THE only science fiction that ever really caught my attention when I was growing up, besides Star Trek and Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, was the novel Contact by Carl Sagan. When I was 15, I saw the 1997 film version of this, which he and his wife Ann Druyan had helped adapt for the screen. Later, as a 17-year-old navigating my first semester at university, I read the book, having accepted that I couldn’t just read Mansfield Park on a loop for the rest of my life. Contact eventually became the gateway for me to try more popular science books, those written for general audiences.
Until that point, when it came to this genre, I had only read Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time – which inspired my interest in particle physics – and Dennis Overbye’s Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos: The story of the scientific quest for the secret of the universe. Overbye’s story was different from the usual public-facing science communications that I had been subject to because it told two stories: a scientific one and the human story that goes hand in hand with it.
The scientific question at the heart of the book was measuring the expansion rate of space-time at cosmological scales: how fast, exactly, were galaxies receding from one another? But equally interesting to me was the human story that underpinned this endeavour: the nasty fights the researchers got into with one another about their differing measurements.
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The book terrified me – well, a bit. Luckily, I was young enough to believe that this kind of bitter competition was the purview of old men who were already dead or very soon would be. I won’t argue that teenagers are the most tactful thinkers. And those of you who are familiar with my book, The Disordered Cosmos, know that I realise now that I was quite naive. In hindsight, maybe this was also one of the lessons I was supposed to draw from Contact, but, at the time, I wrote off the politics in this story as a government problem, not a scientist problem.
Instead, what caught my attention was the portrayal of Eleanor “Ellie” Arroway, a girl and then a woman who loved looking at the stars. Despite its apparently cynical (but in reality probably optimistic) portrayal of how the US government would respond to messages that contained details about how to build alien technology, Contact is, at its heart, a romantic story that shows off Sagan’s unique gifts as a science communicator.
Inspired by the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) and real-life alien hunting astronomer Jill Tarter, Sagan tells a story that is focused on radio telescopes and takes advantage of the fact that the non-expert reader or viewer feels they understand these devices. By this I mean that even in the film, the adult Ellie (played by Jodie Foster) is seen listening to space using a pair of headphones connected to the Very Large Array (VLA) – a real facility in New Mexico.
In radio astronomy, scientists look at the cosmos using light waves that are in the radio wavelengths, the longest in the electromagnetic spectrum. These waves are longer than those of visible light that we can perceive with our eyes, and they are even longer than the infrared that we can see with night-vision goggles. Because radio waves are a type of light, they travel at the speed of light. Like other types of light, radio waves don’t naturally produce sound, but with the right equipment, the electrical signals created by the detection of these waves can be converted into an audible mechanical signal.
Astronomers don’t really do this for the purposes of actual research because there is rarely any point. This is the kind of detail that is unimportant for the purposes of the film of Contact, but how it portrays radio astronomy is one of the inaccuracies I occasionally hear scientists complain about. I was lucky enough to do some observations using the VLA for my third-year lab course. We were looking at the behaviour of water molecules in the Orion nebula: where they were, how fast they move and in what direction. We didn’t listen to the data. Instead, we processed it so that we could look at it, just like we would with data from an optical telescope.
That was my favourite lab project and probably the only time I ever excelled in the lab; I was so excited to be a real-life Ellie Arroway. Later, I would be forced to think more about the human aspects of my experience. I would witness unnecessarily nasty arguments between scientists, complete with yelling and chalkboard punching. But, thankfully, Carl Sagan’s Contact had not only introduced me to the idea of radio astronomy as a possible career path, it had also given me a road map for staying centred amid the chaotic collision of astronomical wonder and human politics.
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is an assistant professor of physics and astronomy, and a core faculty member in women’s studies at the University of New Hampshire. Her research in theoretical physics focuses on cosmology, neutron stars and particles beyond the standard model.
Chanda’s week
What I’m reading
Taylor Branch’s 2000+ page trilogy about the US during the years of Martin Luther King, Jr.
What I’m watching
I saw the Apple TV adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation twice in one week!
What I’m working on
My first PhD student will be defending his dissertation soon, so I am helping him get ready.
