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

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 »

History of Science & Technology Q&A:

History of Science and Technology Q&A (December 27, 2023) »

1 hour 45 minutes

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If eyeglasses were developed in Italy in the second half of the 13th century, then why was the invention of the telescope delayed until 1608? Is it possible that some researchers purposefully misinterpret history to support their current research? I often hear some things are "open to interpretation," but is there a case of this causing false experiments? It's the same for LLMs' hallucinations today. Makes me think of the "replication crisis" and the question of how many PhDs, if we ran all of them since the 1960s through an LLM, would be flagged for plagiarism? What is best for historical research? Photos? Text? Artifacts? What do you know about the history of archiving? When did archiving begin? Your discussion today pinpoints how critical it is for scientists to know the history of their fields of research as well as to become excellent communicators of the science. One without the other leaves others not as immersed in the field, floundering to understand their ideas. What has history taught us on how to deal with a science community that is misguided? What does the modern history of science tell us about non-academic contributors and the future of this type of contribution? It's not just science where new ideas need time to settle. Van Gogh famously sold only one painting during his lifetime. How and why should we document science in the future when AI starts to lead progress? What are the positives of reformulating history? View Less »

History of Science & Technology Q&A:

History of Science and Technology Q&A (December 13, 2023) »

1 hour 19 minutes

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Can you talk about the history of gazettes, i.e. the recording of "official" information? Why are some older coins or bills worth more than their original face value? How does Galileo's equivalence principle relate to Einstein's equivalence principle? Important work from bright minds gets shelved, and then we discover the work decades later and put it to use. Have you thought of ways to reduce this happening so much? Could you elucidate the historiographical development of string theory, assess whether its inception was exclusively within the mathematical domain, and determine if it has yielded any tangible technological advancements? Some old things are worth more due to nostalgia. Eventually, they will lose their value again. What is the history behind observer theory? View Less »

History of Science & Technology Q&A:

History of Science and Technology Q&A (November 22, 2023) »

1 hour 15 minutes

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What are your thoughts about how R&D has been done and funded across history? I came across Petri nets in university and never had the chance to dive deep into them. Can you give some historical context about that concept, and if it found actual application anywhere? Do you have any reflections on the recent leadership situation at OpenAI and, perhaps, the history of decision making for large scientific research programs? Has "EA," or effective altruism (and similar philosophies), had close involvement with tech in the past? Can you talk on the history of podcasts? View Less »

History of Science & Technology Q&A:

History of Science and Technology Q&A (November 8, 2023) »

57 minutes

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How did taxation work before money was invented? How did trading happen between nations that used different number systems? Can you discuss the role of ancient civilizations, such as the Greeks, in laying the foundations of modern science and technology? Did Isaac Newton spend a significant amount of time attempting to transmute lead into gold? Did he believe in all of the miracles described in the Old Testament? What was the greatest technological advancement to come out of the Roman Empire? Given what we know now about symbolic representations and languages, what do you make of the break from computable mathematics in the 1800s/1900s and our current set-theoretic foundations? View Less »

History of Science & Technology Q&A:

History of Science and Technology Q&A (October 25, 2023) »

1 hour 37 minutes

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Can you talk about the history of quicksort or Hoffman encoding? TIFF is also lossless... I think in some version... Standard method for 5G? That is, within 5G, does it operate on the bit level rather than the radio wave level? There is a similar problem with SIP: not all vendors implement the same standards or follow the standard properly, and you end up with interop problems. Would that also work with a logographic language? The future is gonna consist of languages that are just emojis. When did the study of economics form? What's the history of "double-entry" bookkeeping? Can something as basic be redefined? What were early tabulating machines like (such as the ones IBM sold during WWII)? Do you think future historians will have a harder time parsing through all the information available in the last 50 years compared to the last century, or even two centuries? What is the best historical record for research in this case? Books, images, video, etc.? Why doesn't copyright law allow flexibility with people who want to share their works online? When did copyright law begin? How did legal structures evolve with the creation of the internet? Were completely new structures built because of it? View Less »

Stephen Wolfram Livestreams

History of Science & Technology Q&A (78 videos)