Science & Technology Q&A for Kids & Others: Stephen Wolfram Livestreams

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids & Others:

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and Others) [Episode 87] »

1 hour 20 minutes

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How was it possible for civilizations across the world to develop pyramids independently (Egypt and Mayans/Aztecs)? Is there any scientific significance to this? Does the double-helix shape in DNA show up anywhere else in nature? Are there any examples of logical gates being built out of chemical reactions? What breakthroughs are needed to achieve this? How many gates are needed for a programming language like C? Is it necessary to have supercomputers to do meaningful biomolecule-level simulations? What life forms have arbitrary differences between individuals and what life forms have meaningfully "unique" individuals? Are Darwin's survival of the fittest, evolution and machine learning all basically the same thing? If not, how do they differ? Can you please say something about the formation of buckyballs? How are gemstones formed and how can we model all gem features? Colors, textures, asterism, anisotropy, everything? What do you know? In quartz, I also notice imperfections like streaks; seems to be the molecular analog to cellular automata. View Less »

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids & Others:

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and Others) [Episode 86] »

1 hour 33 minutes

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Thoughts on longevity research and its feasibility? Does computational irreducibility have practical implications for the difficulty of solving this complex biological problem? Also, do you ever get sad about the shortness of the current human lifespan causing us to miss out on the (potentially unimaginable) future opportunities for understanding the universe? Do you think a multicomputational approach to medicine will detect disease first by observing visual systems or chemical systems or otherwise? Is this discussion of mortality curves related to the survivorship function? Would there be any justification for pursuing eternal life for humans, if feasible? Aging might be the condition that makes the most sense to study economically, in terms of the money spent by health systems on related problems overall. According to Michael Graziano, immortality will be achieved by uploading human consciousness into computers. The discussion today reminded me of this post I saw where it asked if you could live for 150 years but you had to upload your brain to the metaverse and give up your real body, would you? Would you upload your brain? Yes, but uploading a copy of your brain into a computer means there are two of you, and computational irreducibility means that the two are different from each other! Is bureaucratic inefficiency analogous to aging in biological systems? That the system over time grinds to a halt and dies due to build up of systematic inefficiencies? Can we apply life extension to institutions? View Less »

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids & Others:

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and Others) [Episode 85] »

1 hour 16 minutes

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So do we live in a simulation or not? So how do we perceive change? Why is motion possible? Why do we perceive that we can make "choices"? What does it mean to make a choice? But every observer observes the same dimensionless constants (like the fine-structure constant)—we don't have any choice about that observation. Or is 1/137 something that lies on an observable manifold of the ruliad? What if the beautiful images of stars and galaxies really are a molecule in another universe and time is very, very slow in that universe from our view? I always thought, what if we are like bacteria living on a bit of sand on the bottom of an alien's shoe while he rides an elevator, and what happens when the elevator stops? Moving at the speed of thought—is there a max on how fast we can think? View Less »

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids & Others:

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and Others) [Episode 84] »

1 hour 15 minutes

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Can you explain why Earth's air doesn't escape into the vacuum of space, considering gas expands to fill the available volume without a container? Why are there these phases of matter? Are these phases "real" or do they depend on what we can "observe"? Sodium chloride makes incredibly square crystals. The patterns snowflakes are predisposed to follow also drive the patterns that evolving vegetation (ferns, and the two types of trees) grows/grew into. It is all super interesting. How perfect are crystals? Can they be used to detect the microscopic structure of space? If the atoms of space act like a superfluid, would that mean vortices may arise if the universe is rotating? And yet diffusion doesn't work in space. This is why I think it is electrostatic forces that must initiate coalescence. Could photons frozen in absolute zero create "hard light"? View Less »

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids & Others:

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and Others) [Episode 83] »

1 hour 20 minutes

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Is 10 a special number in any way? Why is scientific notation (or the digit system) in base 10? Is it just because we have 5×2 fingers? Lots of flowers have five-fold symmetry. Empedocles believed arms, fingers and legs just roamed around as creatures of their own, eventually merging into all kinds of creatures, and only the five-fingered, four-limbed animals won out. It's like an ancient Greek natural selection. Why are some animals cold-blooded? Can the Wolfram Physics Project be used to simulate models of new medications for diseases? #WolframPharma. Will we ever successfully be able to use cryogenics to freeze humans? Won't the ice crystals rupture our cells, like a banana left in the freezer and then thawing it out? Is it true that cats domesticated themselves compared to other animals that humans domesticated for a purpose? View Less »

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids & Others:

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and Others) [Episode 82] »

1 hour 22 minutes

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The term "spatom" as a portmanteau of space atom (atom of space): yes or no? Did you ever meet Vladimir Arnold? What do you think of the Erlangen program? Can spoken language be broken into a set of logical primitives? What major attempts have been made at this, and in what ways did they fail? Is GPT-3 an example of building up from language primitives? Language is to all things; the context of its content. Will we have better designed/optimized cities, homes, everyday objects in the future? Since the world is now built around humans, would humanoid robots be the most general (like a Rosie for in-home tasks)? View Less »

Stephen Wolfram Livestreams

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids & Others (159 videos)