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First of all, sorry for my english...

In real life I'm just a guy that enjoys science, in particular non-basic science, like xenobiology, astrophysics, theorical physics, paleontology, etc. Plus, I love science fiction, and I love to link this with the forementioned interests.

I will try to explain some Half Life science, and correct some concepts. If you don't agree with me, got a question or want to add some info, do it in a nice way. Help is well received.

- Most people confuse universe, dimensions or timeline using alternate or parallel prefixes. Our Universe has determined physical/chemical properties, which will be the same everywhere (maybe not everytime), and nothing can break the rules (Floating Islands in Xen? - I'll talk about it later).
There could be a completely different universe with completely different laws (so different that you can't even exist in that universe); or a universe that would be different in one or three (not two) of these properties: charge (matter - antimatter), parity (left-handed - right handed particles) and time (tardions - tachyons) symmetry.
Dimensions are hard to define; but they aren't "places". You should always consider time as a 4th dimenstion, mensurable in length units (1 second 2,8exp9 meters), just multiply your favorite time unit with c, and you got it in length units. All dimensions are length mensurable.
I'm ignoring the quantity of dimensions, because that doesn't matter now.
Then what is Xen, if it is not an alternate universe or dimension?
Xen could be in a galaxy millions of parsecs away from the milky way, if we consider the three spatial dimensions we detect (because the others are just so big or so small), but it is just some few micrometers in a particular dimension. It just depends how do you see it. Imagine we see the three spatial dimensions of our universe represented in a flat paper. Then fold the paper once, and voilá, you have now a multidimesional two-brane universe. That means, Xen is in another brane than Earth (probably very close to multiple branes, so it can be called "borderworld", a relay station).

- Portals: Doesn't matter of what portal or game are we talking about, they work the same way. They are just shortcut that go through dimensions (including time), thus through branes, represented by a hole in the aforementioned folded paper. That is called Wormhole in popular culture, or Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky bridges. There are plenty of them in the equations of Einstein and in our universe, but they are highly unstable. It was believed that tachyons or "exotic matter" (they are known in Half-Life with this name) could stabilize these bridges (but it has been discovered recently that also an electromagnetic field can do that, I can not say more).

I'm not done yet... I want to say something about Xen, but later...

Well, I'm no physicist, but I'll give you my theories.

We know Xen is a border world, ie it borders two or more other universes. These other, "main" universes would obviously be far, far more "massive" than a mere border world. Thus, Xen is caught in the middle of two or more "objects" of significantly more mass than itself.

My theory, then, is that the islands of Xen are within a massive Lagrangian point between the universes. That's why the distribution of islands is relatively flat, ie an infinite void above you and below you; the L-point of the two universes allows a field of matter to remain gravitationally suspended, caught between the universes which Xen borders.




(Edited for correction of homonymic errors.)

Tiny little message from the apologetic spelling police:


Please do not let this public service broadcast interrupt the exquisite discussion.

Sorry, I'm a bit late here but...

Wasn't the "Xen World" supposed to be a completely different DIMENSION. If so wouldn't that kind of negate any laws of reality that we hold dear?

Thats pretty much the general consensus answer, but it's always fun to deconstruct things further than that and work out exactly what is different and how it could work. This is a pretty scientifically minded forum after all ;)

and by all means don't et me stop you, I was more or less asking for my own knowledge

That has happened in our history a lot of times....

In a few years more, astrology, parapsicology, ghost and all that esotheric things could be explained by science...

Just look for the PEAR project... something about collective conciusness and probability...
http://noosphere.princeton.edu/homepage.html

One step to destroy superstition and reach an enlightened humanity... (Yeah, I know I sound like Breen)

I just want to know how long it will be before we can use Zero Point Energy like the force