“Contact” is a great movie because it deals with the religious, philosophical, and scientific aspects of an extra terrestrial encounter where as a movie like “Independence Day” is more about weapons, battles and explosions. It was also relatively accurate with scientific principles, of course with the exception of a few scenes. Unfortunately, there is a huge mistake at the end of the movie that deals with time dilation within Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity. Dr. Eleanor "Ellie" Arroway claims to have been gone for about 18 hours while everyone else on Earth claims that she was only in the “core” of the machine for a fraction of a second as her pod fell straight through. For both her and the observers to be right, the movie would have to break the laws of special relativity and the pod would have to travel much faster than the speed of light, as shown in the calculations below. I put the dilated time (Δt) as 0.1 seconds because they said she was only in the core for a “fraction of a second.” I put Δt₀ as 64800 seconds (equivalent of 18 hours) for what Ellie claims to have experienced. In solving for “v”, you can see the answer does not exist because you would have to take the square root of a negative number. This means the pod would be going faster than the speed of light (1.9426x10¹⁴ meters per second). For this problem to agree with out current understanding of physics, namely Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity, only one perspective can be correct.

Let’s assume for a second that the outside observers (the ones in the control room) are correct and she was only gone for a fraction of a second. We have to assume she was traveling less than the speed of light, otherwise the math breaks down like it did in the first problem. I set her velocity as 299,792,457 meters per second (one meter per second slower than the speed of light). As you can see in the calculations below, even if she was gone for a tenth of a second, traveling that close to the speed of light means that more than 165 days would have elapsed on Earth before she returned.

Now let’s assume that Ellie was correct and she really was gone for 18 hours and her camera did in fact record 18 hours of static video. After working out the calculations, you can see that the dilated time is ENORMOUS in this scenario. We end up with 9.257x10¹² seconds (equivalent to more than 2933 CENTURIES!!!).

So the question is, how would I revise the script. I would probably re-write it so the aliens sent them drawings for a warp drive machine. This way, Ellie could travel with space instead of through a worm hole, and there would be no problems with time dilation.