History of Science & Technology Q&A: Stephen Wolfram Livestreams

History of Science & Technology Q&A:

History of Science and Technology Q&A (July 24, 2024) »

1 hour 38 minutes

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What was more important to ancient civilizations, philosophy or science? What have been your observations on the role of history in current science and research? Is it still relevant, or are we advancing fast enough to make it irrelevant? Can you tell us about the history of the Wolfram Summer School? How did it start? What is the history of formal verification in computer security? Particularly, how is it related to automated theorem proving and symbolic computation? Do people use Wolfram Language for formal verification? Would you consider using one AI to formally verify software now? What are some examples of scientific/technological "dead ends" other than alchemy (although I suppose we did learn things by accident with that one)? What about Pythagoras? Philosophy or science? Do we have enough information to answer this question (philosophy vs. science) for ancient South and Middle American civilizations? View Less »

History of Science & Technology Q&A:

History of Science and Technology Q&A (May 22, 2024) »

1 hour 23 minutes

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How are new words adopted into language? Can anyone invent a new word, or are there certain processes? Who discovered the dinosaurs? How has technology assisted with research? Which ecosystem could accommodate woolly elephants? Isn't it so strange that every kid has a passion for dinosaurs? A subset of dinosaurs evolved into birds. Aren't bees considered too fat to fly? How has our understanding of the asteroid impact theory evolved since its introduction in the 1980s? If it were technically possible, would submarines be more efficient if they copied fish or aquatic mammals? In your background, I see minerals or corals. Do you like petrology? In popular culture, dinosaurs are often portrayed as solitary and aggressive creatures, akin to fierce monsters. However, scientific research suggests that many dinosaurs may have had complex social behaviors and interpersonal relationships. Could you share an example of a dinosaur whose social behavior has been discovered or hypothesized based on fossil evidence? How do these discoveries influence our perception of dinosaurs, and how they are portrayed in the media? What came first, the dinosaur or the egg? How much computational irreducibility exists in DNA engineering? Do you know what the first written description of human handedness was? There are some depictions and artifacts, but when did we realize "some people are like this"? Did Isaac Newton get the idea for the inverse square law of gravity from reading a book by Giovanni Alfonso Borelli? Are there good simulations of warm periods of the Earth? What would be the physics on Earth with such huge creatures like the dinosaurs? To grow that big, they would have to either have a lot of food or the gravity must have been weirder. Yeah, there's not enough logged data for that to be predicted accurately, IMO. When did they start keeping track of the average temperature, the ~1920s? During the time of the dinosaurs, atmospheric oxygen levels were significantly higher, which contributed to the existence of very large insects. When a space shuttle reenters Earth's atmosphere, does it affect our protection from solar and cosmic radiation? Could this piercing of Earth's barrier impact the stability of the magnetosphere? Is it like a wound that closes gradually or immediately? View Less »

History of Science & Technology Q&A:

History of Science and Technology Q&A (May 1, 2024) »

1 hour 34 minutes

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Are there exact matches or just similarities between complexity in nature (bio, evolution), society (political, religious) and technology? How did the development of atomic theory by scientists such as Democritus, Dalton and Rutherford influence our understanding of discrete structures and the behavior of matter at the atomic level? How do historians know with certainty the identities of prominent historical figures? Could there have been more to the Socrates, Plato and Aristotle timeline? Do the majority of historians of physics now have a favorable opinion of string theory? Is there any scientific reason "pure maths" concepts are picked up by physics much later? Do you find our lack of human history odd, considering how long we have lived on this planet? With regards to notable people in history, humans seem to be completely obsessed with credit for their contributions—an interesting feature of the human ego. Taoist philosophy believes the Tao makes achievements and lays no claim to them. Can we reconstruct the lost works in history with AI scraping through contemporary reference scripts and searching for the influence lost writings had on known writings? That brings up the interesting point that there were likely MANY people "back there" who had amazing ideas that would have important applications today, but they didn't have the good fortune to be noticed and documented. How did the concept of zero originate and evolve in mathematical history? Do zero and infinity have the same origin? Interesting, but if I had three ducks and gave them all to you, surely the ancients must have had some concept of what that left me with? Speaking of string theory, what are for you the notable "dead-end paths" taken in the history of math/sci/tech? View Less »

History of Science & Technology Q&A:

History of Science and Technology Q&A (April 17, 2024) »

1 hour 3 minutes

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Are there languages or logic systems we haven't yet discovered from the past? Can smart keyboards help with this process of language discovery? Do you view mathematics as a subset of language, or the other way around? How did different languages come to develop? Will we slowly move toward a universal language? "Ona, also known as Selk'nam (Shelknam), is a language spoken by the Selk'nam people in Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego in southernmost South America." Spoken by only one person. The distinction is the unique role of mathematics expressing and formalizing ideas in ways that transcend linguistic and cultural boundaries. Language came before humans, e.g. dolphins and whales; we just scaled it up and complexified it. Was Shakespeare's style unique to him? Would there have been a possibility for people to speak in a more poetic language? I think language is closer to 1.5-dimensional, considering we have relative pronouns and other constructions that link up with previous statements, such that a 2D diagram of it can be made. If I want to write a short statement, I prefer English. For a detailed style, I would prefer German... which is usually longer and not as nice to read as short English text. Bulgarian is pronounced exactly as it is written. One of its quirks. If LLMs are hallucinating all the time and good ones are just hallucinating correctly/accurately most of the time, does that explain how Ramanujan might have arrived at his formulas without proofs? View Less »

History of Science & Technology Q&A:

History of Science and Technology Q&A (April 3, 2024) »

2 hours 12 minutes

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Is there a directionality to science and technology? Has anyone sort of applied the hacker mentality to the Antikythera mechanism to figure out what else you could use it for? What kind of uses could a time-traveling von Neumann figure out? What is the likelihood that ancient tech we've discovered had vastly different uses than what we believe? Southeast Asia is terrible for archeology because you can make almost anything from bamboo: tens of thousands of years ago, people obviously used wood etc., but only stone remains. What does that say going forward, with our fast-rotting bits, in contrast with stone or wood, or even paper? Any thoughts on the ancient dodecahedra? Do you have one? Who started research on the periodic tables? Can you discuss a bit about its development? What motivated the advent of the fast Fourier transform algorithm? What was its creator wanting to solve? How advanced did analog computers get before we moved to digital computers? Was there any debate on whether we shouldn't move to digital at the time? Why did modern formal logic take so long to develop historically, compared to other branches of mathematics or physical sciences? What explains the delay until the mid-nineteenth century? Is there any knowledge in physics today that has been influenced by ancient texts like the Vedas etc.? View Less »

History of Science & Technology Q&A:

History of Science and Technology Q&A (March 20, 2024) »

54 minutes

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Has any species evolved in a measurable way since humans have been observing and tracking evolution? Why are there more bacteria than blood cells in a human body? Would you say humans have aided in the evolution of domestic animals? Has all of Grothendieck's work been understood yet? What was the earliest use of radioactivity for light or heat? What current technological advancement would be most beneficial to ancient societies? Getting to significant and industrial scales was really hard for penicillin. What kind of technology present today do you see becoming nothing more than history? What are some examples of previous technology being discarded? View Less »

Stephen Wolfram Livestreams

History of Science & Technology Q&A (81 videos)