Friday, September 21, 2007

Wormholes


The wormhole journey as portrayed in Contact is a cheap thrill ride unworthy of the material.

OK... So the pod drops through the center of the popcorn machine and into a wormhole aperture. Great, with you so far...  But the red flashy-crap, followed by a star-field, followed by being sucked into some kind of funnel/vortex/tunnel thingy doesn't work.

Here's how it should have gone... The machine should have been more like the one in the book where a stationary pod is surrounded by a device that generates a pucker in spacetime to which an awaiting wormhole nozzle can attach. The wormhole itself is an invasive sphere which envelopes a local area of spacetime; the space enclosing the pod when the machine reaches full power. Through a window, a passenger would see her surroundings instantly change from departure point to destination without ever experiencing a tunnel. 

Yes, Sagan used tunnels in the book. But I think he included the tunnel adventure more for entertainment than scientific value. I don't know.

In the book the pod is completely encased, which conveniently doesn't allow an outside observer to see anything. But the popcorn machine works around this problem by having the walls become transparent within Ellie's line of sight? What the hell? This only adds too the notion that she's nuts. 

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