There's a lot more to that story. In the film, there was a blind physicist; in reality, he was named Kent Cullers [1], who was, as he told me, cast in that role

There's a lot more to that story. In the film, there was a blind physicist; in reality, he was named Kent Cullers [1], who was, as he told me, cast in that role until the director changed. The fellow who played him prepped for the part by watching outtakes of Kent. In fact, I took my two very young snappers to see the film when it came out, and was stunned: I thought Kent was in the film. I was wrong, but, I'm told that Kent did show up in the film with his back to the camera. In fact, Kent was giving a lecture on some aspect of radio astronomy (He got a PhD from Berkeley) and Carl was in the audience and asked him questions about radio waves. They have polarity [2]. Kent worked with Jill and wrote many of the software algorithms to analyze SETI signals. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_Cullers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_Cullers [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polarization_(waves) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polarization_(waves)