The Stephen Wolfram Podcast

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 there nuclear reactions going on inside our bodies? - Do you think we'll ever be able to replace damaged brain parts with computational parts as another form of prosthesis?   --  What ethical implications will become relevant when we combine machine learning and brain sensors/effectors? - Suppose a rule creates a memory in our brain. Then it could be an irreducible problem to make a true brain interface for any individual that could interpret a memory or preexisting concept. Truly a fascinating subject. Assuming we are able to completely understand the human brain, one could probably make a complete copy - basically, we could "fork" one brain into multiple copies! - Do you think neurons do their signal processing based mostly on discrete states or the temporal difference between states? - Even though all brains are different, don't they all "implement" the same underlying ideas? Doesn't this point to some Platonic realm of reality? - One of the issues with being able to read and decode a memory is that someone will have the ability to write artificial memories into a brain. It's somewhat scary to think that could happen one day, but it could also be used for good. - What about a Turing test, but for memories; like in Inception? - Perhaps the only difference between dreams and reality is just a matter of degree? Perhaps it just depends on its logical coherence? Once the logical coherence is larger than what the brain can be aware of, it is considered "real." - We've co-evolved with our environment so it should be coherent to us, but if we inject things into our environment that we haven't co-evolved with or evolved in, we get confused.

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about business, innovation, and managing life as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-business-qa Questions include: Is it worth moving to the USA from the UK/Europe to pursue a career in science, mathematics or engineering? What if one wants to change the world? - How long should one wait after college to start some startup in an area of their interest/expertise? - When you are thinking deeply about a problem, do you think "on paper" or on a computer or a tablet or...? Do you find one of them to be better than the others? - Can you tell a couple "stamp-licking" stories from the early days of starting Mathematica/Wolfram Research? - What are your thoughts on crypto and blockchain from a business perspective in general? - What do you think have been some of the most interesting and hard questions you've been asked here and elsewhere? - Can ChatGPT increase productivity? Is outsourcing writing skills beneficial or damaging? - "AI did my homework" is the inverse of "the dog ate my homework." You don't want to be in either situation! - Visual AI can produce amazing inspirations for jewelry and that sort of intricate art. - Do you drink caffeine sources like tea or coffee? How many per day? - What practices do you use to gauge and cultivate meaningful accountability as an individual and as part of a collective? - ​What was your revenue plan and time-to-revenue when starting your company? - We know that you use a hierarchical knowledge organization (files in folders) but did you ever try to use a networked knowledge organization (e.g. Logseq, Roam Research, Mem.ai, etc)? Thoughts on the best way to organize knowledge? - Wolfram documentation is amazing because it's connected (related functions). - I think the knowledge graph thesis is to give people epistemological tools and make it visual. But epistemology isn't something people worry about all the time while writing daily notes. - Have you "driven" a Tesla in Full Self-Driving mode? It's out now for beta testing and it's magical. It's so, so good. Purely a vision + neural net implementation. - Do you enjoy collecting and organizing physical books? Libraries are endless fun!

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 we close to making face recognition a ubiquitous replacement for passwords in electronic systems that require a login, negating the need to remember and constantly change multiple passwords? - Can you describe the correlations among qubits, how they differ from ordinary bits and the potential advantage of them? - So perhaps a conscious observer is in fact the result of the underlying physical system building a model that averages out all the parallel threads into a coherent story? - What I don't really understand is destructive interference between threads of history. I understand how probabilities can add, but how can they interfere destructively? - Could our brains be a quantum computer? - It is, of a sort! A distinctive feature is it being inside your body and firing neurons in 3D spatial patterns. - What Wolfram Language functions would be most improved if they could utilize 20 million logical qubits on a quantum computer?

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: Can you give some insight into automata theory, its history and its applications up until today? - How did scientists figure out the source of the cosmic microwave radiation? - Why didn't containers become popular until Docker around 2013? It seems like they would have been very useful long before that. What did people do instead? - The idea of containers was there, but it was virtualization plus a heavy load of scripts to manage servers and configurations, which was just another iteration of mirroring machines. - Apple also had a Motorola-to-PPC emulator for their PPC Macs.

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: There was a study where they saw helices in superconducting materials. What properties make helices common in nature, from DNA to whirlpools to EMR? - Can you tell us why electrons in the atoms of the Sun do not burn due to the heat? - How does superconducting magnet levitation work? - Fermions and bosons... Are hadrons the intersection between them? - Is there much use for superconductivity in space where the temp is already close to 0 K? - Especially in places without an insulating atmosphere around, superconductors should be a serious option. Much easier to dissipate heat! - Aren't there Japanese maglev trains on which there are cooling systems? - I believe these flux tubes also show up in gravity, leading to dark matter and dark energy effects. - What do you think has the most potential for changing the energy crisis, and what field do you think we need to focus on to get there? - As long as the nuke plant isn't dual-use for producing plutonium, then I think it's safe. - Thermovoltaic cells are a new thing that seem interesting for the efficiency of steam turbines.

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about business, innovation, and managing life as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-business-qa Questions include: As a British native, do you participate in Thanksgiving festivities? - Do you ever use spreadsheets or any other type of specialist app to manage information? Or is your main tool Mathematica? - Do you go through periods of low motivation? If so, what do you do to get over that? - Should I travel? - Pi Day at SXSW was pretty special! - I've been to one of your talks. The first time was around 1990 at the University of Colorado Boulder. Dr. Wolfram is the reason why I purchased a NeXTSTEP computer, because it included a copy of Mathematica. - I think a lot of people are deep in mainstream university discourse and it is good to have talks to open up and stimulate curious people to break out of the stream if they want. - Well, "they" say nothing beats person-to-person contact, as opposed to video conferencing. Then again, maybe "they" just like to travel to exotic places (disclaimer: I hate travel)! - If you have to think about it (doing more in-person talks/traveling)... the answer is no. Unless you absolutely love it, there is no value in it. - How about meeting people that don't go to universities but are really engaged in and doing hobby projects in computer and mathy stuff? - Have you ever been to Idaho? - Doesn't have to be a big and public place. Just talking back and forth, having a conversation. Big talks are not needed. - What's the goal? To interact and make friends or lay the seeds of the Wolfram universe? - Have you thought about making a video streaming and conferencing platform that integrates with your notebooks and computational language? Or do Google and Zoom do that well enough? - You could periodically host "Wolfcon." Only folks interested would be likely to show up. - As far as virtual interaction, I like Q&A streams, but also CA and physics streams. - If I were you, I would make appearances conditional with a personal request based on your curiosity. Example: "I'll come to Paris, and in return I want you to pre-arrange a three-hour private tour with a senior curator at the Louvre for me and my wife." - Wouldn't a conference on the Physics Project, in collaboration with a major university, help further disseminate it within the academic community? - You should do a talk with Gerard 't Hooft. - How come you were not on the Apple keynote when the Intel-based Macs were announced during the Mathematica demo?

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: 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?

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: Did Einstein ever attempt to quantize spacetime, as opposed to treating it as a continuous medium? - We are ultra-interested to hear about this future history of science! - What was the most fantastic experience you had as a physicist? - What is the history behind migrating the entropy term to information theory? - What is the process like making computations for the thermodynamics project? - What do you think about engineering efforts that help in discovering science (building tools and experiments)? I've met many scientist who dismiss engineering as "less intellectual." - Computational language design is basically like being a modern-day wizard. - Technology, science and social relations co-evolve.

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: 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 often natural language can be interpreted differently? - What would be your thoughts on Languages from the perspective of the category theory? It seems like Category theory encompasses all of Math. - What limitations does Wolfram Alpha have currently, and what methods are you exploring to address those limitations?

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about business, innovation, and managing life as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-business-qa Questions include: How do you prepare for your keynote talks about new technologies and Wolfram Language features? - What barriers currently still exist that keep AR/VR from being widely useful in the workplace? - One thing I genuinely appreciate about Stephen is his obvious incredible delight when explaining concepts, particularly related to science. Does he ever have to force it? - Do you take part in clinical trials? - Diagnosing is definitely a potential job for AI. - Can Wolfram Language screen for diseases or illnesses? - ​Is it possible to change human DNA by intention, I mean eating foods or taking medicine? - Do you try to convince your children to go to specific universities/schools, or do they decide by themself without any impact from you? - Multiple screens are nice but I feel it's less productive sometimes. Sort of the same thing as multitasking being a myth. - I feel like I am someone who has a lot of interests. I did my engineering degree a decade ago but I want to study mathematics, physics, philosophy and neuroscience too. Have you also been someone with diverse interests? If so, how do you manage them? I feel like I struggle with wanting to learn so much more—I feel like its a lot better to be focused and simple minded. - Any tips for fixing a chaotic filesystem? My files are scattered everywhere. - What do you do when you feel like you're stuck in the mud and can't get out? - How do you write? - How much do you use the mouse while writing in a notebook? - Do you have any preferences in reading hard copy vs digital? - You should have an automatic email word cloud generator. - Does UV hurt the paper? - Physical books are heavy and bulky, while ebooks are never bigger than your favorite tablet! - What is the oldest book you own? - Do you think storage devices like tapes and punch-cards might come back sometime?