Stephen Wolfram Livestreams

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids & Others (160 videos)

Weekly ask-me-anything about science & technology

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New episode streaming Friday, July 25, 2025 at 3:30pm ET. Submit your questions

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids & Others:
Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and Others) [Episode 130] »

1 hour 24 minutes

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​Is it possible to create more universe? Why does running my Waterpik interrupt Bluetooth connections? In third grade, I had an argument with a teacher. She said, "Before humans had language, they thought just like us." I argued that couldn't be true—instead, language gave way to complex thoughts. Was I right? Why do many medications have side effects? Why do we yawn? Are yawns truly contagious? Why do cats meow, why do dogs bark, why do birds chirp? Why can't AI help us to analyze animal sounds? Do photons run through antimatter? Does that make them matter? Is chemistry really just physics? Does brain size have any correlation to IQ? Well, the hardware of the brain is an ongoing process, especially in childhood. Nurture, environmental, social and natural circumstances can cause changes in brain hardware. Do bigger brains actually have more functional neurons, or are they just more spread out? Would all whales speak the same whale language? A friend had a bird that learned to imitate their microwave alarm. View Less »
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Science & Technology Q&A for Kids & Others:
Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and Others) [Episode 129] »

1 hour 23 minutes

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Why is it important that the periodic table is structured as a table rather than a list of elements? Is the periodic table just the table for the current state? Since there weren't heavy atoms from the start (Big Bang), maybe in the far future everything decays and just the electrons survive. How certain are we that the Big Bang actually happened? What are the chances of the Big Bang theory being displaced in the future? What do you make of the very early galaxies seen by JWST, which seem too large to exist so early? Is it possible that the expansion of space due to dark energy could eventually be fast enough that even atoms and nuclei come apart? How is the temperature of cosmic background radiation measured? Is it just from the wavelength of the microwaves? View Less »
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Science & Technology Q&A for Kids & Others:
Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and Others) [Episode 128] »

1 hour 3 minutes

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Congrats on the new blog post! Are there any dangers to these "custom" plugins? Allowing ChatGPT access to your computer seems like asking for an AI takeover. Is current tech like ChatGPT going to be able to answer every question imaginable? Are you worried about being replaced by AI? A caveat, though: LLMs can quite easily be asked to write in any nonperfect way we want! What are some ways LLMs can be improved? Do these improvements require advancements in technology that haven't yet been made? One thing that worries me about LLM is that right now, many people are using LLM as a "source of truth" or even "references" to their arguments. Perhaps the only real way for an AI to make those value judgments is for it to be able to model its own possible future states and decide for itself? Asking for ChatGPT to write less formally makes me think of the evolution of music genres, i.e. electronic music is now "not perfect" on purpose. We're gonna one day find out that these livestreams are like a really advanced Turing test being conducted at Wolfram, and both Stephen and the moderators in the chat have been AIs all along. View Less »
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Science & Technology Q&A for Kids & Others:
Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and Others) [Episode 127] »

1 hour 11 minutes

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In quantum chromodynamics, what is color confinement? How did we discover strong nuclear force? Is there a finite number of sub-atomic particles? Or will we forever find new unique ones? How do detectors sense the presence of these particles? For example, if a microphone has a diaphragm detecting vibrating air, what is the diaphragm of this detector? View Less »
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Science & Technology Q&A for Kids & Others:
Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and Others) [Episode 126] »

1 hour 30 minutes

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If you ask the AI the exact same question several times, will it give the same answer or will it change it based on some random function? Or do the neurons change during self-learning and change the answer? Do you think at any point we will create an AI factory? Like specialized AI algorithms that create other AIs (which can do very well one specific task)? Any thoughts on using physics simulations vs. the real world to teach robots? Is it computer power then that speeds real progress? What do you think about sources of energy now and in the future for developed and developing countries? What will happen when oil runs out? Will there be a shift to "clean" energy well before this happens? For nuclear energy, do the dangers pose a problem? Or do the pros outweigh the cons in this situation? Apparently the death rate for nuclear energy is around 0.04 deaths per terawatt-hour, which is similar to wind and solar. Nuclear is safer than coal, because people are more cautious when the stakes are higher. What do you think of small modular reactors? What is the connection between computational irreducibility and extracting usable energy? Can energy be "mined" with computation? Nuclear is not going to be a good thing until we have some way of dealing with the waste products. View Less »
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Science & Technology Q&A for Kids & Others:
Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and Others) [Episode 125] »

1 hour 23 minutes

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I've been hearing of AI and LLMs in context of an "arms race" between countries. What do LLMs look like scaled up in that manner (vs. like a global LLM)? What about model interoperability? Where are we at on the research for that? Do we need to develop new and more sophisticated mathematics to begin to understand these black box models? Do you think in time we will be able to do casual inference with them? Do you agree with Yann LeCunn and Andrew Ng that recent affirmation that AGI is still decades away and cannot be achieved with the current transformer architectures, regardless of parameter and token count? Where is the line then between a program with an inner experience and one without? So with unlimited intelligence, maybe everything can be predicted with accuracy. When will an AI write a work worth feeding into another AI? View Less »
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