The Stephen Wolfram Podcast

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: I am writing a long-form article about James Lovelock, who was unusual in that he was an independent scientist. It struck me that you count as one too, and I wondered if you had ever blogged about the upside or downside of not being part of the scientific establishment? - ​What is the artifact behind you? It looks like something one might use to trap a mouse. ​- Have you ever focused "too much," such that the focus was detrimental to your work? - So you are on an island? I have been looking for an isolated island with limited tourists to spend some stress-free time. They are hard to find! - Any tips for building a remote software company, and how to maintain company culture when everyone is working from home? -  From a business point of view, how do you make the jump to working on highly technical projects that have long development times and higher costs? - Hypothetically, if one had the opportunity and means to pursue a completely different avenue in life even though it was not one's formal field of study... Thoughts on big life changes?  - Any interesting discussion of the history of the whaling business? - Sorry for a bit of a silly question, but you seem to like to use a light theme as opposed to a dark theme on your computer. Does it have any effect on your eyes in the long run? - How much time do you spend each day on your phone? - If you had to spend one year without computers, what would you do? - ​​I'm still waiting for phones that can do projection on the wall with a keyboard touchscreen with light detectors. - ​Did you learn anything useful during your brief time as a consultant? - If you could go back in time with your laptop running Mathematica, who would you show it to? Euler? Bernoulli? Newton? Others? - A discussion between Ada Lovelace and Alan Turing would be interesting. - You need to write this fiction, even if it's just blogged in chunks.

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 is computation in nature different than the computation that a computer does? ​- Why do cars get much hotter than the outside air temperature? In Austin this week, my car's internal air temperature was 130° F, while it was 100° F outside. - Why haven't we discovered a cure for baldness? Compared to the other great apes, we have lost most of our body hair, so I wonder if baldness is not just our further evolutionary progression of losing all body hair. - Think about things in nature as having autonomous rules. For example, a flower is one rule, but different shapes, colors, etc. of flowers have different initial conditions. Is this too crazy an idea? - To what extent are plant cells Voronoi meshes? How about animal cells? To what extent could one build a simulation of a tree using something like a "Voronoi mesh automaton"? - Do you believe there is a concrete description of evolution waiting to be fleshed out in the multicomputational paradigm? If so, does its basic rule relate to the expansion of the hypergraph? - If mammals have a common ancestor, then how did they get divided into carnivores and herbivores? - What do you think of the notion of chemical interspecies communications? - ​Can we think of some fungi species that could reach some kind of intelligence like the human one in the future? - Are bubbles round because of gravity?

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: You have published several other books after NKS. Has publishing technology and quality changed in the intervening time? - Would you like to provide a history of fluid mechanics, for example how the Navier–Stokes equations were discovered and how they work? - Given the recent hearings on and history of UFOs, do you have any thoughts on this subject? - In general, how do you engage with conspiracy theories or "alternative science"? I'm curious because most scientists in institutions are immediately dismissive of anything outside mainstream thought, but to me this seems just as intellectually dishonest as ascribing absolute certainty to any given conspiracy theory. - Isn't there a suspicious correlation between a surge in UFO sightings since the 1950s and a surge of UFO movies during that same period? - What about the Phoenix Lights event where thousands of people saw the same exact thing? - What are some other notable phenomena that people thought they observed that never were proven to have scientific validity (e.g. alchemy)? - How has your view of the future changed over the past 40 years? - Most surprising is that so many people are using the internet for watching cat videos instead of doing useful things. - Maybe cats are the aliens.

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 do glaciers form? - Is the orbit of the Earth constant around the Sun? Or is there a variation on a large time frame? - Could it explain the ice ages? - ​​Have you ever studied aerial photos of ocean waves to assess their evolution for irreducibility/pockets of reducibility? - Do you think ocean waves are computationally universal? ​What are neutrinos for? Why do they exist if they don't interact with anything? Could aliens have a purpose for them? - ​​Didn't some neutrinos cause hardware failure in airplanes? - ​If technology could produce a small practical neutrino emitter and detector, would it be useful to send messages with them? - Will holograms as seen in the Iron Man movie ever be available for widespread use? - Why do some foods, like peanuts and crustaceans, cause deadly allergic reactions in some people, while others can eat them daily without harm? How many species have allergies?  - Do we know the mechanism behind this "training"?

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: In science, when is it preferable to self-publish rather than go through academic journals? ​- What place do you see for competitive behavior (especially in respect to the paper/citation system) in science? - What do you think would be a good replacement for peer review? - Have you ever considered working in finance instead of physics? Many very smart people work for trading companies (such as RenTech/Jane Street) for a couple years. - I sometimes think we waste some of our brightest minds on "making money." Could we somehow "shift" the market demand for technology that highly favors intellectual advancement in ideas sufficiently so that these "analytically bright" people are interested in scientific progression? - How do you "decide" to direct your behavior when faced with aggression in tense meetings? - Is it possible for low-level employees to prove themselves by solving complex problems in an operation despite lacking the typical formal qualifications of education, but nevertheless being promoted? - ​​One of the best docs for technical computing comes from Wolfram. Is there any general philosophy in Wolfram on balancing technical and business-oriented documentation that generates leads? - ​What advice would you have for someone who wants to pursue some academic field that's a bit unorthodox—like, say, your kind of physics—as a graduate student? - What I've been told is to save that for when you become a tenured professor (if ever). ​Is there a way to contribute to science without a college degree? - ​​Humans were scientists for a long time before there were college degrees (let alone colleges).

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: ​​What does the concept of the ruliad say about teleportation? ​​​- So are we experiencing a single state of the universe, or are we sampling different branches to build our experience? ​​​- ​If the speed of light emerges from propagation through discrete emes, then does the speed of light vary slightly? Could this be experimentally validated? ​​​- I've listened to live neurons in a lab, amplified and made audible—very strange experience. - It would be the ultimate biofeedback experience to visually see one's own neuronal activations spatially. Engineering that might be tricky for a while. - Would there be, in theory, a way to measure your relative position in rulial space? - How do new concepts get created and integrated in the mind of humanity? What makes them robust over 1,000+ years?

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: How was it determined that light travels at a constant speed in a vacuum? - Could you speak about the history of the hard sphere model in statistical mechanics? In many textbooks, it is mentioned rather briefly for something so fundamental. - How did the study of nonlinear dynamics come about? I'd imagine it would be a known thing after Newton's work. - How important are complex numbers in the history of science and tech? Would the current state be possible without them? - Solving equations of that form led negative and complex numbers to be taken more seriously, but people did not see the utility of these types of numbers. A lot of facts that are true about real numbers are also true about complex numbers. They're not necessary to solve many problems, but they're convenient for packaging. - Have you ever seen CA-like objects produced by a Jacquard loom? - Just curious on your thoughts on technological singularity.

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 much does a cat's tail affect its ability to land on its feet? Do cats without tails tend to fall over frequently? - ​​​​​Could a planet have "internal" rotation of its molten core while having a stagnant outer surface, or perhaps a slowly rotating surface? - ​​​​What's the deal with the Dzhanibekov effect (the observation a cosmonaut had when a spinning bolt flipped in space)? ​​​- The head and the shaft are rotating in unison. The head has more inertia around the axis. Don't forget the bolt is in a standing pressurized chamber of air. - ​​​​Will the Earth eventually cool down enough to stop producing a geomagnetic field? - ​​​​​Tails seem to be vestigial for many organisms. 

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: Are periodic boom and bust cycles of the economy inevitable, or should we by now be capable of managing national economies better, simultaneously avoiding both recessions and excessive inflation? - What modes does Stephen Wolfram have? - What are the personality traits of Stephen Wolfram that have made him become an entrepreneur? - Have you ever questioned your competence? If you did, what did you do in that situation? - What methodology do you use when you have to solve a problem you don't know how to solve but that has to be solved fast? - How does Stephen stay organized, in general? And specifically, how does he organize and write his papers and books? - Are there specific questions/audits that you routinely run on your business, life or thought process to facilitate innovation? - Problem solving with other people requires understanding other people's psychology. How do you go about understanding how to influence others to be efficient at solving problems? - Good banter can enhance the conversation. - How do you deal with multiple smart people on your teams disagreeing with each other, e.g. team member A proposes doing f() while team member B proposes g()? - Did you know Paul Graham between 2002 (NKS) and 2005 (Y Combinator founded)? Was NKS implicitly/explicitly why he ran many different "programs" (startups) to see what happened empirically? - It's mind blowing how many of the important points in time of modern innovation Wolfram was in the room for.

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: ​​As the Wolfram Language grows, will the number of lines of code ever shrink? What could cause such a trend? - ​​​​Scientists are trying to elucidate the origins of life on Earth. The current focus is exploring the "RNA world." This occurred 4.5 billion years ago. Could there have been dimensional fluctuations back then? - ​​​Why are small children able to spin around so quickly without getting dizzy, while adults become nauseous? ​​​- Do we still need the appendix? Are there any parts in our body that we "evolved away"? - Is science getting harder? Are ideas getting harder to find? - Yes, the more we've learned, the more we've learned that there's a lot more to learn! - ​How ironic then, that Albert Einstein started his revolution in physics while working in a patent office! - One thing that interests me is predicting what the future will look like (Alan Turing predicted computers would be capable of playing chess 50 years from when he said that, and sure enough, by 1997 they were able to do so).