The Stephen Wolfram Podcast

Stephen reads a recent blog from https://writings.stephenwolfram.com and then answers questions live from his viewers. Read the blog along with Stephen: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/07/generative-ai-space-and-the-mental-imagery-of-alien-minds/ Watch the original livestream on YouTube: https://youtu.be/X8DQuazATdM

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.

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: Do you think that in the future, people will look at our societal interest in math and science the same way we view alchemists and theologians of old? - Tell us about the history of chess computers and the approaches they used before deep learning. - Can you talk about the history of software packaging and distribution? - My brain came online around the time we needed two CDs for games, and I thought that was a pain. - I might be misremembering, but I think we put a piece of masking tape on floppy disks to circumvent copy protection. - I would love your thoughts on internet pseudonymity and its history! - How has the "central hub" of science changed geographically over time, and what may be the reasons for this change? - There is obviously a link between training clergymen (the original role of most Western universities) and the growth of early modern science. - Any thoughts on different methods of storing information in terms of resilience over long timescales? - Cuneiform is mostly only preserved because it was stamped in clay tablets. All the really "good stuff" (science, poetry, etc.) was usually written on biological material like hides and papyrus and, obviously, they didn't age that well. - Paper Dutch East India Company records from 1600-1700 still exist today. - In light of the recent law requiring free access to all federally funded research (and associated data), can you talk about how scientific knowledge and data have been shared throughout history?

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: Why were only a few species domesticated? Could any species be domesticated? Are humans domesticated? - Does conditioning have anything to do with domestication? - Since an octopus has nine brains, including one in each leg, how does it see the world? - Every animal has different capabilities, with their own advantages and disadvantages. Dolphins are fast, but they're not fast on land. -  Would you agree that humans are the most "flexible" and can "adapt" to learn the most among Earth species? - Other species' communication is domain specific and our communication is universal, right? - I believe the mapping between the world and brain zones is a super-simple geometrical mapping that makes good sense. I wonder what this brain-leg mapping would be. Legs are further away from each other than a leg and a brain. - Do you think it's possible that we might live inside a cosmic super-organism, analogous to the way microbes live inside of us? - Is there a way to tell how much of our intelligence emerges from high-level brain functions vs. low-level cellular computation? - What is the simplest possible object? - Can you explain why the default scientific position is that consciousness does not rely on quantum mechanics? To me, it seems obvious that it would to at least some degree. - Why is it that we as observers never see quantum superpositions? Why are superpositions aligned to our macroscopic observations? - Could it then be that what is quantum mechanics to us just involves higher dimensions of time? The fact that quantum mechanics is incomprehensible to us is then because we are trying to understand-higher dimensional time from a single dimensional experience of time. - Why do my glasses get foggy but my eyeballs don't? - Fog can't create droplets on a wet surface. - And let's not forget the eyelids, which act as windscreen wipers!

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: Do you have any fun Halloween plans? Any memorable costumes you've dressed up in or have seen? - If you could spend the day as any animal in the world, what would it be? What might the change in perspective allow you to understand and apply toward your current work? - What are your thoughts on providing feedback to employees? What methodologies and tools do you use? How can we best help an employee to grow before letting them go for underperformance? - I just finished reading Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About by Donald Knuth. He briefly mentions the possibility of the universe being a cellular automaton. Have you ever read this book? - Maybe "project" is not an adequate word for undertakings like Wolfram|Alpha. - Do you have a timeframe for the Physics Project, or is it a lifelong project? If you had to work on another idea/project, what would that be? - How would you tackle a problem? Dive into it or first observe the bigger picture? - What's your way of studying something new? Understanding the historical evolution of concepts or reading from textbooks and working out examples? - I have to wonder how Bertrand Russell would have viewed the Wolfram Metamathematics Project! - ​What has been the typical response when reaching out to "academics" to join the Physics Project?

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 much time do you spend on building Wolfram Language vs. doing research on the Physics Project? And what are the pros and cons of doing both things? - When working on something new, how do you know if you're making progress? Have you had stretches of time when you were exploring something, but it turned out that you weren't making much progress? - How do you choose whether to throw a project in the trash or not? Sometimes you invest so much of yourself in something that it feels just impossible to do so. - What tools, practices and/or policies can be implemented to mitigate the effects of reduced attention span and memory from social media use (and short-form content in general)? - When you code, do you apply a test-driven design approach, or do you enjoy a more exploratory approach? - What's "a day in the life of Stephen Wolfram" look like these days? - With so much email, how do you bucket your email? Have you been running it through a rules engine of your own design? - Why do so many companies prove such easy targets for hackers? Is robust security really so hard? - Any future interviews of any public physicists, mathematicians, etc. coming soon? - Do you take notes of things you learn? What's the system that you use for managing new information (when researching or learning new things)? - What is your opinion on solo work vs. group work and how it impacts the legacy of a product that has tangible and intangible business products? - How do you identify great developers? Do you test developers, be that with code or psychometrics, as part of the hiring process, or do you prefer to rely on conversation? - Any philosophy book or article you recommend reading?

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: Should we try to contact extraterrestrial beings by broadcasting signals into space, or is it too dangerous to reveal our location? - How do you tell if something is natural or artificial? - How far can an EMP from the human heart travel? - If I am on an object moving two-thirds of the speed of light moving towards another object that is moving two-thirds of the speed of light toward me, what would the object look like to me while on the first object? - Dogs can not understand mathematics; similarly, humans must be limited in their ability to grasp aspects of reality. Is our ability to understand upgradable? Would biological evolution, better brains or merging with AI allow us to break through our biology's limitations and become new "dogs who can understand mathematics"? - ​​I think that is no problem; the brain would just incorporate the new frequencies and we would see it like a new color. - Do we see more green in one eye and more red in the other eye or something? Is that how we perceive things in 3D?

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: What's the history behind emails and instant messaging? I have a hard time imagining life before then and handling communication that may not get a response for days (waiting for a letter in the mail). - What were the early days of Wolfram|Alpha like? - I see papers from '40s - even '30s - of PRL (physical reviews). They are typeset so cleanly. How did they do this without LaTeX at that time? - It's been said that a real perpetual motion machine cannot exist. Do you agree, or do you think we can get there and we just don't know how yet? - At a quantum scale, there seems to be perpetual motion. Otherwise the electron would collapse into the nucleus. So is there a Maxwell's demon at the quantum scale that can only open very small doors? - What were people's reactions to Carnot's exploration of steam engine mechanics and the development of the idealized Carnot cycle? - What is the history of Fahrenheit and ancient representations of temperature - perhaps some that were even non-numerical?

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: 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?

Stephen Wolfram celebrates 35 years of Mathematica, originally launched on June 23, 1988, starting with a look at V1 of Mathematica on a Mac SE/30. The live demonstration (part 1) is followed by a discussion (part 2) covering the development and timeless nature of Mathematica, as well as answering viewer questions. Watch the original livestream on YouTube: https://youtu.be/HxWg8exJxNY