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Contact (novel)
''Contact'' is a 1985 hard science fiction novel by American scientist Carl Sagan. It deals with the theme of contact between humanity and a more technologically advanced extraterrestrial life form. It ranked No. 7 on ''Publishers Weeklys 1985 bestseller list. The only full work of fiction published by Sagan, the novel originated as a screenplay by Sagan and Ann Druyan (whom he later married) in 1979; when development of the film stalled, Sagan decided to convert the stalled film into a novel. The film concept was subsequently revived and eventually released in 1997 as the film '' Contact'' starring Jodie Foster. Plot As a child, Eleanor "Ellie" Arroway shows a strong aptitude for science and mathematics. Dissatisfied with a school lesson, she confirms in a library that pi is transcendental. In sixth grade, her father, Theodore ("Ted"), dies. Her new stepfather, John Staughton, does not support her interests. Ellie resents him and believes her mother remarried out of weakn ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Carl Sagan
Carl Edward Sagan (; ; November 9, 1934December 20, 1996) was an American astronomer, planetary scientist and science communicator. His best known scientific contribution is his research on the possibility of extraterrestrial life, including experimental demonstration of the production of amino acids from basic chemicals by exposure to light. He assembled the first physical messages sent into space, the Pioneer plaque and the Voyager Golden Record, which were universal messages that could potentially be understood by any Extraterrestrial life, extraterrestrial intelligence that might find them. He argued in favor of the hypothesis, which has since been accepted, that the high surface temperatures of Venus are the result of the greenhouse effect.Extract of page 14 Initially an assistant professor at Harvard Universi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Caltech
The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech) is a private university, private research university in Pasadena, California, United States. The university is responsible for many modern scientific advancements and is among a small group of Institute of Technology (United States), institutes of technology in the United States that are devoted to the instruction of pure and applied sciences. The institution was founded as a preparatory and vocational school by Amos G. Throop in 1891 and began attracting influential scientists such as George Ellery Hale, Arthur Amos Noyes, and Robert Andrews Millikan in the early 20th century. The vocational and preparatory schools were disbanded and spun off in 1910, and the college assumed its present name in 1920. In 1934, Caltech was elected to the Association of American Universities, and the antecedents of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which Caltech continues to manage and operate, were established between 1936 and 1943 under ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Religious Skepticism
Religious skepticism is a type of skepticism relating to religion. Religious skeptics question religious authority and are not necessarily antireligious/clerical but rather are skeptical of either specific or all religious beliefs and/or practices. Socrates was one of the most prominent and first religious skeptics of whom there are records; he questioned the legitimacy of the beliefs of his time in the existence of the Greek gods. Religious skepticism is not the same as atheism or agnosticism, and some religious skeptics are deists (or theists who reject the prevailing organized religion they encounter, or even all organized religion). Overview The word skeptic is derived from the Greek word ''skeptikos'', meaning inquiring, which was used to refer to members of the Hellenistic philosophical school of Pyrrhonism which doubted the possibility of knowledge. As such, religious skepticism generally refers to doubting or questioning something about religion. Although, as no ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Primer (textbook)
A primer (in this sense usually pronounced , sometimes , usually the latter in modern British English) is a first textbook for teaching of reading, such as an alphabet book or basal reader. The word also is used more broadly to refer to any book that presents the most basic elements of any subject. Secular primer textbooks developed out of medieval religious primer prayer books and educationally-oriented revisions of these devotionals proliferated during the English Reformation. The Latin ''Enschedé Abecedarium'' of the late 15th century, translated into English as the ''Salisbury Prymer'', has been identified as the earliest example of a printed primer. It presented the alphabet and several Catholic prayers. '' |
Ionosphere
The ionosphere () is the ionized part of the upper atmosphere of Earth, from about to above sea level, a region that includes the thermosphere and parts of the mesosphere and exosphere. The ionosphere is ionized by solar radiation. It plays an important role in atmospheric electricity and forms the inner edge of the magnetosphere. It has practical importance because, among other functions, it influences radio propagation to distant places on Earth. Travel through this layer also impacts GPS signals, resulting in effects such as deflection in their path and delay in the arrival of the signal. History of discovery As early as 1839, the German mathematician and physicist Carl Friedrich Gauss postulated that an electrically conducting region of the atmosphere could account for observed variations of Earth's magnetic field. Sixty years later, Guglielmo Marconi received the first trans-Atlantic radio signal on December 12, 1901, in St. John's, Newfoundland (now in Canada) usin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
1936 Summer Olympics
The 1936 Summer Olympics (), officially the Games of the XI Olympiad () and officially branded as Berlin 1936, were an international multi-sport event held from 1 to 16 August 1936 in Berlin, then capital of Nazi Germany. Berlin won the bid to host the Games over Barcelona on the 29th IOC Session on 26 April 1931. The 1936 Games marked the second and most recent time the International Olympic Committee gathered to vote in a city bidding to host those Games. Later rule modifications forbade cities hosting the bid vote from being awarded the games. To outdo the 1932 Summer Olympics, 1932 Los Angeles Games, Adolf Hitler had Olympiastadion (Berlin), a new 100,000-seat track and field stadium built, as well as six gymnasiums and other smaller arenas. The Games were the first to be Fernsehsender Paul Nipkow, televised, with radio broadcasts reaching 41 countries.Rader, Benjamin G. "American Sports: From the Age of Folk Games to the Age of Televised Sports", 5th ed. Filmmaker Leni Ri ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler (20 April 1889 – 30 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician who was the dictator of Nazi Germany from 1933 until Death of Adolf Hitler, his suicide in 1945. Adolf Hitler's rise to power, He rose to power as the leader of the Nazi Party, becoming Chancellor of Germany#Nazi Germany (1933–1945), the chancellor in 1933 and then taking the title of in 1934. His invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 marked the start of the Second World War. He was closely involved in military operations throughout the war and was central to the perpetration of the Holocaust: the genocide of Holocaust victims, about six million Jews and millions of other victims. Hitler was born in Braunau am Inn in Austria-Hungary and moved to German Empire, Germany in 1913. He was decorated during his service in the German Army in the First World War, receiving the Iron Cross. In 1919 he joined the German Workers' Party (DAP), the precursor of the Nazi Party, and in 1921 was app ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hipparcos
''Hipparcos'' was a scientific satellite of the European Space Agency (ESA), launched in 1989 and operated until 1993. It was the first space experiment devoted to precision astrometry, the accurate measurement of the positions and distances of celestial objects on the sky. This permitted the first high-precision measurements of the intrinsic brightnesses, proper motions, and parallaxes of stars, enabling better calculations of their distance and tangential velocity. When combined with radial velocity measurements from spectroscopy, astrophysicists were able to finally measure all six quantities needed to determine the motion of stars. The resulting ''Hipparcos Catalogue'', a high-precision catalogue of more than 118,200 stars, was published in 1997. The lower-precision ''Tycho Catalogue'' of more than a million stars was published at the same time, while the enhanced Tycho-2 Catalogue of 2.5 million stars was published in 2000. ''Hipparcos'' follow-up mission, '' Gaia'', was ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Universal Language
Universal language may refer to a hypothetical or historical language spoken and understood by all or most of the world's people. In some contexts, it refers to a means of communication said to be understood by all humans. It may be the idea of an international auxiliary language for communication between groups speaking different primary languages. A similar concept can be found in pidgin language, which is actually used to facilitate understanding between two or more people with no common language. In other conceptions, it may be the primary language of all speakers, or the only existing language. Some religious and mythological traditions state that there was once a single universal language among all people, or shared by humans and supernatural beings. In other traditions, there is less interest in or a general deflection of the question. The written Classical Chinese language is still read widely but pronounced differently by readers in China, Vietnam, Korea and Japan ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Prime Number
A prime number (or a prime) is a natural number greater than 1 that is not a Product (mathematics), product of two smaller natural numbers. A natural number greater than 1 that is not prime is called a composite number. For example, 5 is prime because the only ways of writing it as a product, or , involve 5 itself. However, 4 is composite because it is a product (2 × 2) in which both numbers are smaller than 4. Primes are central in number theory because of the fundamental theorem of arithmetic: every natural number greater than 1 is either a prime itself or can be factorization, factorized as a product of primes that is unique up to their order. The property of being prime is called primality. A simple but slow primality test, method of checking the primality of a given number , called trial division, tests whether is a multiple of any integer between 2 and . Faster algorithms include the Miller–Rabin primality test, which is fast but has a small chance of error ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Light-year
A light-year, alternatively spelled light year (ly or lyr), is a unit of length used to express astronomical distances and is equal to exactly , which is approximately 9.46 trillion km or 5.88 trillion mi. As defined by the International Astronomical Union (IAU), a light-year is the distance that light travels in vacuum in one Julian year (365.25 days). Despite its inclusion of the word "year", the term should not be misinterpreted as a unit of time. The ''light-year'' is most often used when expressing distances to stars and other distances on a galactic scale, especially in non-specialist contexts and popular science publications. The unit most commonly used in professional astronomy is the parsec (symbol: pc, about 3.26 light-years). Definitions As defined by the International Astronomical Union (IAU), the light-year is the product of the Julian year (365.25 days, as opposed to the 365.2425-day Gregorian year or the 365.24219-day Tropical year that both approxim ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Vega
Vega is the brightest star in the northern constellation of Lyra. It has the Bayer designation α Lyrae, which is Latinised to Alpha Lyrae and abbreviated Alpha Lyr or α Lyr. This star is relatively close at only from the Sun, and one of the most luminous stars in the Sun's neighborhood. It is the fifth-brightest star in the night sky, and the second-brightest star in the northern celestial hemisphere, after Arcturus. Vega has been extensively studied by astronomers, leading it to be termed "arguably the next most important star in the sky after the Sun". Vega was the northern pole star around 12,000 BCE and will be so again around the year 13,727, when its declination will be . Vega was the first star other than the Sun to have its image and spectrum photographed. It was one of the first stars whose distance was estimated through parallax measurements. Vega has functioned as the baseline for calibrating the photometric brightness scale and was one of the stars ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
