Contact by Carl Sagan is an interesting view into the scientific mind. The book deals with the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) and the relationship between science and religion. Sagan was a well-known and popular scientist in the 1980s for his show Cosmos
Eleanor (Ellie) Arroway grew up loving her father (who died while she was a child) and an inquisitive streak. She pushed her knowledge and love of science into a Harvard education and a career in astronomy. She became enchanted with SETI and became the director of a radio telescope observatory in New Mexico. And then they receive a message from Vega. It starts off with prime numbers and then they find pages of instructions for a machine inside. As the world debates whether or not to build the machine, there are debates internally with Ellie and a famous preacher (Palmer Joss) about whether or not science or religion is the proper path to follow.
The book does a wonderful job of balancing the discussion of science and religion. In a book by a noted agnostic scientist, there might have been a danger of making the scientific arguments much stronger than the religious ones. But Sagan does a good job of taking on the religious personalities and making them real people with real beliefs. Ellie is as close to an atheist as one could be, but at the end she is forced to confront her own beliefs and is put into a situation where she is forced to defend the machine on nothing but belief.
Sagan has made an interesting novel. It’s a science fiction novel that goes into wonderful detail about how a message from an extraterrestrial intelligence might appear and yet balances that with an interesting debate over the places of science and religion in people’s lives. The book does a great job of not taking the easy way out or making one side or the other out to be caricatures. The movie based off the book