Contact A Novel

It's a great movie. Carl Sagan wrote that book.

He wrote the movie Contact, McConaughey and Jodie Foster.

If you've seen the movie Contact...

Apparently it's not too inaccurate from the writer of this article who was Freud and Link, wasn't it?

Well, it was based on a book written by Carl Sagan and he definitely knew his stuff.

He wrote the movie Contact, McConaughey and Jodie Foster. That was based on his novel.

If you want to watch that one, is fairly accurate and on track.

Well, it was based on a book written by Carl Sagan and he definitely knew his stuff.

But one of the things he wrote was Contact, the novel.

And wrote the movie Contact, McConaughey and Jodie Foster.

That was based on his novel.

If I want to see a movie about alien contact, I go and read a book by Carl Sagan called contact later made into a movie. Why? Cause he's pretty smart. And if there was alien contact, that's probably how it's going to happen.

Not only that, in Carl Sagan's novel Contact, which then became a movie in the late 1990s.

So Contact, that also had aliens that you never saw.

There was more work done on wormholes, especially inspired by Carl Sagan's novel Contact, when he was buds with Kip Thorne, a relativist physicist, astrophysicist at Caltech, where you run through more of the equations and you can, in principle, just punch a wormhole through the fabric of space without reference to a black hole or a white hole.

So he also actually suggested to Carl Sagan in Contact that wormholes were used in the film.

In the movie Contact. And the novel. In the story.

So that was a film adaptation of Carl Sagan's 1985 novel, and we saw there Jodie Foster playing the lead character, Ellie Arroway, first hearing a signal coming through the radio telescopes converted into sound.

And they said, Carl's writing a science fiction book.

And they said, well, you might think you recognize someone in the book, but I think you'll like her.

And I said, oh, come on. All right. As long as she doesn't eat ice cream cones for lunch, nobody's going to think it's me.

It's been rumored that the lead character of Contact, Ellie Araway, might have smelled like you a little bit.

I was a fan of the book Contact.

Carl Sagan's first novel is always strongly drawn from your personal life experience.

In the film, she wants to listen for radio signals from intelligent aliens at a time when that's not an entirely embraced thing for a scientist to do.

She has this developing relationship with a religious cleric who is the other side of the argument.

So to listen to the conversations between Ellie Arroway and Palmer Joss, who was a romantic interest and also a cleric, was very much to read Carl Sagan and what he had to say about the juncture between science and religion.

And so that's one that did it. Not only that, in Carl Sagan's novel Contact, which then became a movie in the late 1990s, because 2001 A Space Odyssey was 1968. So Contact, that also had aliens that you never saw.

Not only that, in Carl Sagan's novel Contact, which then became a movie in the late 1990s, because 2001 A Space Odyssey was 1968. So Contact, that also had aliens that you never saw.

Well, that was Carl's first novel.

And they say that your first novel is always strongly drawn from your personal life experience.

In the film if you haven't seen it, she wants to listen for radio signals from intelligent aliens at a time when that's not an entirely embraced thing for a scientist to do.

And also she has this developing relationship, believe it or not, with a religious cleric who is the other side of the argument.

Because the closest we get to this I think Is Kip Thorne speaking of The development of the wormhole in Contact In the movie Contact Because he said he was approached by Carl Sagan And he said how can we justify this scientifically

And then Kip Thorne went and did a calculation Added some extra physics that was not known before To wormhole calculations And then there he actually published a paper Inspired by Carl Sagan Trying to get this science right in the movie Contact

So that was a film adaptation of Carl Sagan's 1985 novel, and we saw there Jodie Foster playing the lead character, Ellie Arroway, first hearing a signal coming through the radio telescopes converted into sound.

And once they decoded it, they found that it was a sequence of prime numbers.

I think in the novel they sent digits of pi, but it's the same idea here.

So what's interesting for me is Carl Sagan, who is not himself professionally a novelist, has to gather raw data to assemble the story that he ultimately composed.

And there were rumors that Jodie Foster's character was based on a real person that Carl Sagan knew. And you wonder, might it have been Jill Tarter, one of the co-founders of the SETI Institute?

I was a fan of the book Contact. I loved the movie Contact. I love the Ellie Arroway character. I love that he described there as a wonder junkie, literally addicted to the mystery, addicted to the question.

Carl Sagan's first novel and they say that your first novel is always strongly drawn from your personal life experience.

In the film if you haven't seen it, she wants to listen for radio signals from intelligent aliens at a time when that's not an entirely embraced thing for a scientist to do.

When came time to do the movie, Carl called me up and said out of all the female scientists he knew, I came closest to being like the character he wanted to portray on the screen which I immediately thought, well of course, it's because I'm just so tactless and in your face and in the book that's the way the character is.

Well, that was Carl's first novel.

And they say that your first novel is always strongly drawn from your personal life experience.

In the film if you haven't seen it, she wants to listen for radio signals from intelligent aliens at a time when that's not an entirely embraced thing for a scientist to do.

And also she has this developing relationship, believe it or not, with a religious cleric who is the other side of the argument.

So to listen to the conversations between Ellie Arroway and Palmer Joss, who was a romantic interest and also a cleric, was very much to read Carl Sagan and what he had to say about the juncture between science and religion.

I'm told and you might have some other insight here that Carl Sagan at the time though young advised the producers of that film to not show the aliens and leave it to your imagination and that fact was preserved in his novel contact when the screen version at least you don't see the aliens at all

That's the Carl Sagan book, right?

Well, that's a connection right there.

one of the great fiction books that I've read which is one of my favorite movies also of all time is movie contact and a lot of times you guys ask me about a book that I think you should read and I always talk about billions and billions which is Carl Sagan who did Cosmos of course it was his last book he actually died at the end before the book was finished then his wife Andrew and who was also a professor at Cornell she ended up finishing the book but Carl Sagan wrote one fiction book and it was contact and I'm sure many of you have seen the movie with Jody Foster and that movie just blew my mind opened me up to such a new world of things I saw that in 97 I had eaten pot brownies and we were going to see Air Force 1 and Air Force 1 was sold out and we just go into contact we didn't know what the hell it was me and my buddies and that panorama of the universe comes out and I'm stoned out of my mind and that thing just got me and just a great great movie James Woods is in it too and then I ended up reading the book I read all of Sagan's books that's his only nonfiction and in the nonfiction one without getting too lost in this you know if you remember in contact she goes into the machine alone in the book several scientists go into the machine and all have different experiences so there's it's just a great wonderful book

I got that line from Carl Sagan, who was one of the greatest science communicators we've ever had, who most of you if you know Carl Sagan, you should know him from many of his books. But most people know him that he was the author. His one fiction book was Contact, which was the movie with Jodie Foster and Matthew McConaughey, which is a spectacular, spectacular movie actually.