History of Science & Technology Q&A (May 24, 2023)

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

Questions include: Are the stars and constellations we see today the same that were seen by the ancient civilizations who first studied them? Do star positions ever change? - What do you make of the relationship between rhetoric and math? They are held in contradistinction, but I am thinking of the relation between rhetorical invention and Chaitin's idea of math-creativity. - What about sudden novas and comets? Sudden shifts in orbits? - Is the Moon moving away measurable compared to human history? As in, since humans started recording history, did the Moon appear to get 10% smaller or so? - How will history be able to correct the continuous conundrum of the accuracy of our forefathers' discoveries, inventions and ideas? Additionally, how can we as humans preserve this? - How did early civilizations explain supernovas? Did they understand it as a star exploding? How did they come to this conclusion? - "The stars are like the Sun, but far away." When said for the first time, this must have been crazy to hear for others. How often were ideas like these disregarded at first? How did researchers of this time convince society of their findings? - Is it possible that errors in translation have affected results of research? Are there any examples of this in history? - When was the first time anyone considered what the angle of our solar system's ecliptic is relative to the Milky Way's galactic plane? Apparently, the angle is about 60 degrees. - Why did science evolve so rapidly in the Western world? - What's there to say about alchemy in history? - Is that because ethical questions are fundamentally computationally irreducible questions? - How do you filter out the "good new" from the "bad new"? It's remarkable that old ideas stood the test of time.