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: Did you have any fun April Fools' Day occurrences this year? - What is the best April Fools' joke you've been a part of or experienced? - Do you enjoy traveling? Is there anywhere you haven't been yet that you've always wanted to visit? Good food is an added benefit also. - Travel tip: I always have a big snack hidden in my bag, just in case. - There is nothing wrong with chocolate (no matter what the truth is). - These days, people don't remember portable computers being 10+ pounds. I'm curious: did you ever own an old Toshiba? - This is what I feel we are on the cusp of. Less rigid paradigms like general media consumption have ballooned (look at Twitch). - I hope to see the day that unknown citizen scientists can democratically do research with thousands of others, and get compensated for that research. - Absolutely. I can only feel like academia is on its way out, and more sophisticated platforms will emerge for collaboration.

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 was it possible for civilizations across the world to develop pyramids independently (Egypt and Mayans/Aztecs)? Is there any scientific significance to this? - Does the double-helix shape in DNA show up anywhere else in nature? ​- Are there any examples of logical gates being built out of chemical reactions? What breakthroughs are needed to achieve this? - How many gates are needed for a programming language like C? - Is it necessary to have supercomputers to do meaningful biomolecule-level simulations? - What life forms have arbitrary differences between individuals and what life forms have meaningfully "unique" individuals? - Are Darwin's survival of the fittest, evolution and machine learning all basically the same thing? If not, how do they differ? ​- Can you please say something about the formation of buckyballs? - How are gemstones formed and how can we model all gem features? Colors, textures, asterism, anisotropy, everything? What do you know? - In quartz, I also notice imperfections like streaks; seems to be the molecular analog to cellular automata.

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 have a sense of the skills that an incoming fellow to the Wolfram Institute will have? What would effective preparation for institute-type work be? ​- What is the Emerald functionality that was mentioned for biological/cellular computational explorations? ​​- And what about around the world, overseas and in other countries? - You get some wonderful things out of pursuing science just for the sake of it. There are pejorative terms for this, like "fishing trips" and "stamp collecting," but such pursuits led to PCR technology just because someone was curious about thermophile bacteria. - ​Activity overseas and in other countries in regards to outreach programs in cooperation with education systems... you were mentioning some campaigns you had going on. ​- Will there be more active development on the computational capabilities of Wolfram Mathematica with the Wolfram Institute? ​- British physics is more geometry guild, and American physics is more group theory and particle physics guild. ​- What is your opinion about experimental mathematics and its relationship with classical "mainstream" mathematics? ​​​- I often hear that science needs philosophy to justify it. What are some historical examples of this? - ​​I think in a lot of places in history, the role of academic pursuit was that of a philosopher's role, but academic pursuit has attained a large amount of "division of labor." ​​- Philosophy and mathematical logic are starting to overlap more. Tarski's semantics relates formal logic to topology just like math and computer languages. ​​- Are there inherently philosophical ideas (i.e. that cannot be turned into a scientific one like the question of motion)? Can we distinguish them outright without knowing future scientific development?

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: Thoughts on longevity research and its feasibility? Does computational irreducibility have practical implications for the difficulty of solving this complex biological problem? Also, do you ever get sad about the shortness of the current human lifespan causing us to miss out on the (potentially unimaginable) future opportunities for understanding the universe?  - Do you think a multi-computational approach to medicine will detect disease first by observing visual systems or chemical systems or otherwise? - ​Is this discussion of mortality curves related to the survivorship function? - ​Would there be any justification for pursuing eternal life for humans, if feasible? - Aging might be the condition that makes the most sense to study economically, in terms of the money spent by health systems on related problems overall. - According to Michael Graziano, immortality will be achieved by uploading human consciousness into computers. - The discussion today reminded me of this post I saw where it asked if you could live for 150 years but you had to upload your brain to the metaverse and give up your real body, would you? - Would you upload your brain? - Yes, but uploading a copy of your brain into a computer means there are two of you, and computational irreducibility means that the two are different from each other! -  Is bureaucratic inefficiency analogous to aging in biological systems? That the system over time grinds to a halt and dies due to build up of systematic inefficiencies? Can we apply life extension to institutions?

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 happened with the computer during WWII? ​​- The ​Imitation Game is a great movie about computers in World War 2. - ​​How important are Nobel Prizes? Are there any scandalous omissions? ​​- It is taxable income. - ​​Some of the physics prizes have been a bit random. - Penzias and Wilson more or less accidentally discovered the CMB, but Gamov predicted it and got nothing (I think). -​​ Thank you for encouraging our curiosity. My question is: When and why did apprenticeships end? It seems all the greats, such as Benjamin Franklin, were sent to be apprentices. ​​- What happened to the interdisciplinary science of the Renaissance? - Do the efficiency gains of specialization outweigh the harms of institutional departmentalization? - ​​Are crazy ideas useful to talk about, or are they only good for guiding intuition in research?

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: So do we live in a simulation or not? - So how do we perceive change? Why is motion possible? Why do we perceive that we can make "choices"? What does it mean to make a choice? - But every observer observes the same dimensionless constants (like the fine-structure constant), we don't have any choice about that observation. Or is 1/137 something that lies on an observable manifold of the ruliad? ​​- What if the beautiful images of stars and galaxies really are a molecule in another universe and time is very, very slow in that universe from our view? - ​I always thought, what if we are like bacteria living on a bit of sand on the bottom of an alien's shoe while he rides an elevator, and what happens when the elevator stops? - ​​Moving at the speed of thought, is there a max on how fast we can think?

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: If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be? Any business/scientific reason why that place? - University vs. experience in programming and computer science: which one is more valuable? - How do you manage technical debt? - What advantages come from using Wolfram Language as in-house code? - How do you manage technical debt in Java codebases? - Good afternoon, Dr. Wolfram. How do you cope with the stress of releasing new products? As it is very hard to judge the success beforehand, do you have any techniques to reduce that stress? - If you were never allowed to use Wolfram Language, what would you use? - Do you find that innovation is largely driven from within, or is it largely external (e.g. your users push you for more features)? - How does Stephen see the current co-creation space and how can we bring the benefits to smaller businesses with smaller budgets? - What is the best way to fund a research project? - Would you always have to artificially describe some midterm future application of your research to sell a business plan to some investors?

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 is the history of "infinity" in mathematics, or in science in general? - I would like to see a differentiation between eternity and infinity. ​- Can you talk about the history of the "elementary length"? What have people believed to be the smallest possible length, and what events have changed this belief? - If space is discrete, does this mean that the fundamental constants are rational numbers? If the fundamental constants were real numbers, couldn't you encode arbitrary amounts of information into your theory, hiding the complexity in these constants? - ​​At what stage in history did the idea of extraterrestrial alien life start to be entertained? Is this a relatively recent phenomenon, or was it a thing even in ancient Greek philosophy? - When did we first realize that we only see the same side of the Moon?​ - What belief systems/groups of people have historically believed in a fundamentally discrete universe? ​- Why do you think the distribution of new discoveries is so random? See, for example, Nassim Taleb's example of 6,000 years between the wheel and wheels on a suitcase, for example.

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"?

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 Excerpt from livestream episode Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and others) [Part 117], Stephen Wolfram answers: How does ChatGPT work?