What's the story behind the drawings on the wall in Portal 2?

While playing Portal 2 I encountered several drawings on the walls:

Something about someone getting shot, companion cubes, people choking on poisonous gas and Chell doing nasty things to GLaDOS.

Something about Schrödinger’s cat (?) and mathematics that don’t make any sense to me.

“The bell invites, hear the turret, for it is knell. That summons to heaven or to hell.” Apparently this is a Macbeth quote:

"I go, and it is done; the bell invites me. Hear it not, Duncan, for it is a knell That summons thee to heaven or to hell."

How it relates to the game however is a mystery to me. So does anyone know what the story behind them is and what they mean?

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8 Answers

The drawings on the walls were done by the Rat Man (real name Doug Rattmann), a schizophrenic former employee of Aperture Science. He was convinced GLaDOS would continue to try to kill Aperture employees if switched on, and so took precautions when GLaDOS was 'fixed' and reactivated, thereby surviving GlaDOS flooding the Enrichment Centre with a deadly neurotoxin. He manipulated the order GlaDOS chose test subjects to put Chell first, as Aperture/GlaDOS had identified her as being abnormally tenacious and thus unsuitable for testing (hence the bell curve); his hope was that she'd be more capable of frustrating GlaDOS than he was.

The images you see around the portal gun are a retelling of the events in Portal; Aperture turns GlaDOS on; GlaDOS floods the Enrichment Centre with a deadly neurotoxin; Chell resists GLaDOS's cakey temptation and destroys her, and is put into suspended animation.

Most of his handiwork is from after his pills ran out. Not all of it is logical.

Edit: also, see acmshar's answer for the significance of the equations the Rat Man's scrawled on the walls.

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Merus' answer is great for covering the reason for the writing (and especially for the third image). I want to clarify what some of the equations are in the second image.

From left, the first equation (starting with t, and including the equation below it starting with gamma) is referencing Time Dilation (Special relativity).

The equation above that is Schrodinger's Equation for a Single Particle in a Potential Well.

The bottom right equations are Maxwell's Laws

The right hand equation is a wave-particle's momentum

The bottom left equation is the time independent Schrodinger equation.

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They're drawings/"instructions" by the "Rat-man", left for Chell when she wakes up.

The full comic is available at

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Spoiler: There's also some neat foreshadowing in that

every one of those drawings has the moon in it!

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The first picture seems to be a historic account of the deadly neurotoxin, Chell's victory over GLaDOS, and the tortured test subjects/Aperture employees.

The equations in the second one are, according to my friend, the Schrodinger equation and the position momentum uncertainty principle... whatever the heck that is. He says Valve seems to like to throw random equations into their games without much context.

The third picture is this:

Presumably they're all drawn up by Rattmann in his panicked and nearly schizophrenic state.

Here's some background relating to the Schrödinger's Cat drawing:

A cat, along with a flask containing a poison and a radioactive source, is placed in a sealed box shielded against environmentally induced quantum decoherence. If an internal Geiger counter detects radiation, the flask is shattered, releasing the poison that kills the cat. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics implies that after a while, the cat is simultaneously alive and dead. Yet, when we look in the box, we see the cat either alive or dead, not both alive and dead

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The first pictures surrounding the portal gun represent the events in Portal, such as the reactivation of GLaDOS, the flooding of the facility with neurotoxin, and Chell killing GLaDOS.

The pictures with the cat represent the Schrödinger’s Cat experiment, which says that the cat left in a box will be both dead and alive until opened. This is talked about when Ratman puts Chell into an indefinite sleep where she would be both alive and dead until someone opens the chamber.

Finally, the last pictures are the graph shown on Chell's record, showing that she has amazing tenacity she she would never give up. This was why Ratman chose her, as Chell would be the one to actually challenge GLaDOS. The quote, "The bell invites, hear the turret, for it is knell. That summons to heaven or to hell," is a quote from MacBeth.

Also, for those of you who don't know who Ratman is, he is a surviving scientist from GLaDOS' attack as he predicted that she would kill everyone. He has schizophrenia, causing him to scribble on the walls in such a vivid pattern.

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The poem actually is an alteration of the quote from MacBeth "I go, and it is done; the bell invites me. Hear it not, Duncan, for it is a knell That summons thee to heaven or to hell."

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