Stephen Wolfram Livestreams

History of Science & Technology Q&A (85 videos)

Biweekly ask-me-anything about the history of science & technology

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New episode streaming Wednesday, February 5, 2025, at 3:30pm ET. Submit your questions

History of Science & Technology Q&A:
History of Science and Technology Q&A (November 30, 2022) »

1 hour 14 minutes

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Can you give some insight into automata theory, its history and its applications up until today? How did scientists figure out the source of the cosmic microwave radiation? Why didn't containers become popular until Docker around 2013? It seems like they would have been very useful long before that. What did people do instead? The idea of containers was there, but it was virtualization plus a heavy load of scripts to manage servers and configurations, which was just another iteration of mirroring machines. Apple also had a Motorola-to-PPC emulator for their PPC Macs. View Less »
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History of Science & Technology Q&A:
History of Science and Technology Q&A (November 16, 2022) »

1 hour 25 minutes

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Did Einstein ever attempt to quantize spacetime, as opposed to treating it as a continuous medium? We are ultra-interested to hear about this future history of science! What was the most fantastic experience you had as a physicist? What is the history behind migrating the entropy term to information theory? What is the process like making computations for the thermodynamics project? What do you think about engineering efforts that help in discovering science (building tools and experiments)? I've met many scientist who dismiss engineering as "less intellectual." Computational language design is basically like being a modern-day wizard. Technology, science and social relations co-evolve. View Less »
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History of Science & Technology Q&A:
History of Science and Technology Q&A (November 2, 2022) »

1 hour 41 minutes

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Do you think that in the future, people will look at our societal interest in math and science the same way we view alchemists and theologians of old? Tell us about the history of chess computers and the approaches they used before deep learning. Can you talk about the history of software packaging and distribution? My brain came online around the time we needed two CDs for games, and I thought that was a pain. I might be misremembering, but I think we put a piece of masking tape on floppy disks to circumvent copy protection. I would love your thoughts on internet pseudonymity and its history! How has the "central hub" of science changed geographically over time, and what may be the reasons for this change? There is obviously a link between training clergymen (the original role of most Western universities) and the growth of early modern science. Any thoughts on different methods of storing information in terms of resilience over long timescales? Cuneiform is mostly only preserved because it was stamped in clay tablets. All the really "good stuff" (science, poetry, etc.) was usually written on biological material like hides and papyrus and, obviously, they didn't age that well. Paper Dutch East India Company records from 1600–1700 still exist today. In light of the recent law requiring free access to all federally funded research (and associated data), can you talk about how scientific knowledge and data have been shared throughout history? View Less »
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History of Science & Technology Q&A:
History of Science and Technology Q&A (October 5, 2022) »

1 hour 41 minutes

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What's the history behind emails and instant messaging? I have a hard time imagining life before then and handling communication that may not get a response for days (waiting for a letter in the mail). What were the early days of Wolfram|Alpha like? I see papers from '40s—even '30s—of PRL (physical reviews). They are typeset so cleanly. How did they do this without LaTeX at that time? It's been said that a real perpetual motion machine cannot exist. Do you agree, or do you think we can get there and we just don't know how yet? At a quantum scale, there seems to be perpetual motion. Otherwise the electron would collapse into the nucleus. So is there a Maxwell's demon at the quantum scale that can only open very small doors? What were people's reactions to Carnot's exploration of steam engine mechanics and the development of the idealized Carnot cycle? What is the history of Fahrenheit and ancient representations of temperature—perhaps some that were even non-numerical? View Less »
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History of Science & Technology Q&A:
History of Science and Technology Q&A (September 21, 2022) »

1 hour 11 minutes

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You recently talked about relearning the history of thermodynamics. Can I ask for resources for learning the history of thermodynamics? Can you talk about the history of mathematical/computational linguistics (the one that studies the principles and regularities of natural languages)? There are famous Soviet mathematicians (Andreev, Sobolev, Kantorovich, Markov—son of his great father) of Kolmogorov's school who advanced this field in the 1950s through the 1970s. What do you think about the science of statistics? Is AI just computational Statistics? What's the most exciting thing about the AI art revolution taking place now? Was there ever a time like it? What did Henri Poincaré think about the infinities considered by Cantor, Hilbert and Zermelo? Do engineers need the concept of a complete infinity? View Less »
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History of Science & Technology Q&A:
History of Science and Technology Q&A (September 7, 2022) »

1 hour 33 minutes

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Did any ancient unit systems use base 10, or did they all use more easily dividable bases like 12, 20, 60, etc.? What is the history of design patterns in software engineering? How did people come to them? Did you ever meet Niklaus Wirth, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Alan Kay and/or Paul Allen? Have Julia sets and Fatou sets played a significant role in the development of computer programming languages? Agreed. Computer programming languages should be object oriented for the language and structure to make sense instead of coming off as abstract and convoluted, and also so they are easier to work with and learn. Did eighteenth-century engineers/craftsmen make use of the paradigm of Newtonian mechanics? Why is it that Isaac Newton spent most of his time trying to prove theological ideas? When will Moore's law expire? Apple announced four-nanometer chip technology, and there has to be a limit. I wonder whether the future will be multicomputational, but to be honest, computers nowadays are more than powerful enough for the average user. View Less »
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