And he still fucked it up history is written by the victor everyone forgot when after slaughtered thousands of aliens, military personnel, scientists, and even his friends if barney didnt get out when he did he might've been caught in the Gordon storm too
im surprised you didn't bring up gordon's thesis he wrote for MIT! which, as we all know, is the Observation of Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Entanglement on Supraquantum Structures by Induction Through Nonlinear Transuranic Crystal of Extremely Long Wavelength (ELW) Pulse from Mode-Locked Source Array. of course.
While this video is very well made, and using the game as a platform to talk about real science is very fun, it's worth noting that the point of Half-Life is that it deals in EXTRA-universal physics. Xen is not another planet, or even another dimension, it is described as "the space in between universes". Which is why it's referred to as a border world: Nothing in Xen is native to Xen, not even the physics present there. Everything is just bleeding through into Xen from different universes that independently had intelligent life that discovered teleportation, and thus discovered Xen. The Resonance Cascade caused a massive influx of portal events because Black Mesa was already experimenting with teleportation using the physics of Xen, so when the experiment created a cascading effect of energy, it ripped open the portal they ALREADY had to an uncontrollable level.
Half-Life: Humanity's insatiable desire to test the unknown will inevitably lead to horrific consequences beyond our comprehension and ability to solve Half-Life 2: Living in Bulgaria fucking sucks lmao
The prune juice sound from 4:07 is very similar to the sound playing when the anti mass spectrometer is breaking down in the Black Mesa Remake. The crowbar collective may have thought of this sound for the resonance cascade starting.
You see the g-man lurking around, and all of the scientists go on about "administrator this", "administrator that" and how he's specifically requested and is rushing this sample test past the safety protocols before the cascade ever happens. I guess it's a headcanon, but it's always felt pretty clear to me that this "resonance cascade" has never been the cause of the invasion at all (or that it might not have even happened), but it was all just orchestrated as an event to pin things on.
The ressonace cascade did open the portals, but it was set up by G man. He (it?) specifically delivered the crystal that caused the cascade and was meddling with many things to set up the scenario before it even happened.
@@whitefang1657I always assumed it was on of his "employers" who wanted the resonance cascade to occur and so gman set it up. Whether that employer is the Combine or some entirely different race or entity who knows
judging by breen apparently alleging that g-man works for the highest bidder and that the combine might employ Gordon’s services going forward at the end of hl2, and by how g-man seems to imply in ep2 that there has been no change of plans for him since black mesa by explaining his rescuing of Alyx from black mesa to Gordon, I think he was probably not hired by the combine to cause the resonance cascade, in fact, I think I remember it being stated somewhere that the combine were actually entirely unaware of humanity’s universe until some time after the resonance cascade
@swagtachiuchiha1501 In Half Life Alyx, we see that the G-Man is contained by something that looks almost exactly like a Bacteriophage. If we take this to be literal, and that "employer" is just the most accurate term that humans are likely to understand (the G-Man is bad with normal human speech, after all,) then it stands to reason that "employer" means "that which connects to the G-Man," as opposed to a specific being/organization. If this is the case, the G-Man would basically be the injected code of something trying to infect the material universe, probably with the aim to corrupt Earth's physical laws. Nobody would thus be hiring him, per say, but would instead be paying him by breaking more and more of Earth's physical laws.
In case you ever want to revisit the topic: You mentioned that Half-Life 1 doesn't go into detail on how teleportation works, but it is elaborated on in the expansion Blue Shift (Dr Rosenberg, end of Chapter Four "Captive Freight") and in Half-Life 2 (Dr Mossman, start of Chapter Five "Black Mesa East"). Half-Life has three, possibly four, distinct forms of portal technology. The Black Mesa method (refined by former Black Mesa researchers during the time-skip between HL1 and HL2), The Aperture Science method, and the Combine method. You've already covered Aperture's portal tech, but the Black Mesa and Combine methods are reliant on what's called the Xen relay, which is that one has to teleport to Xen and back as opposed to a direct Point A-to-B. Black Mesa's earlier methods relied on strapping devices to the crystals to give a reliable simulation of local teleportation, but those techniques were improved both in the months leading up to the Black Mesa Incident and in the 20 years following. Where the two differ is that the later more refined Black Mesa/Resistance method uses Xen as dimensional slingshot to avoid actually passing through, while Combine portals are string-based. Mossman, who is the main source of information on Combine portals, makes specific mentions of Calabi-Yau manifolds, dark energy, and entanglement. It's mentioned somewhere, though I forget where, that the Combine can't actually teleport through local space and are reliant on less effective means of transport once they are actually in their target universe. The possible fourth method is an Aperture Science experiment mentioned in HL2:E2, something akin to the Philadelphia experiment, that had faded into urban legend by the early 2000s, but almost nothing is known about it beyond it being some indescribably powerful technology, so we cannot definitively say that it is significantly different from the three known methods.
From bits and pieces I've seen around the internet regarding the Borealis (mostly discussion and epistle3 which is not official lore), they talk about some sort of "bootstrap device", time loops and alternate realities warping the ship and the people on board, so it seems that aperture went beyond the whole "get from A to B" and instead directly to "get from A to The Plot of Event Horizon"
I always felt that the thing resonating in the resonance cascade was the fabric of reality. They intended to just excite a sample but instead that sample excited space and time to the point it broke
@@TheShuckmeister Well, I mean I think yes there’s a good amount of fiction but especially in Half-life 2 there’s a bit more research done into quantum mechanics for the story telling at least. They get some parts about Entanglement and the calabi-yau manifolds pretty accurate. Dr. Breen at the end *Spoilers ahead by the way* mentions being teleported at the point of “synapse” to another Universe… which sounds odd at first until you start to look at the clues in some of the other games. I think the latest game Half-Life Alyx very Heavily points towards the potential of the story involving parallel dimensions where the events play out slightly different between them but there’s small connections between the two where you can pass from one to the other. My heavy, deep Half-life lore theory is that the resonance cascade does in fact create a resonance though in an extra dimension we don’t normally perceive. Kind of like a tesseract and how we as 3 dimensional creatures wouldn’t be able to fully comprehend an object that exists in a higher dimension than our own. I think the crystal and other materials like it can resonate that higher dimension essentially creating a pocket of entangled particles. Particles in the pocket could exist in both locations simultaneously until the point of collapse of the pocket in which case the particles would either be in one location or the other. Not only that, but I think there’s a slight hint that this resonance can either propagate across the barrier between parallel dimensions or break across that barrier we perceive for time, allowing essentially an action or event happening now to affect the past as well. There’s vague hints in what the vortigaunts say too in half-life 2 with them seeming to know a great many things about stuff they may have not seem themselves but perceived from some “telepathic” link. Their interaction with the G-man as well in HL2:episode 2 as well seems to point towards their knowledge of some dimension of space both they and the G-man are aware of and able to consciously interact with. I think the vagueness though does point a bit more towards the hand wavy, this is just good story telling and less based on science fact but at least to my crazy brain it seems to fit together pretty well. I hardcore believe though that the Glados AI from portal somehow at some point gets swept across the universe and back in time and becomes the basis for the Combine that we see in Half-life 2. I like to believe she purposely stages everything to ensure all the events occur again in the future. But maybe I’m just a little too obsessed with Half-life lore 😂
The entire Resonance Cascade itself was all orchestrated by the G-Man. He was the one who sent in the "purest sample" and the most unstable. Sample GG-3883. Combined with the sample's instability and the increased threshold of the AMS, upon contact sent the crystal's energy across the room. This opened a dimensional rift from Earth to Xen, and the Nihilanth was a major part in holding the rift open. The rift was eventually closed, but the Portal Storms following were much more devestating, combined with the invasion of the Universal Union, and, the fall of humanity.
This may be non-canon (in the sense of what could've happened but didn't really in the main timeline), but the funny thing is, Cave Johnson could've prevented all this by simply obtaining Black Mesa. Recall this Perpetual Testing Initiative dialogue: >"Cave Johnson, new owner and CEO of Black Mesa. That's right, you've been bought. First order of business, we're renaming you under the Aperture brand. I'm leaning towards Blappeture Mesa. Marketing boys think something else. So: Blappeture it is. Next, they tell me you people are conducting some anomalous materials research that could result in a resonance cascade. So I'm shutting that down before you idiots end the world. A resonance cascade! You're supposed to be scientists. Use some common sense." Considering G-man has been behind a lot of miserable events, this leads me to believe that it was one of G-Man's nudges that caused Cave Johnson's death since his death happened way before Alyx's birth, which is also before the Resonance Cascade. He knew Cave would mess up his plan, so he had to make sure Cave couldn't get in the way.
@@GrundrisseThat’s a super cool theory and it holds some weight. Did he fund the moon rocks that led to Cave’s moon dust poisoning? After all, the accountants told him they couldn’t afford $7 worth of moon rocks but he somehow bought $70,000,000 worth of them anyway. There is no way the transaction would go through if he didn’t have the money so Gman must have pulled some strings to get him the 70 million dollars he needed to buy the rock. Alternately he didn’t use money to buy them but he sold his soul to Gman for want of a better phrase.
Maybe the Nihilant siphoned this energy to literally work its magic and open those portals? It has been implied and stated that it was the one who opened and maintained the connection between Xen and Earth so maybe due to the G-Man creating an opening that the desperate Nihilant needed to rip holes into the walls between dimensions, maybe?
See I always thought the implication was that some sort of resonating field that could open a worm hole. The cascade part is that the portal that was opened caused other areas around it to resonate in the same way causing the portals to propagate themselves which is why you see enemies randomly teleport in.
There is a SINGLE issue I have with this analysis, and that's that I don't think the "anti-mass" in "anti-mass spectrometer" means anti-matter, but instead means "negative mass". Now, unless I completely misunderstood relativity (which I very well might have, calculus was never something I was good at) if it did indeed involve negative mass, perhaps it wasn't the crystal itself that was resonating and cascaded, but spacetime, resulting in a wormhole (again, this is just with a cursory understanding of relativity, I could be completely wrong here)
@TheShuckmeister that's fair, though half-life is a sci-fi universe and the math for negative mass theoretically checks out (I think. Again, not good at calculus) so I think it's a valid possibility.
something that might help to explain the way valve thinks about teleportation in the half-life series is that THE innsbruck teleportation experiments from 1997 are referenced multiple times in half-life 2
Awesome video! I really appreciated the style with which you explained everything. It dove into the scientific complexities of the processes without overburdening the idea with doctorate-level ideas. Thank you for taking the time to apply your talents to this game.
@@TheShuckmeistera fair viewpoint, though many long time fans will find exotic matter to be the more likely definition, not just because of the ‘anti-mass’ name, but also probably due in part to the fact that the portals look and behave differently from Aperture portals-being actually spherical holes.
@@TheShuckmeister what about negative gravitational mass but positive inertial mass? This is what dark matter could potentially be. It PUSHES rather than pulls, and it's why we don't see any in our galaxy... cause it's OUTSIDE the galaxy. That said, there are plenty of holes in this theory of mine, but it is still more plausible to me than some mysterious particle that should be all around us but is nowhere to be found.
While this video is fun, and I'm certain you know what you're talking about much more than I do, I feel it's somewhat in bad faith to simply ignore concepts like negative mass, aliens, and wormholes because they're hard to do maths around or statistically impossible or too theoretical. Considering you also talk about dark matter (a heavily theoretical and difficult topic itself) and we're discussing a sci-fi game, I think it's worth at least entertaining these ideas. I mean the whole idea of a "borderworld" is already pretty out there. Is it a pocket dimension? Can you have other dimensions in a string theory/quantum mechanics 10 dimensional multiverse? The Combine are said to be a pandimensional empire. In Half-Life 2 they talk about slingshotting through Xen with their teleporters as if it's a real space with physics that match ours. It might be fun to look into these more theoretical and out there topics to see how a silly game from the 90s gels with our current understanding of physics.
Cool video, I like how you applied what you knew to the game elements for inference! Your explanations for resonance and antimatter left me confused until you made clear their link to the Xen crystal at the end of the video. Would it make things clearer if the link to the scientific concept introduced and the game aspect represented was made more explicit?
I always assumed the antimass spectrometer referred to the theoretical property of negative mass instead of antimatter. Like they were shooting the xen crystal with tachyons or other exotic particle. Or maybe the crystal has some kind of negative mass property's.
When I played this game, years ago, I couldn't understand something Judith Mossman was talking in Half Life 2 Episode 1 (I think it was in episode 1 or 2). She talked about the portal tech we use, something about a Calabi-Yau Model. Would you make a video out of that? Greetings from Argentina btw (: Nice video!
@@TheShuckmeister You'll find that and the rest of her explanation in the chapter "Black Mesa East" from Half-Life 2 before and during the elevator ride.
Man, I'm hoping to be an engineer or physicist that gets to tackle these kinds of things. I am in the physics sphere but I barely hear about some of the stuff discussed in the video. I love your channel though!
No evidence for it, no dialogue, no graphics. If anything, the expansion Half-Life: Decay implies it was recovered by Vortigaunt slaves at the Nililanth's request. We do know it was the G-Man that provided it in the first place.
I always thought of it like the beam going into the crystal created too much resonance in that intangible barrier between the realms and ultimately shattering it. Since the crystal is from xen and xen is the border between dimensions, it shattered that barrier, creating a cascade effect where it opened thousands of little openings to go from xen into our universe. The scientists at black mesa did this all the time in a much more controlled environment, opening little holes to slip through before they disappear. A resonance cascade, in my theory anyway, would be like shooting that barrier with a shotgun, and with a lot more power than what you'd use to slip into xen, causing the gaps to stay open. In the game, when you launch that rocket you're completing a satellite chain that can be used to close all these little holes, which is exactly what happens in the expansion pack Decay. Of course, the Nihilanth keeps a hole open with its psychic power, allowing its forces to still come through, and you see this in the gameplay if you really pay attention. However, all of this weakened the barrier, allowing new gaps to randomly open up and cause havoc, seen in the form of the portal storms mentioned as having happened in the direct aftermath of the incident. I'm just a writer, no scientist by any means, but half life, especially half life 2 reference spiritual and psychic elements to the world as much as it does scientific, so I think the real answer is much more esoteric. Of course, the true answer is that we've both put way more thought into it than Valve ever did haha
07:48 "We dont have that budget right now" oh no... HE WORKS AT APERTURE SCIENCE! Black Mesa gets all the funding! Now it makes sense why he loved cave johnson in the portal video. RUN SHUCK GLADOS IS GOING TO BE AWAKENED!
3:33 the 'face' that forms behind the glass, with the button as they eye is similar to the face like form on the chest of the HEV suit. edit: the mark 4 suit; that is from HalfLife 1
There's a ton of lore about the science behind the mass relays hidden in the game in the Codex, just so you know. From what I can understand, the mass relays appear to be some kind of gravity warping boost device for the Alcubierre drives installed in the ships in mass effect that allows them to accelerate to speeds many many times c over a short distance, allowing them to make trans-galactic crossings take minutes to hours, as opposed to what the drives can pull off on their own, which appears to be traveling between stars in a cluster in minutes or hours. You can tell that they're Alcubierre drives because of the fact that they're using "element zero", which is kind of analogous to exotic matter described in Alcubierre's theories, both substances exhibit the same essential effect: an inverse "mass effect" on the higgs field, generating negative gravity.
I found it funny how you were explaining things very accurately with all your scientific knowledge and then you say "and this _somehow_ opens a portal to Xen" 😂
Discovered this channel from the portal video today. I love this video too. Would love a video on half life 2. Gravity gun is good choice. Or the science behind alyxs dog, or the hev suit, or the citadel,
Wouldnt anti-mass be negative matter and not antimatter? Negative mass is supposed to be instrumental in stabilizing wormholes and creating warp solitons and stuff like that you should read some alcubierre and maybe even some erik w lentz my d00d
Wow, despite having heard and seen the term "Resonance Cascade" like 50,000 times now, until this video, because of the explanation of the word resonance in it, I always heard and read it as Renaissance Cascade..
i think the thing to note about black mesas teleportation is just how hard it was to get a consistent point to point instead is was much more wibbly wobbly as it pleases also a wild out there idea on how it made "rifts" like this, just like a wobbly shaken plane intercepting a stationary flat plane, where intercept points could be those "rifts", the resonating material could actually be spacetime or such with the crystal much more akin to the water in the glass as an amplifier probably not right in the slightest but i had an idea there
He’s leaving alone (for now) the assumption that the crystal is anti-mass (antimatter) and being strolled and and pro-mass (matter) cart into the beam. I work in similar fields and I love this. This is great! Cheers!!
In Half-Life 2, Mossman says that their teleporter works on a Xen relay emulation and that they use it as a dimensional slingshot, making me think there's some form of higher dimension pseudo-gravity going on.
Two extra factors about the cascade: - The crystal for the experiment was swapped out for an unstable one (GG-3883) by the G-Man - And he talked the Administrator, Wallace Breen into clocking the Spectrometer to 105%. In other words, it was a setup from the beginning.
@FlamingAomeba its more likely than not that somewhere, there is a civilization just as advanced as ours. to completely ignore probability and say "aliens dont exist" is foolish
I don’t know if there’s enough scientific data to work with, but examining how a Halo ring from the Halo series works might be interesting. Specifically how it kills and does so at super-luminal speed.
I also thought they ment space it's self was resonating. I think it's a reference to the Manhattan project where there was a fear of igniting the atmosphere.
My headcanon is that G-man did not exactly "cause" the resonance cascade but rather made sure it happened in the right way, as Black Mesa would eventually cause a resonance cascade no matter what with the reckless way they were conducting things. If Gordon Freeman and Alyx were anywhere other than exactly where they were when the cascade happened, humanity would have no hope, and, at least contractually, it seems G-man has an interest in preserving humanity. Given G-man's apparent rebellious streak towards his employers (I have learned to ignore such naysayers, etc), and the fact that he seems convinced that the combine invasion could not have been averted (...all the effort in the world would have gone to waste...), it stands to reason that he would orchestrate the resonance cascade in such a way if it was inevitable.
My understanding of the meaning of the "cascade" is actually a bit different. What I guessed was happening is that the machine created resonance and was if the fabric of space and time was what was vibrating (hence the sound caused by the machine) and that perhaps the Xen crystal has a bond to Xen itself, so when it was put into the machine, it created a link to Xen. So the cascade (or the glass breaking) is actually time and space itself shattering, hence the several gateways created. I may be missing something as well since the video is so in-depth on real physics, but since this is still science-fiction it's much easier for me to be able to guess what the writers were making up for the plot.
I have no understanding of science so I always assumed Resonance Cascade was when the strings that resonate at different frequencies in the quarks making up Xen and Earths matter/energy were matching up in a cascading effect that caused them to overlap.
I thought the cascade was the crystal caused the fabric of our universe itself to resonate with the universe the crystal came from, Xen. And as our universes resonated, portals could easily open on it's own. That's what the rocket / satellite you encounter mid-game is for. To cancel out the resonance, and close the portals. BUT, a powerful entity on the other side forces the portals to stay open. Also, for those who are unfamiliar with half-life decay. There you use 3 crystals to sync up with the satellite to create the canceling effect. But the whole thing blows up in your face.
I wonder about a crystalline materiel/object with regular holes or vacancies where "something" should exist, but doesn't. Such holes would be considered an absence, and measuring them (without breaking the crystal) would require an energy beam of some kind. If the vacancy were created by the particle being displaced, connected to another universe and being left behind when it was brought here... A resonance cascade might happen as depicted in the games. Wild speculation with a TON of assumptions, I know, but fun to think about.
Did someone say SCIENCE?!
SCIENCE!
Dear Valve...
Gordon doesn’t need to hear all this, he is a highly trained professional.
He went to mit
This is a legendary meme now 😂😂
"Gorden is a hightly trained professional "
*You press one button and push a cart*
AND HE’S VERY GOOD AT IT
it's a VERY heavy cart!
That MIT education pays for itself.
i think he knows how to use the suit and maybe keep it working,space suits and diving suits are hard to use
And he still fucked it up history is written by the victor everyone forgot when after slaughtered thousands of aliens, military personnel, scientists, and even his friends if barney didnt get out when he did he might've been caught in the Gordon storm too
im surprised you didn't bring up gordon's thesis he wrote for MIT! which, as we all know, is the Observation of Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Entanglement on Supraquantum Structures by Induction Through Nonlinear Transuranic Crystal of Extremely Long Wavelength (ELW) Pulse from Mode-Locked Source Array. of course.
Jesus christ
I am afraid
In laymen’s terms: “we can make teleporter portals by blasting super rare crystals with lasers”.
was that the one with the typo on pg 603?
@@lionocyborg6030thank god you posted this i didn’t understand jack shit he said
While this video is very well made, and using the game as a platform to talk about real science is very fun, it's worth noting that the point of Half-Life is that it deals in EXTRA-universal physics. Xen is not another planet, or even another dimension, it is described as "the space in between universes". Which is why it's referred to as a border world: Nothing in Xen is native to Xen, not even the physics present there. Everything is just bleeding through into Xen from different universes that independently had intelligent life that discovered teleportation, and thus discovered Xen. The Resonance Cascade caused a massive influx of portal events because Black Mesa was already experimenting with teleportation using the physics of Xen, so when the experiment created a cascading effect of energy, it ripped open the portal they ALREADY had to an uncontrollable level.
Good background and description. Much appreciated
I've always wondered how Xen would hold up when compared to Brane cosmology, not that I really understand the concept myself.
Half-Life: Humanity's insatiable desire to test the unknown will inevitably lead to horrific consequences beyond our comprehension and ability to solve
Half-Life 2: Living in Bulgaria fucking sucks lmao
Episode 1: hiroshima/nagasaki
Episode 2: cliffhanger
Half-Life: Alyx: Undo that cliffhanger and make a new one
I died
"at least its not detroit"
I heard this in male human 04s voice @@Ribbons0121R121
The prune juice sound from 4:07 is very similar to the sound playing when the anti mass spectrometer is breaking down in the Black Mesa Remake. The crowbar collective may have thought of this sound for the resonance cascade starting.
You see the g-man lurking around, and all of the scientists go on about "administrator this", "administrator that" and how he's specifically requested and is rushing this sample test past the safety protocols before the cascade ever happens. I guess it's a headcanon, but it's always felt pretty clear to me that this "resonance cascade" has never been the cause of the invasion at all (or that it might not have even happened), but it was all just orchestrated as an event to pin things on.
Holy shit good work man
The ressonace cascade did open the portals, but it was set up by G man. He (it?) specifically delivered the crystal that caused the cascade and was meddling with many things to set up the scenario before it even happened.
@@whitefang1657I always assumed it was on of his "employers" who wanted the resonance cascade to occur and so gman set it up. Whether that employer is the Combine or some entirely different race or entity who knows
judging by breen apparently alleging that g-man works for the highest bidder and that the combine might employ Gordon’s services going forward at the end of hl2, and by how g-man seems to imply in ep2 that there has been no change of plans for him since black mesa by explaining his rescuing of Alyx from black mesa to Gordon, I think he was probably not hired by the combine to cause the resonance cascade, in fact, I think I remember it being stated somewhere that the combine were actually entirely unaware of humanity’s universe until some time after the resonance cascade
@swagtachiuchiha1501 In Half Life Alyx, we see that the G-Man is contained by something that looks almost exactly like a Bacteriophage.
If we take this to be literal, and that "employer" is just the most accurate term that humans are likely to understand (the G-Man is bad with normal human speech, after all,) then it stands to reason that "employer" means "that which connects to the G-Man," as opposed to a specific being/organization.
If this is the case, the G-Man would basically be the injected code of something trying to infect the material universe, probably with the aim to corrupt Earth's physical laws. Nobody would thus be hiring him, per say, but would instead be paying him by breaking more and more of Earth's physical laws.
"Ferb, i know what we're gonna do today"
Best comment of all-time
''Here it is Resonator 3000''
I'm so glad you did a followup to the algorithm's blessing! It's like a special gift sequel
Happy to provide!
In case you ever want to revisit the topic: You mentioned that Half-Life 1 doesn't go into detail on how teleportation works, but it is elaborated on in the expansion Blue Shift (Dr Rosenberg, end of Chapter Four "Captive Freight") and in Half-Life 2 (Dr Mossman, start of Chapter Five "Black Mesa East"). Half-Life has three, possibly four, distinct forms of portal technology. The Black Mesa method (refined by former Black Mesa researchers during the time-skip between HL1 and HL2), The Aperture Science method, and the Combine method. You've already covered Aperture's portal tech, but the Black Mesa and Combine methods are reliant on what's called the Xen relay, which is that one has to teleport to Xen and back as opposed to a direct Point A-to-B. Black Mesa's earlier methods relied on strapping devices to the crystals to give a reliable simulation of local teleportation, but those techniques were improved both in the months leading up to the Black Mesa Incident and in the 20 years following. Where the two differ is that the later more refined Black Mesa/Resistance method uses Xen as dimensional slingshot to avoid actually passing through, while Combine portals are string-based. Mossman, who is the main source of information on Combine portals, makes specific mentions of Calabi-Yau manifolds, dark energy, and entanglement. It's mentioned somewhere, though I forget where, that the Combine can't actually teleport through local space and are reliant on less effective means of transport once they are actually in their target universe. The possible fourth method is an Aperture Science experiment mentioned in HL2:E2, something akin to the Philadelphia experiment, that had faded into urban legend by the early 2000s, but almost nothing is known about it beyond it being some indescribably powerful technology, so we cannot definitively say that it is significantly different from the three known methods.
I'm calling that fourth method the G-Man Method and you can't stop me.
From bits and pieces I've seen around the internet regarding the Borealis (mostly discussion and epistle3 which is not official lore), they talk about some sort of "bootstrap device", time loops and alternate realities warping the ship and the people on board, so it seems that aperture went beyond the whole "get from A to B" and instead directly to "get from A to The Plot of Event Horizon"
I always felt that the thing resonating in the resonance cascade was the fabric of reality. They intended to just excite a sample but instead that sample excited space and time to the point it broke
Yeah it’s a little hand wavey but it’s still cool
@@TheShuckmeister Well, I mean I think yes there’s a good amount of fiction but especially in Half-life 2 there’s a bit more research done into quantum mechanics for the story telling at least. They get some parts about Entanglement and the calabi-yau manifolds pretty accurate. Dr. Breen at the end *Spoilers ahead by the way* mentions being teleported at the point of “synapse” to another Universe… which sounds odd at first until you start to look at the clues in some of the other games. I think the latest game Half-Life Alyx very Heavily points towards the potential of the story involving parallel dimensions where the events play out slightly different between them but there’s small connections between the two where you can pass from one to the other.
My heavy, deep Half-life lore theory is that the resonance cascade does in fact create a resonance though in an extra dimension we don’t normally perceive. Kind of like a tesseract and how we as 3 dimensional creatures wouldn’t be able to fully comprehend an object that exists in a higher dimension than our own. I think the crystal and other materials like it can resonate that higher dimension essentially creating a pocket of entangled particles. Particles in the pocket could exist in both locations simultaneously until the point of collapse of the pocket in which case the particles would either be in one location or the other. Not only that, but I think there’s a slight hint that this resonance can either propagate across the barrier between parallel dimensions or break across that barrier we perceive for time, allowing essentially an action or event happening now to affect the past as well. There’s vague hints in what the vortigaunts say too in half-life 2 with them seeming to know a great many things about stuff they may have not seem themselves but perceived from some “telepathic” link. Their interaction with the G-man as well in HL2:episode 2 as well seems to point towards their knowledge of some dimension of space both they and the G-man are aware of and able to consciously interact with. I think the vagueness though does point a bit more towards the hand wavy, this is just good story telling and less based on science fact but at least to my crazy brain it seems to fit together pretty well.
I hardcore believe though that the Glados AI from portal somehow at some point gets swept across the universe and back in time and becomes the basis for the Combine that we see in Half-life 2. I like to believe she purposely stages everything to ensure all the events occur again in the future.
But maybe I’m just a little too obsessed with Half-life lore 😂
Now explain why the Gluon Gun is a terrifying concept and the games don’t do it justice
The entire Resonance Cascade itself was all orchestrated by the G-Man. He was the one who sent in the "purest sample" and the most unstable. Sample GG-3883. Combined with the sample's instability and the increased threshold of the AMS, upon contact sent the crystal's energy across the room. This opened a dimensional rift from Earth to Xen, and the Nihilanth was a major part in holding the rift open.
The rift was eventually closed, but the Portal Storms following were much more devestating, combined with the invasion of the Universal Union, and, the fall of humanity.
This may be non-canon (in the sense of what could've happened but didn't really in the main timeline), but the funny thing is, Cave Johnson could've prevented all this by simply obtaining Black Mesa. Recall this Perpetual Testing Initiative dialogue:
>"Cave Johnson, new owner and CEO of Black Mesa. That's right, you've been bought. First order of business, we're renaming you under the Aperture brand. I'm leaning towards Blappeture Mesa. Marketing boys think something else. So: Blappeture it is. Next, they tell me you people are conducting some anomalous materials research that could result in a resonance cascade. So I'm shutting that down before you idiots end the world. A resonance cascade! You're supposed to be scientists. Use some common sense."
Considering G-man has been behind a lot of miserable events, this leads me to believe that it was one of G-Man's nudges that caused Cave Johnson's death since his death happened way before Alyx's birth, which is also before the Resonance Cascade. He knew Cave would mess up his plan, so he had to make sure Cave couldn't get in the way.
@@GrundrisseThat’s a super cool theory and it holds some weight. Did he fund the moon rocks that led to Cave’s moon dust poisoning? After all, the accountants told him they couldn’t afford $7 worth of moon rocks but he somehow bought $70,000,000 worth of them anyway. There is no way the transaction would go through if he didn’t have the money so Gman must have pulled some strings to get him the 70 million dollars he needed to buy the rock. Alternately he didn’t use money to buy them but he sold his soul to Gman for want of a better phrase.
HE ORCHESTRATED IT!
Do not forget it was not the G-Man who orchestrated it. But his employers
@@lionocyborg6030are we sure this "moon rock dust" wasn't just asbestos?
/s
I'm happy that I understood at least half of this
*half* life
I see what you did there
Maybe the Nihilant siphoned this energy to literally work its magic and open those portals? It has been implied and stated that it was the one who opened and maintained the connection between Xen and Earth so maybe due to the G-Man creating an opening that the desperate Nihilant needed to rip holes into the walls between dimensions, maybe?
my man went from Jojo to science and im all for it. These are really intresting for learning something new. Good job sir
TL:DR “GREEN AND YELLOW SHIT COMBINED IS NOT GOOD”
LOL
Brown shit ain’t good either that’s why we flush it down
lmao
See I always thought the implication was that some sort of resonating field that could open a worm hole. The cascade part is that the portal that was opened caused other areas around it to resonate in the same way causing the portals to propagate themselves which is why you see enemies randomly teleport in.
I’ve never really liked wormholes myself. I think they can be a little too theoretical
Fuck the algorithm, the Portal Video and now this are so fucking cool
Algorithm may hate my channel, but I love making these videos!
There is a SINGLE issue I have with this analysis, and that's that I don't think the "anti-mass" in "anti-mass spectrometer" means anti-matter, but instead means "negative mass". Now, unless I completely misunderstood relativity (which I very well might have, calculus was never something I was good at) if it did indeed involve negative mass, perhaps it wasn't the crystal itself that was resonating and cascaded, but spacetime, resulting in a wormhole (again, this is just with a cursory understanding of relativity, I could be completely wrong here)
I try to avoid negative mass at all costs. I really don't believe in it
@TheShuckmeister that's fair, though half-life is a sci-fi universe and the math for negative mass theoretically checks out (I think. Again, not good at calculus) so I think it's a valid possibility.
@@TheShuckmeister What the FUCK is NEGATIVE MASS dude?
@@Unit_457a theoretical concept introduced by Einstein
@NatCo-Supremacist ty
Oh hey the science works ou-
*dimensonial skidoosh*
something that might help to explain the way valve thinks about teleportation in the half-life series is that THE innsbruck teleportation experiments from 1997 are referenced multiple times in half-life 2
Awesome video! I really appreciated the style with which you explained everything. It dove into the scientific complexities of the processes without overburdening the idea with doctorate-level ideas. Thank you for taking the time to apply your talents to this game.
Wow such a comprehensive breakdown from a real-world POV. Honestly stellar 👍
Glad you like that! I have a bunch of other science videos that are pretty cool to check out!
Hmmm I don't think that they were talking about antimatter, but about matter with negative gravitational mass...
Negative mass is something I don’t subscribe to. I’ve had professors rip into the idea before
@@TheShuckmeistera fair viewpoint, though many long time fans will find exotic matter to be the more likely definition, not just because of the ‘anti-mass’ name, but also probably due in part to the fact that the portals look and behave differently from Aperture portals-being actually spherical holes.
@@TheShuckmeister what about negative gravitational mass but positive inertial mass?
This is what dark matter could potentially be. It PUSHES rather than pulls, and it's why we don't see any in our galaxy... cause it's OUTSIDE the galaxy.
That said, there are plenty of holes in this theory of mine, but it is still more plausible to me than some mysterious particle that should be all around us but is nowhere to be found.
Here's how i would describe it: we put a fork in god's microwave, and cooked it on "high"
Half Life spotted, big excited to see this
While this video is fun, and I'm certain you know what you're talking about much more than I do, I feel it's somewhat in bad faith to simply ignore concepts like negative mass, aliens, and wormholes because they're hard to do maths around or statistically impossible or too theoretical. Considering you also talk about dark matter (a heavily theoretical and difficult topic itself) and we're discussing a sci-fi game, I think it's worth at least entertaining these ideas.
I mean the whole idea of a "borderworld" is already pretty out there. Is it a pocket dimension? Can you have other dimensions in a string theory/quantum mechanics 10 dimensional multiverse? The Combine are said to be a pandimensional empire. In Half-Life 2 they talk about slingshotting through Xen with their teleporters as if it's a real space with physics that match ours.
It might be fun to look into these more theoretical and out there topics to see how a silly game from the 90s gels with our current understanding of physics.
Cool video, I like how you applied what you knew to the game elements for inference! Your explanations for resonance and antimatter left me confused until you made clear their link to the Xen crystal at the end of the video. Would it make things clearer if the link to the scientific concept introduced and the game aspect represented was made more explicit?
It probably would make things a little clearer. Thanks for pointing that out
shuck discovers that twitter users have infinite free time, chaos ensues
Man I sure do love the science
one of my fave youtubers talking about one of my fave games? YES PLEASE!
Thanks for putting the Turret Wife Serenade into your video, it's been my phone's ringtone since portal 2 was released. 😂😂😅
@@smadge1 I should do that as well haha
1:23 in a HEV suit without a helmet.
good vid, could please make a vid on the half-life gluon gun? or maybe the tau cannon
Good ideas! Thanks!
I agree with the gluon gun. Always wondered how it worked
I always assumed the antimass spectrometer referred to the theoretical property of negative mass instead of antimatter. Like they were shooting the xen crystal with tachyons or other exotic particle. Or maybe the crystal has some kind of negative mass property's.
When I played this game, years ago, I couldn't understand something Judith Mossman was talking in Half Life 2 Episode 1 (I think it was in episode 1 or 2). She talked about the portal tech we use, something about a Calabi-Yau Model. Would you make a video out of that? Greetings from Argentina btw (: Nice video!
Interesting! I’ll have to investigate it!
And glad to see a fan from Argentina!
@@TheShuckmeister You'll find that and the rest of her explanation in the chapter "Black Mesa East" from Half-Life 2 before and during the elevator ride.
Man, I'm hoping to be an engineer or physicist that gets to tackle these kinds of things. I am in the physics sphere but I barely hear about some of the stuff discussed in the video. I love your channel though!
6:59 Xenon difluoride confirmed.🗣️💯🔥
"We dont see the crystal itself shatter". I think cannonically it does shatter
Interesting. Dang game graphics were too primitive
@@TheShuckmeister Yeah. But all things start from somewhere. And we were too busy Deathmatching, planting/disarming bombs and Sven Co-Oping to notice
No evidence for it, no dialogue, no graphics. If anything, the expansion Half-Life: Decay implies it was recovered by Vortigaunt slaves at the Nililanth's request. We do know it was the G-Man that provided it in the first place.
@@TheShuckmeister use the steam remake ‘black mesa’ instead
You have no idea how awesome it is to hear someone else trying to figure out how this worked!
Okay this was super cool
Hope you enjoyed Half-Life
Except for the Ladder
Ladders we're like the worst part of the game next to autosaving
@@TheShuckmeister yeah...that's a pretty common thing. if you hate the ladders in HL1, you will *loath* the HL2 ones
If you press e on the ladders you lock on them
I always thought of it like the beam going into the crystal created too much resonance in that intangible barrier between the realms and ultimately shattering it.
Since the crystal is from xen and xen is the border between dimensions, it shattered that barrier, creating a cascade effect where it opened thousands of little openings to go from xen into our universe.
The scientists at black mesa did this all the time in a much more controlled environment, opening little holes to slip through before they disappear. A resonance cascade, in my theory anyway, would be like shooting that barrier with a shotgun, and with a lot more power than what you'd use to slip into xen, causing the gaps to stay open.
In the game, when you launch that rocket you're completing a satellite chain that can be used to close all these little holes, which is exactly what happens in the expansion pack Decay. Of course, the Nihilanth keeps a hole open with its psychic power, allowing its forces to still come through, and you see this in the gameplay if you really pay attention.
However, all of this weakened the barrier, allowing new gaps to randomly open up and cause havoc, seen in the form of the portal storms mentioned as having happened in the direct aftermath of the incident.
I'm just a writer, no scientist by any means, but half life, especially half life 2 reference spiritual and psychic elements to the world as much as it does scientific, so I think the real answer is much more esoteric.
Of course, the true answer is that we've both put way more thought into it than Valve ever did haha
2:39
Instructions unclear, now 3 Aztic Man wants to duel with me
2:41 natural frequency changes as water is added as object is altered
3:45 Ah, a Warrior's Drink.
This is very interesting. Nice work.
07:48 "We dont have that budget right now" oh no... HE WORKS AT APERTURE SCIENCE! Black Mesa gets all the funding! Now it makes sense why he loved cave johnson in the portal video. RUN SHUCK GLADOS IS GOING TO BE AWAKENED!
3:33 the 'face' that forms behind the glass, with the button as they eye is similar to the face like form on the chest of the HEV suit.
edit: the mark 4 suit; that is from HalfLife 1
Mass effects element 0 (positronium?) and mass relays seem like a good starting point. Also, biotics, because they're related.
There's a ton of lore about the science behind the mass relays hidden in the game in the Codex, just so you know. From what I can understand, the mass relays appear to be some kind of gravity warping boost device for the Alcubierre drives installed in the ships in mass effect that allows them to accelerate to speeds many many times c over a short distance, allowing them to make trans-galactic crossings take minutes to hours, as opposed to what the drives can pull off on their own, which appears to be traveling between stars in a cluster in minutes or hours. You can tell that they're Alcubierre drives because of the fact that they're using "element zero", which is kind of analogous to exotic matter described in Alcubierre's theories, both substances exhibit the same essential effect: an inverse "mass effect" on the higgs field, generating negative gravity.
average prune juice enjoyer
I didnt understand anything but i just like to listen to Shuck talk about physics
3:47 Ahh, a warrior's drink.
Champion’s beverage
I found it funny how you were explaining things very accurately with all your scientific knowledge and then you say "and this _somehow_ opens a portal to Xen" 😂
I like your funny words magic man
Discovered this channel from the portal video today. I love this video too. Would love a video on half life 2. Gravity gun is good choice. Or the science behind alyxs dog, or the hev suit, or the citadel,
Wouldnt anti-mass be negative matter and not antimatter?
Negative mass is supposed to be instrumental in stabilizing wormholes and creating warp solitons and stuff like that
you should read some alcubierre and maybe even some erik w lentz my d00d
all we need is a mutual friend
Wow, despite having heard and seen the term "Resonance Cascade" like 50,000 times now, until this video, because of the explanation of the word resonance in it, I always heard and read it as Renaissance Cascade..
i think the thing to note about black mesas teleportation is just how hard it was to get a consistent point to point
instead is was much more wibbly wobbly as it pleases
also a wild out there idea on how it made "rifts" like this, just like a wobbly shaken plane intercepting a stationary flat plane, where intercept points could be those "rifts", the resonating material could actually be spacetime or such with the crystal much more akin to the water in the glass as an amplifier
probably not right in the slightest but i had an idea there
He’s leaving alone (for now) the assumption that the crystal is anti-mass (antimatter) and being strolled and and pro-mass (matter) cart into the beam.
I work in similar fields and I love this. This is great! Cheers!!
I never thought it would be possible for me to hear so many words I barely understand. I did learn about computer chips tho so that’s neat.
In Half-Life 2, Mossman says that their teleporter works on a Xen relay emulation and that they use it as a dimensional slingshot, making me think there's some form of higher dimension pseudo-gravity going on.
Prune juice causes a resonance cascade within my gastrointestinal tract….
Shut up grandma, drink ya prune juice... that mod og times
@@Nobodycares22222 true
So the anti-mass spectrometer is just one giant wine glass.
Two extra factors about the cascade:
- The crystal for the experiment was swapped out for an unstable one (GG-3883) by the G-Man
- And he talked the Administrator, Wallace Breen into clocking the Spectrometer to 105%.
In other words, it was a setup from the beginning.
2:35 "And the rim is lubricated and rubbed".
Yeah, that's one of my favorite experiments too ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
i would like to see a video on if it's possible to make light bridges.
i talked to chatgpt, and all i could find is something called pair production?
11:14 why wouldnt aliens exist? theres planets similar to earth in the universe!
More importantly, the universe is VAST, it feels impossible, or perhaps improbable, that life would only exist on one planet
@FlamingAomeba its more likely than not that somewhere, there is a civilization just as advanced as ours. to completely ignore probability and say "aliens dont exist" is foolish
I don’t know if there’s enough scientific data to work with, but examining how a Halo ring from the Halo series works might be interesting. Specifically how it kills and does so at super-luminal speed.
I also thought they ment space it's self was resonating.
I think it's a reference to the Manhattan project where there was a fear of igniting the atmosphere.
Prune juice... a Warrior's drink!
7:26 as you show what looks to be a neutrino detector.
Maybe it isnt the crystal that shattered but the fabric of reality itself
Big brain!
can't wait for the combine arrival.
So freaking cool
Ty for the video
No problem! Thanks for watching!
“I might as well enjoy half life 1”
Shows footage of Xen
My headcanon is that G-man did not exactly "cause" the resonance cascade but rather made sure it happened in the right way, as Black Mesa would eventually cause a resonance cascade no matter what with the reckless way they were conducting things. If Gordon Freeman and Alyx were anywhere other than exactly where they were when the cascade happened, humanity would have no hope, and, at least contractually, it seems G-man has an interest in preserving humanity. Given G-man's apparent rebellious streak towards his employers (I have learned to ignore such naysayers, etc), and the fact that he seems convinced that the combine invasion could not have been averted (...all the effort in the world would have gone to waste...), it stands to reason that he would orchestrate the resonance cascade in such a way if it was inevitable.
Instead of shattering the glass with resonance, you shatter spacetime
4:05 "I watched you chaaaange"
Ferb, I know what we’re going to do today!”
End the world
My understanding of the meaning of the "cascade" is actually a bit different.
What I guessed was happening is that the machine created resonance and was if the fabric of space and time was what was vibrating (hence the sound caused by the machine) and that perhaps the Xen crystal has a bond to Xen itself, so when it was put into the machine, it created a link to Xen. So the cascade (or the glass breaking) is actually time and space itself shattering, hence the several gateways created.
I may be missing something as well since the video is so in-depth on real physics, but since this is still science-fiction it's much easier for me to be able to guess what the writers were making up for the plot.
Gaben will be proud of you my dude
"Oh wait, scratch that last one" *yet*
Glad to see you are also a Jobro
Please make a video about Engineer's teleporters in TF2
I’ll have to look into it a little more!
I have no understanding of science so I always assumed Resonance Cascade was when the strings that resonate at different frequencies in the quarks making up Xen and Earths matter/energy were matching up in a cascading effect that caused them to overlap.
i need this guy as my science teacher
Very fun video, loved it 😍
Thank you so much!
Cool Video Shuck 😊
Thank you! Glad you enjoyed it
@@TheShuckmeister is good video.
Really wish music wasn't playing while you were demonstrating the wine glasses
4:37 - A example of Real-Life Resonance Cascade (that strictly speaking is a resonance cascade :D)
I thought the cascade was the crystal caused the fabric of our universe itself to resonate with the universe the crystal came from, Xen.
And as our universes resonated, portals could easily open on it's own.
That's what the rocket / satellite you encounter mid-game is for. To cancel out the resonance, and close the portals.
BUT, a powerful entity on the other side forces the portals to stay open.
Also, for those who are unfamiliar with half-life decay.
There you use 3 crystals to sync up with the satellite to create the canceling effect. But the whole thing blows up in your face.
Is there any sience in the zero point energy field manipulater? Or is it fully fiction?
I’m not super on board with Zero Point Energy myself. It’s a strange case for sure
Some company should try this...
I’d love to work there
I wonder about a crystalline materiel/object with regular holes or vacancies where "something" should exist, but doesn't. Such holes would be considered an absence, and measuring them (without breaking the crystal) would require an energy beam of some kind. If the vacancy were created by the particle being displaced, connected to another universe and being left behind when it was brought here... A resonance cascade might happen as depicted in the games.
Wild speculation with a TON of assumptions, I know, but fun to think about.
1M subs and Shuck creates a Resonance Cascade irl