I just watched the movie again. The end of the movie is based on really heavy mistake. 18 hours happend for her but only a second for them? It should be exactly the other way round. She traveld with the speed of light or faster. So one second for her would be 18 hours for them. I guess they did that because otherwise the story wouldn‘t work.
shareThis is a fantastic point but then I realized that I had posted this very thing here 2 years ago - https://moviechat.org/tt0118884/Contact/5ec1ee16c0a9d8349066224d/Time-dilation-speculation
Nobody answered then. Perhaps you can speculate on that topic further there
Nothing really to speculate. Arroway was simply returned to the same point, in both space AND time, where her journey began. Which is a good thing, really, since eighteen hours later Earth would be in a DIFFERENT spot than it was. By what agency she is returned, we are not sure. Perhaps there was a second wormhole (First rule of government spending, etc.). Perhaps from where she was returned there was resources for a much more efficient return trip, which would explain why it was so much shorter than the outbound one. The real only salient element here, is that this is science fiction. You can make up pretty much whatever you like.
shareshe didn't travel with light speed, she travelled through a wormhole. so it's correct. think of time travel movies where people return to the same point in time where they started travelling, even though they spend hours, days etc. in a different time period.
shareActually the solution to having to travel at light speed to another part of the universe using a theoretical wormhole. Wormholes bends space shortening the distance between 2 points within the universe. This means you don't need to travel at light speed. As for the 18 hours, it could be that in the planet she went to time traveled a lot faster there than on earth.
shareI don’t know how well the movie aligns with the novel but supposedly Kip Thorne advised Sagan on it and you probably won’t find anyone alive as well versed in general relativity as Thorne.
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