Yes. He was a good guy. By the way, some of the details in the movie was very accurate particularly all the political games that the main character had to endure during her scientific career. Another point that was fairly accurate was the way in which the message was encoded. Mr. Sagan and many others believe that somthing similar might be the way in which we would receive a message from a not too advanced civilization. Remember the big sphere and the rotating e/m fields ? Hmmm ... a clue there somewhere: Funny - or maybe obvious - how this spherical symmetry thing keeps cropping up all over mathematics in three dimensions ......
Personally, I'm not sure I'd want to do what she did. I don't have the guts or balls to travel across the universe in a metal sphere to meet some aliens.
TM is right. Sagan wrote the book. The book was written well before the movie was made. So it's possible that the script could have been altered somewhat to make it a "tribute" to Sagan who was either already dead, or just very ill when the script was adapted. But while I cannot remember many specifics (I read the book when it came out....I do remember reading it in hard cover so it was a long time ago), I recall that the movie followed the book quite closely. So I think the "tribute" was limited to the dedication in the title (Sagan was dead before the movie was released for sure). Good movie, good book, and I think Sagan's only work of fiction. (Not positive). But either way, the film was true to the book. And quite clearly transposed, unlike Space Odyssey, which was also true to Clarks work, but only in Kubrick's brain. Without reading Space Odyssey the movie was incomprehensible as to story line. (I know I have mentioned this before on ET).....I am a big fan of Kubrick but that movie really couldn't possibly make sense to viewers who had not read the book. For those that did, it followed the book almost exactly. (name changes, minor stuff...Jupiter instead of Saturn, etc.) That's what happens when you have no narrative and just try and take a very narrative work and present it strictly as a visual. Very confusing!! Contact was the opposite. Clearly took the viewer through the story and used the visual advantages of film just perfectly. Peace, RS
If you liked the movie, try reading the book. You may not like it so much after that. I personally thought the movie was a very poor translation of the book. The "bald guy" was neither inserted as a tribute to Sagan (or being symbolic of Sagan) nor an alien sent to Earth. His character (Hadden) is from the book (not added as an afterthought to the movie). He was supposed to have been a whiz kid who came up with a superfast computer processor (been a VERY long time since I read the book, but I think it was supposed to be some kind of intelligent processor) and other electronics and computer industry inventions that made him a billionaire. He was able to give the main character the solution to decoding and reading the information in the signal simply because he was still a whiz kid and his mind worked that way. Unfortunately, while Sagan penned the character as an eccentric genius, I always felt the film makers turned him into a bizzare caricature. Zemeckis is a terrific directory, but Goldenberg's script needed more editing than he gave it. Turning a mostly narrative book into a solid movie is a very tough job, but I thought Goldenberg's script (probably exacerbated by certain of the actors) was stilted and ponderous and a disappointment after the book. Sagan died about six months before the movie was released. He and his wife consulted on the film and he was able to at least see parts of film prior to its final editing. Pity that it wasn't as good a translation of his book as it could have been.
Yeah, Somehow determining the Stable Homotopy Rings/Groups of Spheres is the key to knowing all you need to know about math and the nature it describes. BTW, don't you mean Cylindrical Symmetry in the Financial case? ;-) nitro