This was found out by a physicist and a science journalist (that is, me), who sorted out the contents of the marker boards in Black Mesa with physics painted on them.
Marker board with a diagram of the tau gun, improved via AI processing by Steam user Cursed Gman (Dany)
Black Mesa is a remake of the first part of Half-Life, in which we play as a silent physicist who finds himself in the epicenter of a cataclysm caused by experiments. The original game, in addition to being revolutionary for the first-person shooter genre, has become a cultural anchor for high energy physics in the minds of many players around the world.
The developers from Crowbar Collective – the authors of the remake – could not leave this fact unnoticed. game praise for careful attitude to the original and a good visual. However, the way the spirit of a real scientific laboratory is conveyed is also admirable.
A special highlight of enthusiasts is white marker boards filled to capacity with formulas and drawings, which, in the case of physics, are taken from real scientific articles. As a physicist, I was very interested in this.
At the moment I’m busy writing a big breakdown of what the Black Mesa physicists are actually doing, but in the process I made a small discovery: according to one of the boards, the tau gun is no longer a thaon accelerator or a railgun, but rather X-ray tube combined with a synchrotron. In other words, this weapon actually fires photons, which makes sense given where Freeman finds it.
I talked more about this board in blog on N + 1. Well, I will try to finish the bigmat on the boards in the near future.
