AMA | September 2021
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
Sean Carroll
4.7 • 4.7K Ratings
🗓️ 16 September 2021
⏱️ 219 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Welcome to the September 2021 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). I take the large number of questions asked by Patreons, whittle them down to a more manageable size — based primarily on whether I have anything interesting to say about them, not whether the questions themselves are good — and sometimes group them together if they are about a similar topic. Enjoy!
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello everyone, welcome to the September 2021 Ask Me Anything Edition of the Mindscape podcast, |
| 0:05.4 | I'm your host Sean Carroll. This episode is being brought to you from the Mindscape |
| 0:10.1 | mobile podcasting unit currently located in Boston, Massachusetts, rather than my usual home base |
| 0:16.4 | of Los Angeles. With the pandemic clearing up a little bit, though obviously not entirely, |
| 0:22.4 | travel is once again possible, and as some of you know I'm spending the fall semester |
| 0:28.5 | visiting the philosophy department at Harvard. Harvard was my graduate institution, but I was in |
| 0:34.3 | the astronomy department. I did though take some philosophy courses because I was interested in |
| 0:38.5 | philosophy at the time, so I got to sit on the courses with John Rawls and Robert Nozick and |
| 0:44.1 | other people, and some of you have heard this question because of this anecdote before, but I got to |
| 0:50.1 | know John Rawls, I chatted with him, a very famous social moral political philosopher, |
| 0:56.1 | and it turns out that he's really really interested in physics and cosmology. So you know he asked |
| 1:03.1 | me because he was very fair, right? John Rawls's whole stick was justice as fairness, and happily, |
| 1:10.4 | this doesn't always happen, especially with moral philosophers, but John Rawls walked the walk as |
| 1:15.6 | well as talking the talk. He was a scrupulously fair guy. I remember once walking through Harvard |
| 1:22.5 | yard and running into some of my friends who were in the philosophy class, and I was just auditing |
| 1:27.1 | it, and they were taking it for real, so they had just gotten out of the final exam, and I said, |
| 1:32.9 | so how was it? And they said, you know what? It was very fair, and a friend of mine who was with me |
| 1:38.8 | immediately said, those must be your philosophy friends, I've never heard a physics person say that |
| 1:43.3 | their final exam was fair. So anyway, yes, John Rawls was all about fairness, and so I asked him, |
| 1:48.9 | even though I was just auditing the class, could I go to the section discussions, you know, |
| 1:53.5 | the small group discussions, which were led by him, and he said, you know, the rule is, if you're a |
| 1:57.6 | graduate student, you can go to those sections, you're a graduate student, therefore you can go. |
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