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 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 »

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids & Others:

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and Others) [Episode 103] »

1 hour 2 minutes

✕ close

Is there any scientific approach to simulate society? What are the main laws in sociology? Property rights are a very basic element of a society. They lead to saving, then specialization, then trade, then currency. Why are some physical constants dimensionless? View Less »

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids & Others:

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and Others) [Episode 102] »

1 hour 8 minutes

✕ close

How do tornadoes form? Why does a fan create white noise? Is that how they produced the audio from our galaxy's supermassive black hole? Fans also generate a different speed of flow radially, as the linear speed is lower closer to the center of the blades than the outside. I think they were actually to measure distortion in gas. I thought they were synthetic, but it seems like they managed to actually measure sound waves in distant gas. Why are roads made of tarmac? Is there anything certain modern physics can say about dark matter/energy? What exactly is it? Does dark matter interact with gravity? If dark matter particles exist, then why are there no dark matter halos associated with our Sun and with the planet Jupiter? What's a graviton? View Less »

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids & Others:

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and Others) [Episode 101] »

1 hour 16 minutes

✕ close

Why are there still mysteries in our knowledge of the human body in spite of exponential advancement in our understanding? What are the approximate odds that two people have had the same fingerprint pattern (odds of a collision among all fingerprints within the enumeration of the parameter space of fingerprint patterns)? Aren't fingerprints two-dimensional, reminiscent of the torus-like inversion that occurs in the body? Is there a way to make trees grow faster? If there exists a machine code for our bodies, is the model you're working on some kind of a debugger? Could you explain the things you expect to be able to predict with your theory? So the conscious brain is like the user code space and the unconscious brain like kernel-space code? How far away are we from finally doing away with physical smartphone screens and replacing them with virtual projected screens in front of the user, which can be made as big or as small as one desires? MIT developed AlterEgo, which reads your mind so you do not need to type. Edward Fredkin Tablet PCs didn't take off in the 90s, but much later. Why? Is typing/writing a bottleneck on productivity? I wonder if thought typing will have a significant effect on how much most people get done. Thanks for that answer. I guess for now we will just have to keep getting excited every time someone comes up with yet another smartphone with a slightly bigger (by a few millimeters) screen! What if somebody falls asleep in front of their computer with the electrodes still on their head and starts dreaming, then typing in their dreams? If you drink milk before you go to sleep, you will remember your dreams. There's something biochemical there. Dreams are so interesting.... The habit of having a dream journal (writing them down as soon as you wake) triggers you to "remember" the dream. But who's to say whether it's an accurate memory or just an on-demand created thought? How come we sometimes experience more subjective time in a dream than actually has passed? Does our brain somehow "outrun" the normal computation rate? What do you think about molecules (supplements) that increase synaptic plasticity, which controls how effectively two neurons communicate with each other? I'm looking for molecules to boost my brain power. But what is a memory, really? Where does one memory start and another end? What is the boundary between the "interior" and "exterior" of the mind? The human brain does seem to have a bias toward discrete categorization, though, e.g. the alternating illusions, the Yanny/Laurel effect, etc. Companies into AI (like Tesla) put a lot of emphasis on "vision" over other sensory detection. Is that also true for us as human beings? Are some senses "more important"? View Less »

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids & Others:

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and Others) [Episode 100] »

1 hour 48 minutes

✕ close

How is computation in nature different than the computation that a computer does? Why do cars get much hotter than the outside air temperature? In Austin this week, my car's internal air temperature was 130° F, while it was 100° F outside. Why haven't we discovered a cure for baldness? Compared to the other great apes, we have lost most of our body hair, so I wonder if baldness is not just our further evolutionary progression of losing all body hair. Think about things in nature as having autonomous rules. For example, a flower is one rule, but different shapes, colors, etc. of flowers have different initial conditions. Is this too crazy an idea? To what extent are plant cells Voronoi meshes? How about animal cells? To what extent could one build a simulation of a tree using something like a "Voronoi mesh automaton"? Do you believe there is a concrete description of evolution waiting to be fleshed out in the multicomputational paradigm? If so, does its basic rule relate to the expansion of the hypergraph? If mammals have a common ancestor, then how did they get divided into carnivores and herbivores? What do you think of the notion of chemical interspecies communications? Can we think of some fungi species that could reach some kind of intelligence like the human one in the future? Are bubbles round because of gravity? View Less »

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids & Others:

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and Others) [Episode 99] »

1 hour 22 minutes

✕ close

How do glaciers form? Is the orbit of the Earth constant around the Sun? Or is there a variation on a large time frame? Could it explain the ice ages? Have you ever studied aerial photos of ocean waves to assess their evolution for irreducibility/pockets of reducibility? Do you think ocean waves are computationally universal? What are neutrinos for? Why do they exist if they don't interact with anything? Could aliens have a purpose for them? Didn't some neutrinos cause hardware failure in airplanes? If technology could produce a small practical neutrino emitter and detector, would it be useful to send messages with them? Will holograms as seen in the Iron Man movie ever be available for widespread use? Why do some foods, like peanuts and crustaceans, cause deadly allergic reactions in some people, while others can eat them daily without harm? How many species have allergies? Do we know the mechanism behind this "training"? View Less »

Stephen Wolfram Livestreams

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids & Others (152 videos)