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

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 »

History of Science & Technology Q&A:

History of Science and Technology Q&A (February 28, 2024) »

1 hour 9 minutes

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What could the following people have done with Wolfram? Aristotle, Archimedes, Emmy Noether, Vega, etc. What would Ada Lovelace have done with current computing? And the possibilities? Did Galileo have some mechanical math tools? How does the abacus fit into the story of calculators? What did Ada Lovelace say when asked about her coding style? "My code is like poetry, it's logical, elegant, and never divided by zero!" Would authors such as Shakespeare find any use in Wolfram tech? How might he react to technology in general? What about someone like Socrates? Or Plato? View Less »

History of Science & Technology Q&A:

History of Science and Technology Q&A (February 14, 2024) »

1 hour 36 minutes

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Can you talk about the history of hearts? Why does the human heart not resemble the heart shape seen most commonly in other forms? How did scientists discover the brain and its purpose? When did this happen? What about the theories that say that neither the brain nor anything else in the body is the "site of consciousness" (e.g. "the brain is just a receiver")? There's at least some stuff there that can't be easily dismissed. Any thoughts on Panini, who wrote a meta-rule to decode the rule conflicts in the linguistic algorithm? How has technology influenced the development and preservation of languages? Why did the Latin language "die"? Do you think it would be widely used if it had survived? The Pirahã, a tribe in Brazil, have a very peculiar way of talking. They don't include numbers and time, if I understand. How do linguists reconstruct ancient languages they have little direct evidence of? Would the Greek spoken at the time of Aristotle be fully intelligible to speakers of modern Greek? How did accents and dialects evolve (for example, UK English vs. US English)? The reconstructed 1700s London accent sounds somewhat American, I thought? Are there still undiscovered writing systems to be discovered? Do you have any comments on the relationship scientists have had with the philosophy of science? If one views religion as a function whose input is belief and output is explanation of "the unknown," then could science ("many universes" in quantum theory, for example) be construed as such? View Less »

History of Science & Technology Q&A:

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

1 hour 28 minutes

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What are the key requirements in place for past scientific revolutions? What do you think about the effective accelerationism movement? What history led to or influenced it? Exploring binary code's historical role in programming and its connection to physics laws, in the universe as a giant computer: do parallels exist between binary principles and underlying structures? Can you talk about the history of cybernetics, second-order cybernetics and its current connections to the observer in the ruliad? Did the "cyber" definition come before the definition of "robotics"? You are forgetting George Spencer-Brown for the second-order cybernetics topic. Have you ever used the ideas he expounded in Laws of Form? What was the significance of the ENIAC computer? Isaac Newton was known as the father of modern physics. How might he view advancements since his time? Would he have anything to add? What is the history of small business vs. big business? Was there a shift in history when one overtook the other? Can you talk about the history of traveling to space? How come Moon visits aren't more frequent? View Less »

History of Science & Technology Q&A:

History of Science and Technology Q&A (January 10, 2024) »

1 hour 13 minutes

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How often do separate ideas emerge (like convergent evolution) and merge to either compliment each other or "make whole" ideas that didn't have all the answers themselves? What surprises you most about the history of science and technology? What is there to learn? What's the history of timekeeping? How did civilizations create the calendar and clocks? What science supports this? How would you keep track of time/sync up your devices? Today it's easy with electronic devices. I'm imagining my microwave and stove clock always being a minute or two out of sync from manually setting it. How did you get to know so much, and in such depth, about such vastly disparate historical topics? Seems this could be fascinating to hear about in and of itself. Makes me think that maybe blockchains are the evolution of agreed-upon ledgers in one single agreed-upon time. Do you think the Fourier transform is fundamental to nature? Historically, it appears in quantum field theory, quantum computing, signal processing, etc. When did time become an important variable in science? Why do you suppose no one tried to continue with Nikola Tesla's incomplete inventions? As a software engineer, I discover elegant academic programming languages all the time, but they never seem to gain much traction in industry. On the other hand, we have languages like JavaScript, which was pretty much developed as a prototype but is now ubiquitous in web development. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on this history of "organic" development of programming languages. Are there any pros to using "historical" technology, or is newer always better? View Less »

Stephen Wolfram Livestreams

History of Science & Technology Q&A (83 videos)