I’m captivated by wireless content in motion pictures. In particular when the content is plausible, either from a historical or a technical perspective.
Here are few words about one of my favorites. Its name is Contact. It was released in 1997. It presents a character, Dr. Ellie Arroway, excellently played by the actress Jodie Foster. The story, based on a novel with the same name by Carl Sagan, is about a scientist searching for extraterrestrial intelligence. That is, radio signals from outer space transmitted by a form of intelligent life. I read the book and I didn’t like it very much because the story evolves at much too slow pace. I, although, very much enjoyed the movie.
The climax of the movie is reached when they actually succeed intercepting an extraterrestrial signal with meaning. The author of the story brilliantly imagined a universal message that any form of intelligence could understand, i.e., a suite of prime numbers. Indeed, their first intercepted message consists of bursts of slow speed pulses. Each burst encoding a prime number. Numbers are sent from lowest to highest. Watch the segment below:
Moral of the story, mathematics is a universal language!
There are several other interesting elements. I like the introduction of the movie showing free space propagation of radio signals transmitted from the earth since the beginning of wireless until modern time:
The propagation model is slightly exaggerated, but illustrative of the fact that wireless knows no frontiers.
During my career, I had the honor to meet a lot of experienced people. People who know their topic and what they are talking about. I recognized that type of people in the Contact movie character Kent. Despite of blindness, he can analyze signals just by sound:
The ending of the movie develops further the fiction side. I felt this not very engaging. In short, the movie is not very conclusive, but it is worth watching.
Posted by ve3emb 
