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The Stephen Wolfram Podcast

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and others) [November 4, 2022]

Jul 28, 2023
01:33:45

Stephen Wolfram answers general questions from his viewers about science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa

Questions include: 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.

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