Word: gunn
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...BILL GUNN...
...Black Picture Show, Playwright Bill Gunn's hero is already hospitalized, or rather, confined to a Bronx, New York City, mental home. Alexander (Dick Anthony Williams) has gone mad, but he has been a black poet, playwright and screenwriter of merit. Fragmented episodes indicate how he has bobbed for the white man's Golden Delicious apple and drowned in economic and psychic abasement. He is dying; perhaps he is already dead. Obfuscation ranks high among Playwright Gunn's defects...
...What is Gunn driving at? He is saying that Alexander, an artist of seemingly impeccable integrity, has sold out and been destroyed by his yen for lucre. This is twaddle. No artist has ever been corrupted or humiliated by the quest for cash unless he was a willing accomplice...
...Gunn, a Caltech astronomer, made no direct observations. In collaboration with three associates, he spent six years studying a wide variety of evidence-including Sandage's redshift measurements. For one thing, he examined the galaxies' brightness and movement, which offer clues to their mass. He also estimated the probable incidence of "black holes," small but extremely massive bodies that are invisible to astronomers. From these and other clues, Gunn's group concluded that the universe has no more than a tenth of the mass-and probably less -needed to close it. "Pulling all the arguments together," says...
Both men expect their conclusions to stir a storm of protest from some of their colleagues. For, as Gunn puts it, the arguments for a closed universe are almost "theological in nature." Indeed, Gunn finds the implications of an open universe thoroughly mind-boggling and paradoxical. "Even though the density of its mass is small," he explains, "the total amount of mass is infinite because space is infinitely big." Sandage agrees. "This expansion is such a strange conclusion," he says. "One's first assumption is that it cannot really be true, and yet it is the premier fact...