Now we're thinking with Portals!
Ever since I started being interested in the Portal games, I’ve wondered about how awesome a portal gun would be in real life. Face it. If you’ve played Portal, you probably thought that too, but I went further. Me and a few friends (who aren’t in this magazine) brainstormed ideas about how a portal gun could work in real life. Seriously, we did. It probably wouldn’t look like the one from the game, but it would need to look the way it would for it to work.
The first thing we kind of worked out were the titular portals. As I will say over and over again, we haven’t thought about this all that much, but bear with me. The portal would be made with some gravitation energy ball thing (see, we haven’t really thought this through) that would be contained by an electromagnetic field and shot out the front of the gun. Upon hitting the wall, it would form one of the two portals. By using the same gravity frequency (one of the other guys thought of it, no idea how) for the other gravity ball, we could probably create two linked portals. Why the electromagnetic field? To stop the gravity ball becoming huge and making a black hole, of course.
To power all of this, we would use some form of very capacious battery or supercapacitor to provide the energy for the gravity balls. Currently, I’m using carbon nanotube batteries as a placeholder in the design. They use carbon nanotubes as electrodes. Carbon, in certain forms, is an excellent conductor of electricity. A pencil line will conduct electricity, for example. We’re not sure about making the gravity balls, or cooling, or other things, but we’re getting there. Of course, the portals would need to be provided with energy to keep the portals open in order to comply with certain laws of physics.