Bizarroland , 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

If portals did not apply a transient vector to your momentum then you could not pass through a portal.

Take for instance the many times Chell jumps through a portal. Her momentum is maintained as she passes through the portal, allowing her and her robot legs to do truly stupendous feats of gravity assisted acrobatics.

If Chell was stationary and the portal fell on her, she would not be launched out of the other side with the momentum of the portal, she would just find herself sticking out of the other side of the portal.

Similarly, if Chell were to ride a moving platform up into an overhead portal, we would expect the top half of Chell's body to pop out of the portal without being accelerated by anything other than the moving platform on the bottom of her feet.

Therefore, unless there is some strange unknowable physics that we will not be able to discover until we develop portals of our own, the most likely outcome is that the victims on the tram would not gain any momentum as the portal was pushed into them, and they would plop out safely on the other side.