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She's not suggesting we should change what the word means - as far as I understand it - she's suggesting we should change what the idea means.
In other words, not changing what "God" means - changing what God is.
Which is basically the same as changing the word, I guess. Shutting up.
Of course, if someone presented that evidence to me, I don't know how convincing I would find it. Since the "go deep enough into Pi and you'll find anything, since it's infinite" still seems at least somewhat valid to me. But that's Sagan's argument, and certainly he was a smarter man than I.
Here's the thing; I see both sides.
Since Pi *is* non-repeating and infinite, that image DOES exist somewhere in Pi, as does your name in ASCII, or as a matter of fact, the complete text of the book "Contact" in ASCII. Somewhere. That's *infinite-and-nonrepeating* for ya!
HOWEVER, I tried to actually search for *anything* useful in the first 4 million digits of Pi, but there's nothing notable. The thing is that as probabilities goes, 4 millions is *nothing*, a spit in the ocean.
Still, on a human (and computational) scale, 4 million digits of pi is a lot.
/Z
Great commentary guys - heard it today.
Did you know George Miller (Mad Max, Babe Pig in the City) was the first director on this before Zemeckis took over. Also, WETA Digital did some of the wormhole effects shots (around the time they did Frighteners).
Jodie Foster's character is based on an amalgam of two real people: Jill Tarter from SETI and Carolyn Porco (Cassini mission).
Hard science movies:
You mentioned that 'Contact' is one of the few examples of 'hard science' done well in the movies. I'd agree and also nominate 'Gattaca' that does 'hard science' well without resorting to technobabble or fantasy elements.
+4
Kept expecting it to pull out of Nicolas Cage's eye or something. The internet has ruined me.
There's a similar sequence in Immortal Beloved, when the young Beethoven lies in a lake at night and it zooms out to encompass the cosmos, all during a crescendo of his 9th symphony. Gary Oldman is brilliant as usual.
It begins just after the 5:00min mark here...
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