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 137] »

1 hour 21 minutes

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Can you tell us some not-widely-known insights about prime numbers? Are the distances between twin primes now quite well known, though? What does the factoring learned in an Algebra 2 class actually do in a real-life situation? Assuming one-way functions don't exist, could the uncertainty given by a multiway function be able to save cryptography? How can we prove this randomness on a big scale? Could there be an inverse of the law of entropy increase? Something like under certain conditions, structural organization always increases? Which maybe gives rise to something like bioevolution? Is there really an infinite amount of primes? View Less »

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids & Others:

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and Others) [Episode 136] »

1 hour 16 minutes

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How is it that animal species all look relatively similar, or at least similar across a breed (ex: dogs, golden retrievers), yet all humans have unique features? What's your intuition for Euler's number, e? In the recent Halloween spirit, is there any science behind ghostly appearances? If an advanced civilization lived on Earth one billion years ago, would there be signs of their existence in today's time? How does photography work? How are we able to capture an image so easily, whether on film or on a phone screen? Kind of a similar topic: how do mirrors reflect images, and can we trust these images or do they change our perception? Is there a number like e or π that instead of being small (under 10) is big (like over 100)? How do these numbers get specific notation/names? How many digits of pi can you recite at this moment? View Less »

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids & Others:

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and Others) [Episode 135] »

1 hour 8 minutes

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Is it possible that individual particles have a halo of dark matter, like galaxies have? How is antimatter made in the lab, and what makes it so difficult to produce? I am curious about your perspective on the recent unveiling of smart glasses equipped with AI assistants (LLMs) by Meta. Do you see this development as a natural evolution of smartphones? But was the separation of matter and antimatter proposed by Feynman, or earlier? And how can this be measured by experiment? Are there anti-neutrons? Anti-elements? Does technology behave differently depending on outside factors (such as atmospheric pressure, temperature of weather, gravity, etc.)? Is there an ideal environment? Deionized (distilled) water won't conduct. How about solar flares? How do they affect technology? A gamma ray burst hit us last year about this time. It was called the BOAT (biggest of all time). Did we learn anything new from the data from that burst? What determines the color of a leaf when the weather changes? Why are some yellow, some orange and some red? Could there be nanites waiting for more favorable conditions to multiply (nanometer-size robots or organisms) in the samples we brought back from the asteroid Bennu? How could we be sure there aren't any? View Less »

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids & Others:

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and Others) [Episode 134] »

1 hour 4 minutes

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If human reaction speed were faster, would that be helpful? How much faster could it be? Is the limiting factor the nerve signal relays or brain processing time? Do you find it weird that on Earth, animals with bigger brains are considered the more intelligent species, but in technology, the smarter computer chips seem to always be smaller? Could these (neuron connections) "prove" precognitions with "impossible" results from certain people? Do you think the brain can be trained (or not) like a muscle? How will brains change through Neuralink connecting to AI? I think some parts of our brains adapted to modern (laggy) typing, so we don't really perceive it anymore. By the way, they have done the same thing to brains of whales etc. and found that those whales actually have fewer neurons than humans. It's just that the size of those neurons is very big. I'd say societies/groups are our larger-scale developing "brains." Would bigger brains run into heating/cooling issues? I get the feeling we'll realize nature is so much more efficient than what we hope to do with electronics that we'll soon be relying on cells for major computation. View Less »

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids & Others:

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and Others) [Episode 133] »

1 hour 29 minutes

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Could we be inside of a black hole? Can biological life survive? Would something trapped in the liminal space between the event horizon and "singularity" eventually be able to escape? In a black hole, does time stop? Is this a case for string theory? What are the implications of a naked black hole (one without an event horizon) on the universe? It is very interesting that the more the black hole "eats," the larger the surface gets. So what exactly is the singularity? If matter and antimatter both have positive mass, then wouldn't Hawking radiation increase the mass of a black hole? How small can a black hole be? "Micro-black holes," maybe? Do you think it will ever be possible to reproduce a black hole situation in a lab for practical research/experimentation? What is spinning in a spinning black hole? Can black holes have a charge? Can the effect of the charge propagate out of the black hole if photons cannot escape? Why are they named black holes and not after the name of the people who found/discovered this phenomenon? Could lasers be used to display an advertisement (or perhaps a clock) on the Moon? Can high-bandwidth internet connections be bounced off reflectors on the Moon? If the Moon is responsible for the tides, can the Earth be responsible for some micro-movement of moon dust? Buying an ad that burns up upon reentry sounds incredibly wasteful. Would the tea dumped into Boston Harbor during the Boston Tea Party have affected the underwater ecosystem? How would biologists test for the effects of caffeine on fish? Why are the elements on the Earth not more homogeneous? Why are there areas/mines abundant with certain metals? Is the heterogeneity of elements increasing or decreasing on Earth? Is this the same for other planets? Galaxies? View Less »

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids & Others:

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and Others) [Episode 132] »

1 hour 5 minutes

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What would a bio-computer look like? Interesting to think whether John Conway's Life is a kind of life. Can you grow life from a computer program? Why are there different colors of flowers but not trees? What causes a four-leaf clover? Why are they so rare? The mantis shrimp has 12 types of cone cells in its eyes. Do you have any intuition what space all these colors occupy in the brain of this animal? Is it something 11-dimensional? There has been a lot of cool research in regards to photosynthesis recently. Anything to say about that? What's the difference between "species" and "variety"? How do you know if something is the main species or its variety? Could it be possible to disable some kind of cone cell (maybe with a paralysis drug) in our eye and thus lead someone to perceive some super-color, i.e. something that activates the other two types of cone cells while not activating the other type, in a way that is not normally physically possible? View Less »

Stephen Wolfram Livestreams

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids & Others (149 videos)