Stephen Wolfram Livestreams

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids & Others (151 videos)

Weekly ask-me-anything about science & technology

New episode streaming Friday, November 29, at 3:30pm ET. Submit your questions

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids & Others:

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and Others) [Episode 97] »

1 hour 5 minutes

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How much does a cat's tail affect its ability to land on its feet? Do cats without tails tend to fall over frequently? Could a planet have "internal" rotation of its molten core while having a stagnant outer surface, or perhaps a slowly rotating surface? What's the deal with the Dzhanibekov effect (the observation a cosmonaut had when a spinning bolt flipped in space)? The head and the shaft are rotating in unison. The head has more inertia around the axis. Don't forget the bolt is in a standing pressurized chamber of air. Will the Earth eventually cool down enough to stop producing a geomagnetic field? Tails seem to be vestigial for many organisms. View Less »

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Science & Technology Q&A for Kids & Others:

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and Others) [Episode 96] »

1 hour 9 minutes

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As the Wolfram Language grows, will the number of lines of code ever shrink? What could cause such a trend? Scientists are trying to elucidate the origins of life on Earth. The current focus is exploring the "RNA world." This occurred 4.5 billion years ago. Could there have been dimensional fluctuations back then? Why are small children able to spin around so quickly without getting dizzy, while adults become nauseous? Do we still need the appendix? Are there any parts in our body that we "evolved away"? Is science getting harder? Are ideas getting harder to find? Yes, the more we've learned, the more we've learned that there's a lot more to learn! How ironic then, that Albert Einstein started his revolution in physics while working in a patent office! One thing that interests me is predicting what the future will look like (Alan Turing predicted computers would be capable of playing chess 50 years from when he said that, and sure enough, by 1997 they were able to do so). View Less »

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Science & Technology Q&A for Kids & Others:

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and Others) [Episode 95] »

1 hour 6 minutes

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What's the difference between bits and bytes? Can you talk about what a "sufficiently smart compiler" is? Sometimes I wonder if a program can be "lifted" to an unrelated mathematical representation, in which certain transformation rules would discover a more efficient optimization than in the absence of such "lifting." I think this requires "multicompilation." View Less »

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Science & Technology Q&A for Kids & Others:

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and Others) [Episode 94] »

1 hour 2 minutes

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Does evolution move toward complexity or simplicity? We should breed extremophile bacteria and algae to terraform planets by slowly exposing them to toxic atmospheres. Can bacteria be diabetic? Did Craig Venter indeed create synthetic life, or did he just change the existing species? Maybe there are as many species on Earth as there are different CA rules that exhibit DNA patterns of the mechanical structure of an organism. The fact that you can edit genes makes me think that so much can be done to cure disorders and diseases. What if the malaria parasite has some kind of function in biological systems that we're completely unaware of? This is the kind of thing I'm always wondering about. View Less »

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Science & Technology Q&A for Kids & Others:

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and Others) [Episode 93] »

1 hour 23 minutes

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Do you think having many (eventually thousands of) IoT devices will necessitate some kind of additional routing logic on local networks to prevent primary devices (desktops) from being slowed? The implementation of IPv6 solved the problem of the number of possible internet addresses, at least. As higher frequencies are utilized in Wi-Fi to achieve higher bandwidth, Wi-Fi range and penetration are reduced. Is there some tech that would simultaneously increase both bandwidth AND range? If gravitational waves travel through Penrose's eons, wouldn't these gravitational echoes make every particle wiggle at the quantum level, considering that there is a "noise" in spacetime? How can we still see radiation from the early universe? Did it expand faster than light? Was it like a balloon expanding, where the light source was in the beginning expanded along with the universe? Is it theoretically possible to detect individual gravitons by launching space probes into black holes? View Less »

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Science & Technology Q&A for Kids & Others:

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and Others) [Episode 92] »

1 hour 11 minutes

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What's the densest thing in the universe? I've heard that black holes don't count—why? The entire mass of the Earth at neutron star density would fit into a sphere of 305 m in diameter (the size of the Arecibo Telescope). What if black holes are like visible branchings in the multiway system? Consider the existence of white holes. So if there is "another universe" on the other side, that universe is causally... AFAIK, fractal-like patterns are the best method to receive signals, but we now have cellular automata—which can maybe do it even better? I lived in a 16th-floor apartment across from a field of transmission towers for an AM station. There were 5–6 radio towers, the closest about 200 yards away. So the AM station could be heard on lots of electronic devices in our house: telephones, answering machine, recording devices, etc. (The AM station towers were powerful.) Can it be that one day we will be able to see into Earth's past, finding an object in space that mirrors light left by Earth a long time ago? I can imagine future humans, having forgotten we sent such a signal on a long round-trip journey, receiving our message and jumping to all sorts of funny conclusions, depending on what we sent. View Less »

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