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This is semi-related; for a good explanation of the difference between dimensions and universes (or realties), there's an episode of Stargate SG-1, from it's final season when it got really shitty, that has a good, simple explanation. I'll see if I can find the clip somewhere.

Hi, I'm new to this forum, but I woulod like to make one observation.

Kinda, I was always an adept of the border world theory, since I played HL1 back in 1999, but one thing about that and the theories posted here made me think, without result because I am so crappy in physics: if the islands are in equilibrium between two massive dimensions, wouldn't the creatures fall in the two directions?

If there's mass above and below, then if you fall from the island you will fall straight into the abyss, and if you jump, you will keep ascending.

Maybe its like someone said, the normal rules simply don't apply. Even so, it would be nice to have some kind of theory!

Perhaps, I haven't seen any theories about this yet. It's a commonly known fact that the creatures in Xen does not belong there naturally. Neither does the player. The astroids do. The creatures and the player comes from other universes or worlds. For the player, he comes from Earth where the normal physics laws apply. Let's just say his kind of matter behaves the same in all universes, and the same for the creatures. And the Xen matter just behaves differently.

Think of our universe as a drawing on a piece of paper, in this analogy Xen is a piece of blotting paper sandwiched between our universe and another (some others?). Xen has soaked up a vague outline of the universes around it, all blurred and overwritten.
Now try and imagine that in more than two dimensions :)

Xen borrows some laws from different universes? That wouldn't work... Xen is not a completely different universe, in fact I don't think is another universe, because the ONLY (important) differences are Floating Islands and Yellow Crystals. I already told that it has gravity, an atmosphere, a star, just like a planet. In game is it told that the yellow crystals posses exotic matter (tachyons) which has imaginary mass (quadric(?) root of a negative number) not a negative mass... Plus, we don't know what really dark energy and dark matter are.

So: Tachyons + [? (Dark Energy?/ Dark Matter?/ A mistery?)] = Floating islands


Yellow crystals explains why Xen is a relay station (in our universe) and why it has floating islands, to me at least.


Here are some ideas for flying islands, if anyone have read one of the sci-fi books, please tell the hipothesis.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_island_(fiction)

Actually, imaginary numbers are the square root of a negative number: i = square root of -1. And I don't remember hearing any of that ingame about the star (which we never see, first of all), or the specific properties of the crystals; as far as I knew, they were more or less a McGuffin, which cause the resonance cascade in the first appearance and which must be destroyed so you can beat the Nihilanth in their next appearance. As for gravity: it only behaves remotely like gravity as we know it. There's no "planet" below the floating islands for Gordon to fall down to.