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

History of Science & Technology Q&A:

History of Science and Technology Q&A (July 27, 2022) »

1 hour 25 minutes

✕ close

How was it determined that light travels at a constant speed in a vacuum? Could you speak about the history of the hard sphere model in statistical mechanics? In many textbooks, it is mentioned rather briefly for something so fundamental. How did the study of nonlinear dynamics come about? I'd imagine it would be a known thing after Newton's work. How important are complex numbers in the history of science and tech? Would the current state be possible without them? Solving equations of that form led negative and complex numbers to be taken more seriously, but people did not see the utility of these types of numbers. A lot of facts that are true about real numbers are also true about complex numbers. They're not necessary to solve many problems, but they're convenient for packaging. Have you ever seen CA-like objects produced by a Jacquard loom? Just curious on your thoughts on technological singularity. View Less »

History of Science & Technology Q&A:

History of Science and Technology Q&A (June 1, 2022) »

1 hour 32 minutes

✕ close

Do you think we'll ever get to the stage of having flying cars? Is there any historical evidence? Even now with traction control, anti-lock braking systems, automatic crash avoidance and the like, driving cars has automated "smart" safeguards nowadays. It seems like many science discoveries or inventions happen due to some mistake or error that ultimately makes the insight or experiment work. How prevalent is this? Can you talk a little bit about the history of automated theorem proving? Do you think we are on the cusp of an era when computers will be proving theorems and mathematicians will interpret them? I think one interesting question would be to flip that around: could one use theorem-proving algos to figure out why black-box neural nets do what they do? Will artificial general intelligence be the future of automation or a symbolic language like the Wolfram Language? I think the computational mathematics system of the future will be generating new languages, new notations, new proofs, new theorems and new conjectures. Artificial intelligence is an effort to create electronic learning. Not human thinking. A self-learning program will not develop human-like emotions. It has no physiological needs, and it has no need to fear. It can be replicated, it can be backed up, it can be turned off and on. View Less »

History of Science & Technology Q&A:

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

1 hour 14 minutes

✕ close

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

✕ close

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

✕ close

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

✕ close

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 »

Stephen Wolfram Livestreams

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