From: Ken Clements (Ken@Innovation-On-Demand.com)
Date: Fri Mar 08 2002 - 22:14:16 MST
I read _Contact_ when it came out in the mid 80's, and I liked it very
much until I got to the Pi stuff at the very end, at which I felt
embarrassed for Carl. It has been long suspected that all finite
sequences of digits can be found in Pi somewhere. This is part of a
property called "normality" which, although not yet proven, is lined up
to be one of the next unsolved math problems to fall. See:
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/NormalNumber.html
http://www.sciencenews.org/20010901/bob9.asp
http://www.nature.com/nsu/010802/010802-9.html
http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/pi-random.html
http://gopher.ulb.ac.be/~pvouplin/pi/pinormal.htm
http://www.nersc.gov/~dhbailey/
It seems to me he could have had ET ask Ellie what happens when such and
such particles collide at mumble energy level, so that when she gets
back and talks some particle physics friends into looking they find
something that opens a new age.
I thoroughly enjoyed the movie. It was one of the first I went out and
got on DVD. If you get the DVD you can set the alt audio to a track on
which Jodie Foster will talk you through the whole movie, explaining
what was going on when they were filming and especially how she
approached the character of Ellie. She had researched child prodigy
behavior for her movie _Little Man Tate_ and carried some of that over
into Ellie. (Considered a prodigy herself, it definitely comes across.)
-Ken
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