Word: rudnick
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...last saw George early this year in a Manhattan Theatre Club presentation of Paul Rudnick's Regrets Only. This time he was a fashion designer who moves from comfortably gay to politically gay. Again he was matched with a firecracker actress (Christine Baranski), and again he gave a performance that located every laugh without strangling it. I thought the play was funny and poignant, halfway to profound, but the proposed move to Broadway never materialized. George did, though, when Mary and I and some friends greeted him after the final curtain. Vibrant on stage, he seemed a little more subdued...
That's a big "if," however, as Rudnick readily acknowledges. The uncertainty comes from the fact that his discovery is circumstantial. What he and his colleagues actually found was that there's a surprising scarcity of radio galaxies - galaxies that put out unusual amounts of radio energy - in a part of the sky marked by the constellation Eridanus. That seemed odd, since radio galaxies tend to be spread about pretty evenly. Then they took a look at an entirely different set of data: microwaves emitted shortly after the Big Bang, as seen by the WMAP (or, NASA's Wilkinson Microwave...
That could hardly be a coincidence, Rudnick thought, and the simplest solution was a great void in space. That would explain why there weren't many radio galaxies in that part of the sky. And microwaves crossing a huge void would lose some of their energy, in a complex process involving the reduced gravity inside. The exciting part is that the void is so huge that current theory simply can't explain it - and astronomers just love this kind of challenge...
...with the WMAP project and the chair of the astrophysics department at Princeton, explains that the microwave signal from the Big Bang has intrinsic hot and cold spots. It's possible that this particular part of the microwave sky was significantly colder than average to begin with. If so, Rudnick's "void" could actually be a region that's merely less dense than average, not completely empty...
...that means Rudnick's chances of fulfilling a lifetime dream might have to wait. All the publicity he and his colleagues have gotten for finding a HUGE HOLE IN SPACE is very nice. "But my real goal," he says, "is to be on Car Talk...