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

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: Can you explain why Earth's air doesn't escape into the vacuum of space, considering gas expands to fill the available volume without a container? - Why are there these phases of matter? Are these phases "real" or do they depend on what we can "observe"? - Sodium chloride makes incredibly square crystals. - The patterns snowflakes are predisposed to follow also drive the patterns that evolving vegetation (ferns, and the two types of trees) grows/grew into. It is all super interesting. - How perfect are crystals? Can they be used to detect the microscopic structure of space? - If the atoms of space act like a superfluid, would that mean vortices may arise if the universe is rotating? - And yet diffusion doesn't work in space. This is why I think it is electrostatic forces that must initiate coalescence. - Could photons frozen in absolute zero create "hard light"?