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

History of Science & Technology Q&A:

History of Science and Technology Q&A (August 30, 2023) »

1 hour 38 minutes

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Do you believe we had an exploration age? Sometimes the hype feels exponential, but maybe it's just linear. What are your thoughts? When was it that we learned about weather being essentially mathematics and physics, which could be utilized to create weapons that can control weather and weather conditions? Are you aware of any efforts (past or present) to use nature to understand mathematics instead of the other way around? Happy belated birthday! Anything notable to say about the history of Stephen Wolfram? What is the history of naming mathematical terms? How has this branched off into other areas of naming? The major reason Greek is overused in science is the fact that ancient Greek vocabulary literally has a word for everything. Which is better, autobiographies or biographies? Which gives a better historical record of a person? View Less »

History of Science & Technology Q&A:

History of Science and Technology Q&A (August 16, 2023) »

1 hour 23 minutes

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Do you know the history of the invention of optical character recognition (OCR)? With recent developments, can you talk about the history of theories of extraterrestrial life and the search for it? Who do you think is the most undervalued scientist in the last one hundred years? Someone who has contributed a great deal to society but has largely gone unnoticed by the public eye? Why were elite physicists (and others) reluctant to embrace computers? I saw an interview with Ed Fredkin where he explained how he tried to teach Richard Feynman to use a Commodore PET, I think it was. "There is a computer disease that anybody who works with computers knows about. It's a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is that you 'play' with them!" – Feynman Didn't he [Feynman] end up causing a hubbub at Los Alamos because he was personally repairing calculators/computers, rather than the IBM person? In the early to mid-1960s, the Soviet Union was very seriously considering what would have been a sort of proto-internet. Do you know anything about this? How do you think kids today would react if they were suddenly teleported 40 years into the past? Have aliens always been referred to as "aliens", or did they have another name in history? Have there been any observable changes to planets during human life on Earth? There's a weird Catholic history of discussing ETs that are neither human nor angel: a theoretical theological field called "exotheology." What is the oldest book that you actually use and is not a museum piece? View Less »

History of Science & Technology Q&A:

History of Science and Technology Q&A (August 2, 2023) »

1 hour 10 minutes

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Do we know what the first piece of technology was? If Alan Turing had not died at age 41, what might he have worked on during the remainder of his life? What if von Neumann lived longer? Would computation and cellular automata have any potential? Who was the first who used statistics to predict something? Having recently watched the Oppenheimer film and seen portrayed there Einstein, Gödel and Oppenheimer at this small lake, I realized that there have barely been any relevant theoretical insights in the last few decades, especially compared to about one hundred years ago. What does this mean for the science of the next hundred years? Where do you see applied psychology in a decade? Is the quantification of behavior and thought going to be a shift, as advertised? Could you discuss the history of cellular automata? View Less »

History of Science & Technology Q&A:

History of Science and Technology Q&A (July 19, 2023) »

1 hour 37 minutes

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Can you discuss a bit of your personal history with AI? When did you first become interested in the idea? Have you seen Oppenheimer yet, or do you plan to? What can you say about the history it's based on? Have new scientific discoveries historically initiated out of myths? View Less »

History of Science & Technology Q&A:

History of Science and Technology Q&A (June 7, 2023) »

1 hour 9 minutes

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How did scientific disciplines originate and evolve through the centuries? Do you think Apple's new VR headset will be much different than previous releases of other VR headsets? What do past releases of similar products predict? VR kinda reminds me of video game systems. Your product may be fantastic, but if the content/software isn't up to snuff, it's probably going to fail. These glasses and headsets need to be comfy and miniaturized to become suitable for everyday use. What are use cases in education for these new headsets? Perhaps AI can be used to translate existing educational material into VR-suitable content. View Less »

History of Science & Technology Q&A:

History of Science and Technology Q&A (May 24, 2023) »

1 hour 26 minutes

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Are the stars and constellations we see today the same that were seen by the ancient civilizations who first studied them? Do star positions ever change? What do you make of the relationship between rhetoric and math? They are held in contradistinction, but I am thinking of the relation between rhetorical invention and Chaitin's idea of math-creativity. What about sudden novas and comets? Sudden shifts in orbits? Is the Moon moving away measurable compared to human history? As in, since humans started recording history, did the Moon appear to get 10% smaller or so? How will history be able to correct the continuous conundrum of the accuracy of our forefathers' discoveries, inventions and ideas? Additionally, how can we as humans preserve this? How did early civilizations explain supernovas? Did they understand it as a star exploding? How did they come to this conclusion? "The stars are like the Sun, but far away." When said for the first time, this must have been crazy to hear for others. How often were ideas like these disregarded at first? How did researchers of this time convince society of their findings? Is it possible that errors in translation have affected results of research? Are there any examples of this in history? When was the first time anyone considered what the angle of our solar system's ecliptic is relative to the Milky Way's galactic plane? Apparently, the angle is about 60 degrees. Why did science evolve so rapidly in the Western world? What's there to say about alchemy in history? Is that because ethical questions are fundamentally computationally irreducible questions? How do you filter out the "good new" from the "bad new"? It's remarkable that old ideas stood the test of time. View Less »

Stephen Wolfram Livestreams

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