Right, for anyone who has not yet seen the movie, please do not read the following paragraph. Personally, I did not think it was much of a surprise, but here is something I noticed regarding John Nash's "friends":
*SPOILER*
The second time Ed Harris's character materializes to John Nash, in the woods and working inside that toolshed, John Nash enters the toolshead and eyes one of the radio operators. If you look closely, the radio operator on the screen for nearly a minute is the same man sporting a tuxedo on John Nash's and Alicia's first and formal date (i.e., the bloke constantly monitoring his conversations with Alicia). That reminds me, John Nash went to some great lengths to re-enforce the existence of simply three different "people."

I think this is easily one of the best movies I've ever seen.

I work at a theater in a mall, and we had it for about 4 months ^_^ After we lost it, it went to the art house (who get some of our movies, including "Bad Company.")

In the scene where Nash's wife drives up to the place where the coded message drops took place, the close-up shows that the driver side car window is very wet. The long shot immediately after shows the car completely dry.

As one of my managers pointed out,

"It makes so much more sense when you watch it the second time around.

*SPOILER*

They never show John & Charles together in public.

Bar scene:

Nash's real friends come in; he's playing pool with Charles (who's now over by the jukebox). "Hey, Nash, who's winning..you or you?"

Kind of like Sixth Sense, I guess. He's right; you pick up on the hints-it's clearer.

When Alicia asks John how big the universe is, John says it's infinite, and when Alicia asks how he can know for sure, he says he doesn't, he just believes it. Putting aside the notion of a scientist or mathematician holding onto a theory or concept out of "belief," who in 1956 thought the universe was infinite? Didn't Edwin Hubble demonstrate in 1928 that it was expanding?

Yes, he did. But one of the paradoxes of modern cosmology is that the Universe is infinite and expanding.

How can it be infinite? It has an edge, doesn't it? Isn't it currently about 12-15 billion light years in diameter?

Then what's outside this bubble?

Besides, unless the Hubble, or another craft, travel that far, there's no way we can know. If the universe is finite, then what exists outside it? More universes, as a multi-verse? Aren't those in different dimensions?

If the universe is indeed expanding, won't it eventually collapse in on itself? If it runs out of room to grow, and the continuous growth is pushing on something, restricted...then what's to say it won't collapse in on itself?

How can it be infinite? It has an edge, doesn't it? Isn't it currently about 12-15 billion light years in diameter? - Luigi

I am not a cosmologist... so my understanding is probably... lacking, to say the least. But in my limited understanding, the 15 billion light years figure is only a measure of the visible universe. After all, we can hardly define or measure the immeasurable.

There can be more beyond that distance, we just don't know for certain because the light hasn't reached us, yet.

My understanding, Hannah, was that nothing existed outside of it, that that is where the universe ends.

It's like asking what was "outside" of the infinitely small singularity that was the universe "prior" to the Big Bang: Nothing. Time, matter, energy, and all other frames of reference didn't exist prior to that, and that the universe has simply been expanding from that Big Bang over the last 12-15 billion years, so whatever was outside that singularity is the same as what's outside the universe, namely nothing.

I could be wrong or working from a faulty memory or assumption, though.

Imagine that you're a flatlander, you only exist in 2 dimensions. To you, a sphere is infinite yet bounded, and can be expanding, yet it has no edge.

Now you generalize that to a 3-D being (us) and a four-dimensional hypersphere.

In other words, the universe is the 3-D hypersurface of an expanding 4-D hypersphere.

Wow. A beautiful, touching movie.

SPOILER:

I really liked that we saw everything from Johns perspective first, the people seeming real. Also, the effect with the light when he sees connections... what a nice idea to illustrate to the laymans and non-mathematicans how the world looks like to a genius.
So even with the modern drugs, John has to choose between not being able to work (because the medications shut down too much) or seeing his hallucinations? A terrible choice, and living so many years on a "mental diet"...

In my TV guide, it says that 1% of the population suffers from schizophrenia. That's quite a lot. I wonder how many are undetected.