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

History of Science & Technology Q&A:

History of Science and Technology Q&A (April 20, 2022) »

1 hour 24 minutes

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What is the history of dimensional regularization and zeta regularization? How are they related to renormalization? When and how was the first compiler made? What language was it for, and what language was it written in? Can you talk about the history of computer graphics standards and libraries, such as OpenGL etc.? Larry Sanger HP 9800s were awesome. They had two overlap video memories. One was ASCII character–based, and the other was HP plotter language controlled. They both showed up on the screen. Handy/versatile. View Less »

History of Science & Technology Q&A:

History of Science and Technology Q&A (April 6, 2022) »

1 hour 41 minutes

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Do you have a sense of the skills that an incoming fellow to the Wolfram Institute will have? What would effective preparation for institute-type work be? What is the Emerald functionality that was mentioned for biological/cellular computational explorations? And what about around the world, overseas and in other countries? You get some wonderful things out of pursuing science just for the sake of it. There are pejorative terms for this, like "fishing trips" and "stamp collecting," but such pursuits led to PCR technology just because someone was curious about thermophile bacteria. Activity overseas and in other countries in regards to outreach programs in cooperation with education systems... you were mentioning some campaigns you had going on. Will there be more active development on the computational capabilities of Wolfram Mathematica with the Wolfram Institute? British physics is more geometry guild, and American physics is more group theory and particle physics guild. What is your opinion about experimental mathematics and its relationship with classical "mainstream" mathematics? I often hear that science needs philosophy to justify it. What are some historical examples of this? I think in a lot of places in history, the role of academic pursuit was that of a philosopher's role, but academic pursuit has attained a large amount of "division of labor." Philosophy and mathematical logic are starting to overlap more. Tarski's semantics relates formal logic to topology just like math and computer languages. Are there inherently philosophical ideas (i.e. that cannot be turned into a scientific one like the question of motion)? Can we distinguish them outright without knowing future scientific development? View Less »

History of Science & Technology Q&A:

History of Science and Technology Q&A (March 23, 2022) »

1 hour 18 minutes

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What happened with the computer during WWII? The Imitation Game is a great movie about computers in World War 2. How important are Nobel Prizes? Are there any scandalous omissions? It is taxable income. Some of the physics prizes have been a bit random. Penzias and Wilson more or less accidentally discovered the CMB, but Gamov predicted it and got nothing (I think). Thank you for encouraging our curiosity. My question is: When and why did apprenticeships end? It seems all the greats, such as Benjamin Franklin, were sent to be apprentices. What happened to the interdisciplinary science of the Renaissance? Do the efficiency gains of specialization outweigh the harms of institutional departmentalization? Are crazy ideas useful to talk about, or are they only good for guiding intuition in research? View Less »

History of Science & Technology Q&A:

History of Science and Technology Q&A (March 9, 2022) »

1 hour 31 minutes

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What is the history of "infinity" in mathematics, or in science in general? I would like to see a differentiation between eternity and infinity. Can you talk about the history of the "elementary length"? What have people believed to be the smallest possible length, and what events have changed this belief? If space is discrete, does this mean that the fundamental constants are rational numbers? If the fundamental constants were real numbers, couldn't you encode arbitrary amounts of information into your theory, hiding the complexity in these constants? At what stage in history did the idea of extraterrestrial alien life start to be entertained? Is this a relatively recent phenomenon, or was it a thing even in ancient Greek philosophy? When did we first realize that we only see the same side of the Moon? What belief systems/groups of people have historically believed in a fundamentally discrete universe? Why do you think the distribution of new discoveries is so random? See, for example, Nassim Taleb's example of 6,000 years between the wheel and wheels on a suitcase, for example. View Less »

History of Science & Technology Q&A:

History of Science and Technology Q&A (February 23, 2022) »

1 hour 19 minutes

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In eight hundred years, what will people call the methodology of NKS? I always felt Ptolemy's system was a necessary step before Copernicus and Newton. Without that slightly dodgy pseudo-scientific reasoning, Copernicus and Newton wouldn't have "fixed" and refined it. Newton invented calculus and his three laws. Do you consider the new Physics Project developing a new tool like calculus, or are you inventing new laws? Why was gravitoelectromagnetism ignored for so long? I disagree with Wolfram. I think there is no "end" to how infinitesimal the universe gets. There's always more—the discoveries will never end. I understand a great deal of human history was lost in ancient Alexandria. Of the early mathematics, are there texts that reference concepts that are lost to us? Is ruliology a "young person's game," an "old person's game" or something else? What traits do you think will be most important for great ruliologists? (Ruliologers? Rulioligizers? Rulioligraphers?) View Less »

History of Science & Technology Q&A:

History of Science and Technology Q&A (February 9, 2022) »

1 hour 27 minutes

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I think that there has been a concerted and focused effort to give greater emphasis to STEM education since WWII. Has the history of science been left out in this process? Nassim Taleb points out that engineering precedes theory, even in complicated projects such as jet propulsion. Can you think of historical counterexamples when theory preceded engineering? Can you talk about some times in history when scientific knowledge was destroyed and why that occurred? What is the history of the Ivy League? Why are those universities so prestigious? How does science progress from outside of the academic process? What do you make of the work being undertaken to lab grow woolly mammoths in a collaboration between a team at Harvard and the company Colossal and its potential in curbing the thawing of permafrost to mitigate the impact of the release of all the built-up carbon? Do you believe that Fermat really solved Fermat's last theorem with a "truly marvelous demonstration," or was his solution probably not mathematically rigorous? What is your opinion on polymathy in the modern age of specialization? How has our understanding of time changed over history? What do you think is the limit of human understanding, or is there a limit? View Less »

Stephen Wolfram Livestreams

History of Science & Technology Q&A (73 videos)