FREEMAN'S MIND: EPISODE 61

[Goliath Curolo]

 

The end of Portal 2 makes this pretty clear. Earth's skies are a lush blue, there a white clouds, blue oceans, a bright moon, huge fields for farming (looks to be for post-industrial use, considering its size), Rattman is confirmed dead from a turret wound, and we know Portal 2 takes place well after Half Life 2.

 

Chell was in stasis long enough for the self-sufficient system to be torn to shreds. That is, of course, after a social hierarchy was established and different departments were created. The announcer is partially corrupt, GLaDOS' core corruption was at 80% (There were way more than the few Chell broke in Portal), and large amounts of Ivy have infested the facility.

 

Not only that, but GLaDOS has the two robots now and says she "doesn't need Chell" anymore. Chell was the last subject, otherwise GLaDOS would have grabbed someone else.

 

Seriously, are you trolling me?

 

No, nothing of this has been confirmed. He could pretty well be hiding the whole time or even long gone from the Aperture. I mean, it's very vague to afirm anything. What about all those paintings and that weird sound?

 

The same goes to the Earth thing. The Combine may be ceased from the planet but that doesn't mean they dont exist anymore. We just saw some shots of a clean Earth and that's it, And like some said here, the Xenias creature have already adapted and made into the ecosystem. You were afirming things that were not confirmed, based on some very vague matters and because of that they are just assumptions.

 

Look at these, we can just theorize

http://half-life.wikia.com/wiki/Doug_Rattmann

http://half-life.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Half-Life_universe

[consistenthistorian]

Awesome episode again Ross, good job.

 

Re Momentum and teleporters, I think Freeman has got a bit muddled. There are two types of momentum to consider here, the momentum of his centre of mass (CoM) and the momentum of his constituent parts in the frame where his CoM momentum is zero. Freeman has experience so far that teleporters don't conserve CoM momentum, but that doesn't mean they kill ALL momentum. I can't see an obvious problem with teleporters cancelling CoM momentum*, so "speedy thing goes in, stationary thing comes out", but there are some big problems with cancelling ALL momentum (someone already mentioned that motion of particles is basically temperature, so Freeman would freeze solid, but there's also the issue that it would violate the Heisenberg uncertainty principle...)

 

* I mean, you'd need to shunt it somewhere, but this seems the least of your worries if you were actually trying to design a teleporter...

Okay this goes back to the "multiple breakthroughs" line again. I considered that maybe it only detects motion on a certain level, but what level? At the cellular level, who knows fast your cells are moving? Hell I think sneezes are at 100mph. Nerve connections and the brain in general must move pretty damn fast as well. I guess the thing is I don't see how you would cancel one type of momentum, but not the other; additionally I don't see how there would be technology to DISTINGUISH the two or even DETECT the difference in the first place. I really tried to think this one out and I couldn't come up with any scenario where momentum is cancelled AND you come out alive on the other end short of having some positional tracking and computational system way, way beyond anything we could dream about. Let us not forget, Black Mesa still uses giant tape reels on their computers.

 

Ok, so maybe it's just masochism, but I'll try and persevere with this!

 

The biggest problem we have in trying to understand this technology is that it's obvious that in order to produce a working teleporter there must have been some kind of major discovery that changes the laws of physics as we currently understand them. Quantum teleportation as we currently understand it won't cut it here, mainly because you need a way of communicating a huge amount of classical data between sender and receiver. This might just about be feasible between two points on earth, if you allow near unlimited computational power, but it's not going to let you send anything to Xen because you'd need a pre-existing communication channel.

 

Unfortunately, it's hard to avoid the temptation to use a 'breakthrough in physics' as a deus ex machina, which just let's you do anything you want to. So let's try and see if we can't agree some assumptions about what sort of physics we have in the half-life universe, and then work from there. You can criticise these assumptions, but at least I'm being definite.

 

1) Quantum Theory as we know it is basically correct. If this doesn't hold I have basically no idea how to do physics. Incidentally, it's a theorem of quantum theory that you can't clone Freeman's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-cloning_theorem) so no multiple Gordon's I'm afraid.

 

2) Lorentz Invariance holds at least on scales that matter (I mean here from subatomic up to solar system scale.) There is very good experimental evidence for this of course, but it is just an assumption.

 

1) + 2) mean any physical theory (apart from gravity) is going to be expressible as a quantum field theory. That's useful because it rules out any sort of quantum teleportation explanation for teleporters. (Not just because of the problem highlighted above, but also because of other limitations of relativistic quantum information like the No-Summoning theorem http://arxiv.org/abs/1101.4612).

 

So given that, any teleporter technology is going to have to be based around gravity. Here's the part where things get sketchy of course, since we are now speculating about the details of unknown 'future' physics! The easiest way for a teleporter to work would be if there were extra microscopic dimensions that could connect different points in 'our' space (a bit like wormholes.) (Incidentally string theory won't generally get you this since the extra dimensions are usually tensor product-ed onto ours, so moving around in the extra dimensions doesn't change your co-ordinates in our dimensions any.)

 

Anyway, regardless of how it works, any working teleporter is almost certainly going to be able to cancel centre of mass momentum, but leave the random motion of atoms etc (i.e. temperature) alone. I say this because teleporters are going to have to do funny things to your momentum anyway in order to be useful, since suppose, e.g. I wanted to teleport to the other side of the world, the teleporters might be stationary in the labs at either side of the world, but they will be moving relative to each other at about 2000 mph! (http://image.gsfc.nasa.gov/poetry/ask/a10840.html) If I teleport from one to the other it's important that I come out stationary relative to the right teleporter! So a useful teleporter is going to have to be able to at least adjust your centre of mass momentum by an arbitrary amount anyway, so I don't see why it couldn't also add or subtract any momentum relative to your input teleporter.

 

Of course I have no idea how this might work in practice, and that's part of the 'future physics' stuff that's just speculation. Still, I think we can still usefully rule some options out, and that gives us a better idea about what sort of new physics we might be dealing with.

[consistenthistorian]

Also, in answer to this:

 

At the cellular level, who knows fast your cells are moving? Hell I think sneezes are at 100mph. Nerve connections and the brain in general must move pretty damn fast as well. I guess the thing is I don't see how you would cancel one type of momentum, but not the other; additionally I don't see how there would be technology to DISTINGUISH the two or even DETECT the difference in the first place. I really tried to think this one out and I couldn't come up with any scenario where momentum is cancelled AND you come out alive on the other end short of having some positional tracking and computational system way, way beyond anything we could dream about. Let us not forget, Black Mesa still uses giant tape reels on their computers.

 

Ok so your centre of mass momentum is the sum of the momentum of all your constituent atoms. Actually doing the sum would be horrific because, as you say, you'd need to know the motion of every atom in your body. But here's the thing, you can get the result very easily from other means. Assuming you know the (GR) stress energy tensor at a few points round the teleporter*, you should be able to read off your centre of mass momentum easily enough, even though you can't know the motion of all the constituent atoms in your body. It's a bit like how the gravitational attraction of the earth on an orbiting satellite has contributions from every mountain, molehill and speck of dust on earth, but as far as the satellite is concerned the net effect looks like a point particle located at where the centre of mass of the earth is with a single fixed mass. (I'm talking about Gauss' law here.) If you were hovering somehow above's the earth's surface you could compute the sum of the masses of everything below you by dropping a ball and seeing how fast it accelerated. Thus it's very very easy to compute the sum of all the masses of the stuff that makes up earth, even though it's very very hard to actually know all the individual masses themselves. It's a broadly similar thing for momentum, knowing the individual momenta - very very hard, knowing the sum (i.e. centre of mass momentum) very easy.

 

As I mentioned in a post above, being able to change this centre of mass momentum is essential if you want a useful teleporter (i.e. can teleport you to places on earth more than a few miles apart), so you have all the ingredients here to read and cancel your centre of mass momentum, without having to know or adjust the momenta of your constituent atoms in the frame where the centre of mass momentum is zero.

 

* This is about the minimum you'd need to know to actually teleport anything.

[ElFreakazoide]

 

1) Quantum Theory as we know it is basically correct. If this doesn't hold I have basically no idea how to do physics. Incidentally, it's a theorem of quantum theory that you can't clone Freeman's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-cloning_theorem) so no multiple Gordon's I'm afraid.

 

Although the no-cloning theorem applies to teleportation in local space and local hidden variables, bear in mind that no-go theorems in general pertain to local hidden variables and can be generalized in Bell's theorem as "No physical theory of local hidden variables can ever reproduce all of the predictions of quantum mechanics." This pertains mainly to a problem of interpretation, since all proof of the no-go theorems is mathematical and not experimental and cannot be applied to any possible theory that involves nonlocal hidden variables like the DeBroglie-Bohm interpretation and others.

 

In reality many interpretations of quantum mechanics are nonlocal either explicitly or implicitly and have severe problems when you try to hold them up to scrutiny in that you just can't, because the experiments generaly gives us answers that are simultaneously in favor and agaisnt them. The most important of them being Popper's experiment. The reaction to its results was:

 

"Indeed, it is astonishing to see that the experimental results agree with Popper’s prediction. Through quantum entanglement one may learn the precise knowledge of a photon’s position and would therefore expect a greater uncertainty in its momentum under the usual Copenhagen interpretation of the uncertainty relations. However, the measurement shows that the momentum does not experience a corresponding increase of uncertainty. Is this a violation of the uncertainty principle?" Use of quantum correlations for faster-than-light communication is thought to be flawed because of the no-communication theorem in quantum mechanics. However the theorem is not applicable to this experiment. In this experiment, the "sender" tries to signal 0 and 1 by narrowing a slit, or widening it, thus changing the probability distribution among the "receiver's" detectors. If the no-communication theorem were applicable, then no matter if the sender widens the slit or narrows it, the receiver should see the same probability distribution among his detectors. This is true, regardless of whether the device was used for communication (i.e. sans coincidence circuit), or not (i.e. in coincidence).

 

So we have a case where both locality and nonlocality are simultaneously untrue when applied to quantum mechanics, the results of Popper's experiment seem to be the result of magic. The loopholes in Bell's experiments on his theorem further reinforce that. It just means we still don't fully grasp the nature of quantum mechanics regardless of whatever interpretation we choose to accept, our math just isn't holding up to scutiny when it comes to testing the central formalisms of quantum mechanics.

 

We just simply can't rule out a quantum teleportation explanation for Half-Life teleporters, hell Xen itself looks like a very convincing nonlocal and nonbound explanation for the propper effects of quantum mechanics that even appears to be involving brane cosmology and thus an expanded version of M theory.

 

I belive it would be too hasty to just simply rule them out and call it a day given all these current unsolved problems in physics. Thats the problem with determinism in science, you can't call it a "myth busted".

[kingkolton9]

 

The end of Portal 2 makes this pretty clear. Earth's skies are a lush blue, there a white clouds, blue oceans, a bright moon, huge fields for farming (looks to be for post-industrial use, considering its size), Rattman is confirmed dead from a turret wound, and we know Portal 2 takes place well after Half Life 2.

 

Chell was in stasis long enough for the self-sufficient system to be torn to shreds. That is, of course, after a social hierarchy was established and different departments were created. The announcer is partially corrupt, GLaDOS' core corruption was at 80% (There were way more than the few Chell broke in Portal), and large amounts of Ivy have infested the facility.

 

Not only that, but GLaDOS has the two robots now and says she "doesn't need Chell" anymore. Chell was the last subject, otherwise GLaDOS would have grabbed someone else.

 

Seriously, are you trolling me?

 

No, nothing of this has been confirmed. He could pretty well be hiding the whole time or even long gone from the Aperture. I mean, it's very vague to afirm anything. What about all those paintings and that weird sound?

 

The same goes to the Earth thing. The Combine may be ceased from the planet but that doesn't mean they dont exist anymore. We just saw some shots of a clean Earth and that's it, And like some said here, the Xenias creature have already adapted and made into the ecosystem. You were afirming things that were not confirmed, based on some very vague matters and because of that they are just assumptions.

 

Look at these, we can just theorize

http://half-life.wikia.com/wiki/Doug_Rattmann

http://half-life.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Half-Life_universe

 

There was no power, IIRC, when Doug went into the relaxation vault. I say you he ded.

 

I don't recall any weird sound? That, and the only Rattman scribbilings and dens I remember are from the start of Portal 2.

 

When did I say the combine didn't exist anymore? They certainly aren't on Earth.

[Sandvich18]

 

The end of Portal 2 makes this pretty clear. Earth's skies are a lush blue, there a white clouds, blue oceans, a bright moon, huge fields for farming (looks to be for post-industrial use, considering its size), Rattman is confirmed dead from a turret wound, and we know Portal 2 takes place well after Half Life 2.

 

Chell was in stasis long enough for the self-sufficient system to be torn to shreds. That is, of course, after a social hierarchy was established and different departments were created. The announcer is partially corrupt, GLaDOS' core corruption was at 80% (There were way more than the few Chell broke in Portal), and large amounts of Ivy have infested the facility.

 

Not only that, but GLaDOS has the two robots now and says she "doesn't need Chell" anymore. Chell was the last subject, otherwise GLaDOS would have grabbed someone else.

 

Seriously, are you trolling me?

 

No, nothing of this has been confirmed. He could pretty well be hiding the whole time or even long gone from the Aperture. I mean, it's very vague to afirm anything. What about all those paintings and that weird sound?

 

The same goes to the Earth thing. The Combine may be ceased from the planet but that doesn't mean they dont exist anymore. We just saw some shots of a clean Earth and that's it, And like some said here, the Xenias creature have already adapted and made into the ecosystem. You were afirming things that were not confirmed, based on some very vague matters and because of that they are just assumptions.

 

Look at these, we can just theorize

http://half-life.wikia.com/wiki/Doug_Rattmann

http://half-life.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Half-Life_universe

 

Please, use the proper wiki:

http://combineoverwiki.net/wiki/Doug_Rattmann

http://combineoverwiki.net/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Half-Life_and_Portal_universe

[Goliath Curolo]

I don't recall any weird sound? That, and the only Rattman scribbilings and dens I remember are from the start of Portal 2.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKoFdTLouaQ

[Goliath Curolo]

 

Please, use the proper wiki:

http://combineoverwiki.net/wiki/Doug_Rattmann

http://combineoverwiki.net/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Half-Life_and_Portal_universe

 

What is the difference?

[KevinJRattman]

 

Please, use the proper wiki:

http://combineoverwiki.net/wiki/Doug_Rattmann

http://combineoverwiki.net/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Half-Life_and_Portal_universe

 

What is the difference?

 

combineoverwiki.net is official, while half-life wikia is unofficial.

[kingkolton9]

 

Please, use the proper wiki:

http://combineoverwiki.net/wiki/Doug_Rattmann

http://combineoverwiki.net/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Half-Life_and_Portal_universe

 

What is the difference?

 

combineoverwiki.net is official, while half-life wikia is unofficial.

 

I know of a few cases where the official wiki is worse than the unofficial one. Beyond that, is there any difference?

[techdude]

 

The end of Portal 2 makes this pretty clear. Earth's skies are a lush blue, there a white clouds, blue oceans, a bright moon, huge fields for farming (looks to be for post-industrial use, considering its size), Rattman is confirmed dead from a turret wound, and we know Portal 2 takes place well after Half Life 2.

 

Chell was in stasis long enough for the self-sufficient system to be torn to shreds. That is, of course, after a social hierarchy was established and different departments were created. The announcer is partially corrupt, GLaDOS' core corruption was at 80% (There were way more than the few Chell broke in Portal), and large amounts of Ivy have infested the facility.

 

Not only that, but GLaDOS has the two robots now and says she "doesn't need Chell" anymore. Chell was the last subject, otherwise GLaDOS would have grabbed someone else.

 

Seriously, are you trolling me?

 

No, nothing of this has been confirmed. He could pretty well be hiding the whole time or even long gone from the Aperture. I mean, it's very vague to afirm anything. What about all those paintings and that weird sound?

 

The same goes to the Earth thing. The Combine may be ceased from the planet but that doesn't mean they dont exist anymore. We just saw some shots of a clean Earth and that's it, And like some said here, the Xenias creature have already adapted and made into the ecosystem. You were afirming things that were not confirmed, based on some very vague matters and because of that they are just assumptions.

 

Look at these, we can just theorize

http://half-life.wikia.com/wiki/Doug_Rattmann

http://half-life.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Half-Life_universe

 

There was no power, IIRC, when Doug went into the relaxation vault. I say you he ded.

 

I don't recall any weird sound? That, and the only Rattman scribbilings and dens I remember are from the start of Portal 2.

 

When did I say the combine didn't exist anymore? They certainly aren't on Earth.

 

I figured I could shed some light on this issue.

 

At the end of the lab rat comic, Rattman was shot by turrets and was injured. The only confirmed hit that I am aware of is a hit to his upper leg. This might not be fatal if he were put into cryogenic suspension immediately. We know he successfully patched Chell's cryo unit into the reserve grid and then he climbs into a cryo pod himself and goes to "sleep". There is no reason to believe that any of the other units, including the one he was in, had power. HOWEVER, the advice of the cube was "reset the fuses" so it is possible that his cryo unit did have power.

 

The weird sounds were something (an easter egg) that you hear in the very last Rattman den. They are the crazed mutterings and ramblings of a madman. Specifically, on the Portal OST (I love it so much!) this easter egg track is labeled "ghost of Rattman". The name would seem to imply that Rattman dies, however, we cannot discount the possibility that the sounds are something else. I know in some scifi there are discussions of phycological patterns being left behind in areas where a person goes often, so it is possible that these are something else. Or perhaps it is Chell reading/hallucinating the various scrawling in her mind.

 

At any rate, there is no hard evidence one way or the other.

 

As a side note, while I know that Portal 2 takes place later, we don't know for sure the combine are not on earth. There are many places outside of the cities that show normal, blue skies in the half life series even during the combine occupation. After the citadel blows up that it gets really cloudy but clouds can change. City 17 is in Europe, but Aperture Science is in Michigan so it is likely that there is different levels of pollution and other problems.

 

 

Loved the episode as ever, Ross Scott! I'm looking forward to your Halloween RGD episode. I know it will be great.

[VeryShyPerson]

About the Rattmann issue: There's enough clues in the game that actually could imply he suicided by portaling the moon. I'll explain more later, I'm not quite my most coherent at the moment.

[kingkolton9]

About the Rattmann issue: There's enough clues in the game that actually could imply he suicided by portaling the moon. I'll explain more later, I'm not quite my most coherent at the moment.

 

I want to hear this! I am very interested. Did you come up with it or did someone else?

[VeryShyPerson]

I can't quite remember that. I'm pretty sure I came up with it myself but then found that someone had gotten to it before me. With this memory of mine though maybe I heard it, then forgot about it.

 

So anyways. First thing is in one of the testchambers you can find a radio that just plays a lot of gibbery stuff. Turns out that's an SSTV image of this:

 

A companion cube on the moon. Clue one.

 

Second is where you find the portal gun.

 

 

 

 

And then you look up:

 

 

 

 

So yeah, that's about it really.

[RandomGuy]

The footage for the next episode is done, though I haven't made progress on the voicework yet. I doubt there will be another FM episode before Halloween, but we'll see. Expect more in November!

 

So, apparently, there will be no new Freeman's Mind episode before the new Game Dungeon episode. Unless it's going to be posted late at night or on the same day as said Game Dungeon episode. November's gonna be a really FM-heavy month, seeing as how Ross promised to get through HL1 by the end of December, and he has at least nine or ten episodes to go. Which means he'll have to produce new episodes weekly at the very least (assuming 62 is about done). I can't wait!

[ScottD.Betson]

The footage for the next episode is done, though I haven't made progress on the voicework yet. I doubt there will be another FM episode before Halloween, but we'll see. Expect more in November!

 

So, apparently, there will be no new Freeman's Mind episode before the new Game Dungeon episode. Unless it's going to be posted late at night or on the same day as said Game Dungeon episode. November's gonna be a really FM-heavy month, seeing as how Ross promised to get through HL1 by the end of December, and he has at least nine or ten episodes to go. Which means he'll have to produce new episodes weekly at the very least (assuming 62 is about done). I can't wait!

I cant wait for the Game Dungeon episode, it should be badass, Hopefully it will top CarnEvil

[Dark Heart]

Ross, when you switched Robin's line from "Get back here you big, orange fuck" to "back rubs", did you have him re-record his line or did you extract it from one of his Shepard videos?

[AP_Pastor]

I think he had Robin record "back rub". That's why he was credited with "Mystery Voice"