SIO433: The Robot at the End of the Universe

Serious Inquiries Only

Thomas Smith

News, Atheism, Skepticism, Democrat, Left, Liberal, Politics, News Commentary, Progressive, Religion

4.6 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 12 March 2024

⏱️ 59 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We're focusing in on some sci-fi with Dr. Bryan Gillis, astrophysicist to the stars! We take you through one of Ted Chiang's incredible short stories, Exhalation, and Dr. Gillis teaches us about entropy and the Laws of Thermodynamics. What is the heat death of the universe? Can we avoid it by turning up the AC a bit or are we just plain effed? Find out!

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Transcript

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0:00.0	And the Hello and
0:15.0	welcome to serious inquiries only this is episode 433 I'm your host Thomas Smith and today I've got a bit of a different one for you
0:25.0	It's astrophysicist Dr Brian Gillis but we thought it would be fun to do something that I used to do over on
0:31.7	philosophers in space.
0:33.4	Great show still going on with Aaron and Callie over there.
0:36.1	What we used to do is take a work of sci-fi, discuss it, discuss what happened,
0:41.0	you know, give a little bit of the plot and all that, and then talk about the themes.
0:44.7	And there was one that I wanted to do for a long time because it's so fascinating and it's so directly physics related.
0:51.6	And Dr. Brian Gillis was kind enough to read it check it out he
0:55.4	loved it as well and so that's what we're gonna do we're gonna take you through a
0:58.2	delightful sci-fi short story by Ted Chang called Exhalation now I think you should just go read it first. It's on
1:05.3	audible and all the things. It's freely available if you Google. It's not very long.
1:09.1	It's really good, but if you don't want to, it's not really not a big deal. It's not something that matters if you spoil't want to it's really not a big deal it's not something that
1:13.3	matters if you spoil it really it's just a good little journey to go on so
1:17.2	exhalation by Ted Chang is the name of the short story we're gonna take you
1:20.8	through it and then we're going to learn about
1:22.8	entropy and the end of the universe. I almost said world but that's too small. The
1:26.8	end of the entire universe, the heat death of the universe, all that stuff, how it's
1:31.8	related to entropy.
1:32.8	Is there any way we can avoid it?
1:33.9	Can we cheat it?
1:34.6	Can we find a way to say no to entropy?
	...

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