Star Trek Community
at Feb 5, 2013 11:45:44 PM
What movie (or book) altered your perceptions, your personal viewpoint?This question came to me on a post where a movie came up that caused me to realized a thought shift that came when I first saw it. And for me, there are many.
As a kid, I had always been a science-fiction fan. Star Trek was my sci-fi drug of choice. But I had never really processed that the backdrop for the show, space, was something that I might further probe as to exactly how it worked. Of course, I was broadly interested in NASA and astronomy, but never really considered thinking about how space all really worked physically.
Then cam the movie
The Black Hole. That is when the light came on where I wanted to know more about gravity wells and event horizons and escape velocities. Space was no longer just a character in a fiction story. It became much more of a reality, an actual thing to puzzle over.
Similarly, the movie WarGames triggered the notion that computers were not just these black boxes with Atari written on them. There were accessible device to be hacked for useful purpose. It was possible for me to get my hands on them and do things with them. Not just some out of reach contraptions that required adult supervision or assistance, but something that I could figure out how to operate. And clearly why I am a software developer today.
So what about you? What movie (or book) did you see that pulled you from the myopic child-view of the world to see something from another perspective, at a higher level? Something that changed the trajectory of your life still evident today.