My friend Mai Kou from the United States knows that I like to watch documentaries, and once recommended a documentary by Carl Sagan to me. I told him that I was watching a very old documentary called Cosmos recently, and the one you recommended to me may take a while to watch. He was silent for a moment and said, we are talking about the same film. This is how I learned about Carl Sagan. It is strange and ironic to say that almost everyone knows about Carl Sagan and his documentary Cosmos with friends in Europe and the United States. However, in China, few people know this documentary, which is watched by more than 500 million people in more than 60 countries around the world, and is one of the most popular shows in PBS history.
Astronomer and popular science writer Carl Sagan, in addition to the world-renowned documentary Cosmos, has written books. His science fiction novel "Contact" (Chinese translation "Time and Space Contact") was adapted into a movie. The movie is about a scientist persistently searching for extraterrestrial civilization, and all mankind who persistently want to talk to extraterrestrial civilization. Unlike commercial science fiction films that are wild and unbelievable, the film "Time Contact", which was adapted by scientist Carl Sagan, does not violate the laws of natural science to a large extent. At first when writing the original novel, Carl Sagan set the heroine to go to Vega to visit extraterrestrial civilization through a black hole. After visiting his old friend, the theoretical physicist Kip Thorne, he changed the black hole to Become a wormhole.
Of course, the wormhole was not the first one proposed by Kip Thorne. "Wormhole", also known as the Einstein-Rosen Bridge, was proposed by Einstein and Nathan Rosen in the 1930s. "Wormholes" are thin tubes of space and time that connect distant regions of the universe. Dark matter keeps the exit of the wormhole open. Wormholes can connect parallel universes and baby universes and provide the possibility of time travel. "(Stephen Hawking "A Brief History of Time") As one of the three giants of general relativity, Kip Thorne is certainly not unfamiliar with it. The beginning of a concept.
The film received widespread praise and a lot of box office. The heroine actor Judy Foster graduated from the Yale University School of Letters, majoring in literature and Latin, and is the heroine of "The Silent Lambs". Before the filming of "Time and Space Contact", she was a two-time Oscar-winning heroine, and now she is Director of the second season of "House of Cards". In the film, she sits in the background of the Very Large Antenna Array (VLA) and listens to the radio waves from the universe. She has become a classic loved by astronomers and science fiction fans. Radio observation does not require ears).
However, Carl Sagan failed to see the movie released with his own eyes-six months before the release of "Time Contact", Carl Sagan died of bone marrow cancer. At the end of the film, the subtitle "For Carl" was played to pay tribute to him.
Today, seventeen years later, a sci-fi movie called "Interstellar" (Chinese translation "Interstellar") will be released worldwide, directed by the renowned Christopher Nolan. In addition to the strong cast and production lineup, it is Kip Thorne, the theoretical physicist who contributed to Carl Sagan, who participated in the screenwriting and scientific setting. Like "Time and Time Contact", this is a "hard science fiction" movie. Kip Thorne tries to make everything happen without violating the laws of natural science.
We are also facing the problem of how to send humans to distant exoplanets in a short period of time. With the experience of using the wormhole concept in "Cross-Time Contact", Kip Thorne and Nolan discussed more about how Show wormholes in the movie. In addition, in order to show time dilation, he also needs a massive black hole.
Thanks to the current advanced computer technology, Paul Franklin, the senior director of Double Negative, is responsible for the visual effects of this film (Double Negative is Europe's largest production base for post-production special effects for film and television). Thorne gave the equations to Franklin, and Franklin's team developed software to simulate scenarios based on these equations. The result is surprisingly good. Franklin said, "Science fiction always tries to disguise, and is always dissatisfied with the fact that the real universe is not amazing. What we make out of software is to remove the fake and keep the truth."
Not only wormholes, but the black holes, universe, and light in the film are all made in this way, exhausting the wisdom of two geniuses and a large team of teams behind them to cater to the laws of the universe. Nolan lets the audience see the beauty, and Thorne lets the audience see the truth. Audiences who are sitting in the cinema to watch "Interstellar" a few days later, please don’t think that this is just one of the many commercial special effects blockbusters that Hollywood has smashed at its expense. The settings are based on scientific facts.
It is worth mentioning that the actor of the film used his life show acting in "The Wolf of Wall Street" to lose 30 pounds for the "Dallas Buyers Club" and won the 2014 Oscar for Best Actor Award in one fell swoop. , It was Matthew McConaughey who played the male protagonist—the heroine’s lover and a Christian philosopher—in Carl Sagan’s "Time Contact" seventeen years ago. In that nineties movie, the young Matthew McConaughey wore a coat and a scarf, brown curly hair, and a charming smile. Apart from him, I can't think of anyone more suitable for this film.
Carl Sagan's "Time Contact", Kip Thorne's "Interstellar". The two films—one has become a classic and the other is about to become a classic—connected in time with breathtaking similarities, like wormholes in the universe. Carl Sagan and Kip Thorne are at each end of the wormhole, looking at each other.
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