Episode 81

The seventh in a series of episodes wherein Matthew and Juliet begin by jointly consulting the I Ching (ancient Chinese oracle), getting hexagram 4, "Youthful Folly", and then see where that goes. They continue on the theme of disenchantment and alienation from natural environments before attempting to link the discussion back to its starting point by considering the current state of the Sun from the point-of-view of hexagram 4. This leads to a consideration of the fate of the Sun and then the fate of the Universe as a whole. Current theories of stellar evolution and "entropic heat death" are pondered before Juliet points out the immediate absurdity of thermodynamics as applied to conscious lifeforms contemplating the theory of thermodynamics.

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Some relevant links:

• disenchantment
• Jay Griffiths, Wild: An Elemental Journey (Penguin, 2006)
• Inuit culture
• animism
• I Ching
• Kahlil Gibran
• "The Fool" (tarot card)
• the Sun (reductionist description)
• stellar evolution
• predicted fate of the Sun
• white dwarf
• entropy
• Infinite Monkey Theorem
• entropic heat death of the Universe
• theories about the end of the Universe
• proton decay
• the "Big Crunch"
• the "Big Rip"
• Laws of Thermodynamics
• Richard Feynman, "The Concept of Probability in Quantum Mechanics "
• snottite