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

History of Science & Technology Q&A:

History of Science and Technology Q&A (May 18, 2022) »

1 hour 14 minutes

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Why did electromagnetism become a focus of study so late into human civilization? Wouldn't the ancients have observed and studied magnets and static electricity and characterized it as easily as we did? Why did Turing come up with Turing machines as a basis for computation and not tag or substitution systems, or mobile automata or register machines? According to Wikipedia, Telex became an operations teleprinter service in Germany in 1933. Maybe not Telex, but ticker tape. Ticker tape was around in the 1800s. According to Wikipedia, ticker tape stock price telegraphs were invented in 1867 by Edward A. Calahan, an AT&T employee. The joke was that Gödel was the only one who read it! Einstein came to regret the name "theory of relativity." Would "theory of invariance" have been a better choice? It's somewhat ironic that Russell had one of the clearest prose styles of all time and was responsible for one of the most unreadable books! At least he didn't name it "Spacetime Stuff and Things." View Less »

History of Science & Technology Q&A:

History of Science and Technology Q&A (May 4, 2022) »

1 hour 26 minutes

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Can you discuss the thinking process of the discovery of complex numbers, quaternions and octonions? Can you go over the history of Grothendieck? What lead to the homotopy hypothesis? Can you talk about the history of four-function calculators? Could you tell us when cybersecurity was considered an important topic in computer science? I bet one of the first major applications of cybersecurity was for the telephone system, which was essentially a giant computer that people started hacking to make free long-distance calls in the 1960s. If nature is fundamentally computational, then what are the bugs in nature? Can you talk about Steve Jobs's NeXTSTEP approach to software? Does it have an ongoing legacy? In the Netherlands, if you dial #31# before the phone number, the other person won't see your phone number, so these things still exist. So is evolution a bug or a feature? View Less »

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 »

Stephen Wolfram Livestreams

History of Science & Technology Q&A (81 videos)