people via the portal
This still assumes that the portal is an infinite-energy machine, though, which I think is unwarranted and creates more difficulty than is necessary. I would assume that the portal itself has no properties and does not act on other objects.
How do you suppose the portal maintains itself?
I think that either
a. The portal maintains itself via energy supplied remotely by the portal gun or
b. Once created, a portal does not require energy to exist. It's simply an anomaly in space-time. A strange loophole whereby one location is closer to another location that it's supposed to be or
c. The portal runs on chuckle-power generated by Cave Johnson's witticisms
I think the idea that the portal generates infinite energy is too complicating and problematic to be assumed.