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 109] »

1 hour 23 minutes

✕ close

Does gravity's strength cause a fundamental limit for the size a planet? What about a star? What about a black hole? What about a galaxy? What about the universe? Internal gas pressure and gravity are two main forces for star formation from nebulas. What was the pressure of the early universe vs. today? Just as a thought experiment. Can one stretch a vacuum beyond a "breaking point" similar to how matter can be compressed beyond a "breaking point" that leads to black holes? In both quantum field theory and general relativity, the zero-point energy seems to be arbitrary: you can add a constant to the equations and it will still be a valid solution. But in general relativity there seems to be a notion of absolute energy because of its gravitational effects. This zero point seems to be associated with flat space. Why is flat space non-gravitational, i.e. why is flat space the lowest possible energy state? Any ideas about "hacking nature" to gain powers (get infinite energy, travel faster than light, etc.). Do you think all these are possible at all? Can we really "hack" or "alter" the rules of nature? You can travel faster than light if the space between you and your destination changes; this happens quite frequently as the universe expands, and it's why we get measurements faster than the speed of light in space. It's just a fabrication. This brings up a related question. You cannot distinguish the geometry of empty space from that which has matter that is uniformly distributed. So it is perhaps uniformity that determines the geometry (without dark energy). But this assumes matter can be spread out like a fluid, instead of being discrete. So perhaps flat space is indeed the lowest-energy state. Uniform matter cannot exist because of the discreteness of matter, which leads inevitably to inhomogeneities. It's almost like you need to solve the puzzle of constructing the space you want to travel through before you can travel through it. Why is the refractive index for x-rays into matter smaller than 1? Does that mean that the speed of light for x-rays is faster in matter than in a vacuum? View Less »

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids & Others:

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and Others) [Episode 108] »

1 hour 14 minutes

✕ close

How does sand form near the sea? Is grammar invented or discovered? I believe there exists a 13-letter language from a Pacific island. Do you think a 10-letter language would be useful since every word would also be a base-10 number? How can a natural programming language replace older concrete programming languages? Would it be fuzzy or like a predictor language, since natural language can often be interpreted differently? What are your thoughts on languages from the perspective of category theory? It seems like category theory encompasses all of math. What limitations does Wolfram|Alpha currently have? What methods are you exploring to address those limitations? View Less »

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids & Others:

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and Others) [Episode 107] »

1 hour 36 minutes

✕ close

Are all pixels squares/rectangles, or have other shapes (which can tile the plane) been used? Why hasn't all the cosmic background radiation escaped out into the universe by now? How is it still around to be detected billions of years later? It's weird to talk about time experienced by a photon. It experiences (this is what's possible to be noticed) only two moments, those of detachment and attachment. Between this, nothing is observable now. Do you need mass to store information? Can you have an organism made purely out of photons or other particles moving at the speed of light? Does time move faster for hot objects? But doesn't a black hole have a temperature? What happens to a black hole's entropy? Why doesn't the black hole further collapse on itself? Do the updates to maintain the structure of space help explain the absurd vacuum energy? How much more complex are the dynamics of the human brain than the dynamics of a galaxy? Does a black hole inherit the dimensionality of the spacetime it is forming in? Interestingly, the number of atoms in a bacterium is also about 100 billion. Interestingly, the distance to the Sun (1 AU) is about 100 billion meters. As gravity increases and/or speed increases, time is constant to the participant, but on the outside, space/distance could be greater or lesser. If you had a light year cube of space and shrunk it into a meter, light would take the same amount of time to go through it. View Less »

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids & Others:

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and Others) [Episode 106] »

1 hour 25 minutes

✕ close

Why were only a few species domesticated? Could any species be domesticated? Are humans domesticated? Does conditioning have anything to do with domestication? Since an octopus has nine brains, including one in each leg, how does it see the world? Every animal has different capabilities, with their own advantages and disadvantages. Dolphins are fast, but they're not fast on land. Would you agree that humans are the most "flexible" and can "adapt" to learn the most among Earth species? Other species' communication is domain specific and our communication is universal, right? I believe the mapping between the world and brain zones is a super-simple geometrical mapping that makes good sense. I wonder what this brain-leg mapping would be. Legs are further away from each other than a leg and a brain Do you think it's possible that we might live inside a cosmic super-organism, analogous to the way microbes live inside of us? Is there a way to tell how much of our intelligence emerges from high-level brain functions vs. low-level cellular computation? What is the simplest possible object? Can you explain why the default scientific position is that consciousness does not rely on quantum mechanics? To me, it seems obvious that it would to at least some degree. Why is it that we as observers never see quantum superpositions? Why are superpositions aligned to our macroscopic observations? Could it then be that what is quantum mechanics to us just involves higher dimensions of time? The fact that quantum mechanics is incomprehensible to us is then because we are trying to understand-higher dimensional time from a single dimensional experience of time. Why do my glasses get foggy but my eyeballs don't? Fog can't create droplets on a wet surface. And let's not forget the eyelids, which act as windscreen wipers! View Less »

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids & Others:

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and Others) [Episode 105] »

1 hour 20 minutes

✕ close

Should we try to contact extraterrestrial beings by broadcasting signals into space, or is it too dangerous to reveal our location? How do you tell if something is natural or artificial? How far can an EMP from the human heart travel? If I am on an object moving two-thirds of the speed of light moving towards another object that is moving two-thirds of the speed of light toward me, what would the object look like to me while on the first object? Dogs can not understand mathematics; similarly, humans must be limited in their ability to grasp aspects of reality. Is our ability to understand upgradable? Would biological evolution, better brains or merging with AI allow us to break through our biology's limitations and become new "dogs who can understand mathematics"? I think that is no problem; the brain would just incorporate the new frequencies and we would see it like a new color. Do we see more green in one eye and more red in the other eye or something? Is that how we perceive things in 3D? View Less »

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids & Others:

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and Others) [Episode 104] »

1 hour 19 minutes

✕ close

Why are there herbivores and carnivores? Isn't it evolutionarily best for everything to be omnivorous? Short digestive systems are better for meat, as they offer some protection from infection, but are less efficient for extracting nutrients from plant matter. Fire allowed us to enjoy both worlds. Aren't we "specialists" in terms of our ability to think? What is holding back robotics? Why don't we have humanoid robots yet? Neural nets and learning algorithms can find approximate solutions to many problems in robotics, I guess. Dr. Wolfram, do you have any thoughts on Michael Levin's work with biological systems using bioelectricity for self-organization and communication? Any thoughts on computer-designed organisms? Could we build robots out of random proteins? K. Eric Drexler and the Foresight Institute researched and designed molecular machines on the assumption one that day a universal assembler will be created. What if every microorganism is also a macroorganism? What is a macroorganism? View Less »

Stephen Wolfram Livestreams

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