Yesterday, we took a walk around the lake to look at Christmas lights. Thinking back, it seems like a tragedy that I cannot remember once looking up at the night sky and enjoying the stars and constellations. Contact is reminding me how much less wonder and awe I have in my life now than I used to. It is a story of a precocious scientist (Ellie) who, from her birth, exhibited an interest in science and wonder and an aptitude for electronics. She gets into radio astronomy and eventually discovers an encrypted message from extraterrestrial life (I'm assuming because I haven't gotten that far in the book yet) .
Many years ago, I watched the movie 'Entrapment'. It came out prior to the new millenium, and took place in the future, on the eve of the new year and millenium. I can remember thinking as I walked out of the theater the wonder that the events in the movie hadn't happened yet. A few weeks/months later, I don't recall how long, I can recall thinking back on the movie and realized that the time period had passed. Through no fault of its own, the entire perspective of the movie had shifted and made it into a fictional history instead of a future potentiality.
Contact was written in 1985 to take place in 1999, and I read it now in 2012. A book written in the past about a future that is now also in the past. I read it now as past history that never happened, a fiction, a tragedy of the real world coalescing into one reality that isn't represented by the story. I wish it had been true (Keep in mind, I am only ten chapters in out of twenty-four, so this opinion may be subject to change). It is true that humans need awe, and such events would have been awing. At the same time, some of the future brought about by the Message did actually occur, without the Message intervention. The book was written at the end of the cold war, and predicted a world where the Message would force the nations of the world to work together even pushing aside the bitter rivalry between the Russians and Americans. The book is written from the perspective of a scientist who cares less about the political background of her fellow scientists than their abilities, but it also reasonably accurately portrays a more modern sense of the tentative acceptance we have of the Russian place in modern society rather than a more contemporary (for that time at least) deprecation of everything that was against the US in the cold war.
Chapter ten contains a discussion about the relationship between science and religion, including a sermon by a rabble-rouser exhorting people to not believe the lies fed to the populace by scientists and an exchange between Ellie and two prominent fundamentalist preachers of slightly different flavors. Either the relationship between fundamentalist religion and science has not changed at all in the last 30 years or Sagan very accurately predicted what relations would be in the future. I suspect the former. Although the discussion is set up to be an even-handed discussion of science and religion, it turns into (was from the start) a defense of science from the religious. I feel that this is an inevitable result of a discussion between two sides where one side is sure they are always right, and the other side is sure that they are never quite right but definitely getting closer. You cannot have an open discussion when one half of the conversation is closed-minded. Mind you, there are plenty of scientists who dogmatically defend the principles of science without necessarily believing in them, or even recognizing the hypocrisy of some of their positions. Too often we have scientists who create a hypothesis then create an experiment to prove it. In this book at least we do not have deal with that right now. Ellie is the ideal scientist - open to questioning her own beliefs, even about science. It is a little bit alien to me - human nature, including mine, is to find and see patterns whether they exist or not.
Contact touches on the gendered-ness of the scientific community. As a female with a brain, Ellie has to fight to be recognized by the majority of her male colleagues, even as she is better at what she does many of them. It is not so overt now, graduating in 2010, as it was then. It is still not gone. In college I wore clothes that didn't flatter my figure, for the double reason of a) it wasn't worth the cost, bother, and annoying attention that the clothes won me for my body, and b) the people who did notice me noticed me for what I could do. At the same time, I personally am biased against my own sex. It took about the same amount of time for me to convince myself that a female professor knew what she was doing as it did for me to convince myself that a male professor didn't know what he was doing. The initial hypothesis is in a different direction, depending on the gender. In addition, in my memory, I lump all the female pre-med BME's into one non-engineering group, while I remember specific pre-med males as being non-engineers. This might be a consequence of the fact that while all the female pre-meds where memorization machines, there were at least two male pre-meds that were incredibly good engineers, and in my opinion will be truly wasted in a medical field.
On a personal note, this book is reminding me why I wanted to go into research in the first place - the awe and splendor, the serendipity of discovery. Probably fortunately, I remember also that I do not find myself particularly suited to the tedium of research with no reason to hope for success other than that what I'm looking for hasn't been disproven yet. Several years in the lab have decisively pointed to a different direction as much more suitable, and as awesome as it is to dream of the next big discovery, I think I'm much happier where I am. Maybe a few more Sagan books will get me back into a lab.
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