Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll.

You might know if you follow the physics news that Jim Hartle passed away recently. Jim was a wonderful

theoretical physicist, a founder of quantum cosmology,

frequent collaborator with Stephen Hawking, Murray Gellman, people like that.

He was also one of the collaborators with Thomas Hurtog, our recent

Mindscape guest on the wave function of the universe again with Stephen Hawking.

What you could predict how things came out and so forth.

And he passed away recently. It was very sad.

Jim had an important role in my life. He hired me for my second postdoc and

always struck me as someone who was a very deep thinker, very careful,

with a puckish sense of humor that made him very fun to be around.

So I was being interviewed by a reporter from physics today for the right up

they were gonna do the obituary if you wanna call it that on Jim's passing.

And he mentioned that he was talking to Thomas Hurtog before.

And we were talking about the relationship, the reporter and I were talking about the

relationship of physics and philosophy.

Jim was sort of pro philosophy, but he wasn't into it, right?

He thought it was a good thing, but he wasn't himself reading a lot of

philosophers or anything like that.

So apparently the reporter had also asked Tomas about it.

And Tomas had related the story that he and Stephen and Jim had written a

paper which I think was called eternal inflation without metaphysics.

...