How Might the Alien Spacecraft Work?
Jeremy is keen to understand how the science relates to the arc of the story for the movie, and what the aliens as well as humans must be feeling at different points.
Christopher shows some of the code he’s written for the movie, and how the controls to make the dynamics work.
In terms of scale, making a movie like Arrival is a project of about the same size as releasing a major new version of the Wolfram Language.
In making a movie like Arrival one’s usually bringing in a whole sequence of people-who might never even have met before-each for a very short time.
At times, I’ve imagined that the process might be a little like making a movie.
In fact in the early years of Mathematica, for example, we even used to have “Software credits” that looked very much like movie credits-except that the categories of contributors were things that often had to be made up by me.
Now, remember, my idea with the whiteboard was to write what I thought a typical good physicist, say plucked from a government lab, might think about if confronted with the situation in the movie.
Originally published at Cogly.
