Hello everyone, welcome to the September 2021 Ask Me Anything Edition of the Mindscape podcast,

I'm your host Sean Carroll. This episode is being brought to you from the Mindscape

mobile podcasting unit currently located in Boston, Massachusetts, rather than my usual home base

of Los Angeles. With the pandemic clearing up a little bit, though obviously not entirely,

travel is once again possible, and as some of you know I'm spending the fall semester

visiting the philosophy department at Harvard. Harvard was my graduate institution, but I was in

the astronomy department. I did though take some philosophy courses because I was interested in

philosophy at the time, so I got to sit on the courses with John Rawls and Robert Nozick and

other people, and some of you have heard this question because of this anecdote before, but I got to

know John Rawls, I chatted with him, a very famous social moral political philosopher,

and it turns out that he's really really interested in physics and cosmology. So you know he asked

me because he was very fair, right? John Rawls's whole stick was justice as fairness, and happily,

this doesn't always happen, especially with moral philosophers, but John Rawls walked the walk as

well as talking the talk. He was a scrupulously fair guy. I remember once walking through Harvard

yard and running into some of my friends who were in the philosophy class, and I was just auditing

it, and they were taking it for real, so they had just gotten out of the final exam, and I said,

so how was it? And they said, you know what? It was very fair, and a friend of mine who was with me

immediately said, those must be your philosophy friends, I've never heard a physics person say that

their final exam was fair. So anyway, yes, John Rawls was all about fairness, and so I asked him,

even though I was just auditing the class, could I go to the section discussions, you know,

the small group discussions, which were led by him, and he said, you know, the rule is, if you're a

graduate student, you can go to those sections, you're a graduate student, therefore you can go.

...