Contact

by Carl Sagan

The book was better than the movie. For one thing, there was a lot more in it. And some of the pictures were awfully different from the movie.

The book contains a prophecy about itself... no, not really. Anyway, while this is mostly true, the movie is still one of the best ever made.

“It’s a lazy Saturday afternoon, and there’s this couple lying naked in bed reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica to each other, and arguing about whether the Andromeda Galaxy is more ‘numinous’ than the Resurrection. Do they know how to have a good time, or don’t they?”

“It’s like stamp collecting. I used to collect stamps when I was a kid. You could send a letter to somebody in a foreign country and most of the time they’d write back. It didn’t matter what they said. All you wanted was the stamp.

Clever trick.

The God whom science recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who does a wholesale, not a retail business.

Vaygay asked, “Did anyone see a naked singularity?” “I don’t know what one looks like,” Devi replied.

Physicists had to invent words and phrases for concepts far removed from everyday experience. It was their fashion to avoid pure neologisms and instead to evoke, even if feebly, some analogous commonplace. The alternative was to name discoveries and equations after one another. This they did also. But if you didn’t know it was physics they were talking, you might very well worry about them.

“No, it’s just that if we don’t engineer a consistent causality, it’ll work itself out on its own. Then it’s almost always worse.”