How can a person "Hold a stargate open" with their arm?

In several episodes of SG1, Atlantis, and once in SGU a person is able to hold a gate open by sticking just their arm through. The show explains why the gate stays open (to prevent a person from being cutoff), but if matter can only travel one way through a gate how can the person pull their arm back through?

Also how would a gate know that the person is completely through, and not just their arm?

Answer

People moving through the Stargate are stored in an energy buffer as they enter into it; the matter is transformed into energy and vice versa "on the fly" as it enters and exits the gate. Only when the object (or person) completely passes through the event horizon is the stream sent through to the distant gate.

It does raise some interesting questions, such as how the gate "simulates" someone's bloodflow and such (never mind their neural activity while their brain is partially-encoded!).

The gate has safety protocols in place to prevent it from being shut off under normal circumstances if there is something partially within the event horizon. There are a few instances of things being severed due to a gate being closed prematurely, such as when Teal'C holds the Goa'uld-infested Major Kawalsky's head in the gate in an early episode in order to partially decapitate him.

Comments

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In time Keeps on Slippin' , Farnsworth creates a basketball team which he matures by abusing Chronitons. This leads to time skipping forward by random, but ever increasing amounts. How much time was skipped in this way? Answer Unfortunately, I don't think a good estimate can be made for this, for two reasons: Many of the time skips move forward by an indeterminate amount of time. At one point, the Professor mentions localized regions of space skipping forward much more than others. We then see two young boys on the street below complaining about having to pay social security, only to suddenly become senior citizens and start complaining about wanting their money. Thus, each individual could have experienced a different amount of time skippage.

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In Empire Strikes Back , we see a transcription of what R2's beeps and bloops mean, but it's not English (sorry for the low quality, it's from the 2004 DVDs): I'd assume it's what Basic looks like when written, but is there some point in the the Star Wars films we see written English instead? (This sort of spun off from a discussion in How do people understand astromech droids? .) Answer At one point there was English but it has been phased out in subsequent versions of the films. Chris Gould at DVD Active did a comparison of all versions of each of the Star Wars films, and in his comparison of Episode 4 , there are a couple of screenshots showing how the power gauge for the Death Star tractor beam was changed. I imagine there are probably more to be found in his other comparisons but I haven't got around to reading those yet.

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