baudot

I'm watching Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking and it's just gotten to the point in episode 3 (about 25 minutes in) where he talks about the life cycle of a star - how the each star begins as a mass of hydrogen, that starts to form helium by fusion, and then helium fuses into carbon and so on... until the star has made iron. At iron, the engine hits a snag - it gets no more energy out than went in, and so the star begins to stall out, and die.

I am reminded of the variegated faerie stories, in which Cold Iron is the undoing of The Fair Folk. It would seem that what Shakespeare had determined Titania and Oberon cannot abide, Hawking's compatriots have determined to be the undoing of stars.