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: How common is 'atomic oxygen' in the universe? - if temperature and pressure both comes from gas molecules bouncing around with a certain momentum, why are the two different/what's the difference between the two? - ​How do I educate my children like your experience growing up in order to give them the potential for any STEM field? - If you were in your young twenties and just graduated college which field would you go into? AI/ML Programming - Aerospace Engineering - Blockchains/Crypto. - ​Is there a closest packing for Spikeys? What's the smallest & largest Spikey ever constructed or discovered? - ​Speaking on AI, do you think we will see AGI this century, if yes what is your best guess at to when? - ​So what's the deal with superfluids. Any useful purposes?

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's the physical limitation of growth speed of humans? Can you get from 10 kg to 90 kg in a month theoretically? - What is the function of the human heart? Is it best understood as a pump or in a different way? - Humans exposed to prolonged micro-gravity conditions suffer from well known health issues. Short of 1g gravity, do we know the minimum gravity required to prevent such issues e.g, 0.1g, 0.3g, 0.5g etc? - ​How can quantum computer solve the protein folding problem? - Is being able to get to the lowest energy state a statement that there is a "continuous" series of energy states that the molecule has, that the transformations from one state to another is "smooth" enough? That there is no energy state that is "isolated" from all others?

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 you familiar with Norbert Wiener's work? Is it relevant to current computer science at all? - Do you have any interesting stories/comments about Frederick P. Brooks? - What did you learn from The Mythical Man Month? (and when did you first read it?) - Dear Dr. Wolfram, what is your opinion on John Backus' lecture from 1977: "Can Programming be Liberated from the von Neumann Style?"? - Was it even one cornerstone for your thinking? - Did general system theory and systems theory die out and why? - Does functional programming count as liberation from von Neumann style? - Do you think scientific software development has a very different development practice? - Are you saying that flowchart descriptions of algorithms and computations originate from systems theory/general systems theory? I always thought that is just a part of modern computer science. - Regarding what you just mentioned about education and teaching programming, what are your thoughts generally on how far our higher level languages are abstracting more and more away from the core metal? Do you worry about future generations of programmers not understanding core fundamentals and that we might come become stunted in terms of coming up with new languages and computing paradigms due to a lack of expertise? - Were you ever involved in the development of a kind of software that you now think might actually be morally questionable in some sense?

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: Do you think will we get anti gravity cars? - How much memory does a rock have? Do protons or photons have memory? Do orbits have memory? - When is someone considered dead? How do we define the line between alive and dead? - How does a flock of sparrows know how to all change directions simultaneously? - Do you think its more important for humanity to look to colonize another planet or try to look after the earth and make it habitable for the future? - Can we push the jet streams?

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 plan and track your product roadmaps? How far in advance do you plan? - Do you decide to go to bed based on the time or once you finish a piece of work? Or do you like to leave pieces of work open to sleep on? - What impact is China's energy crisis going to have on manufacturing? Are you worried about inflation of the US dollar? How to not worry about larger Macroeconomic events and just focus on business? - How is your ERP replacement project going that was mentioned a year ago? - Has anyone built a computer yet that is good at programming other computers? - Do you agree a life unexamined is not worth living? - What would you like to see younger/newer programmers focusing on? Do you think that the computer science community is focusing too much on video games, dating apps, etc.? - To be creative, do I need to know how to change peoples beliefs? There are many people in this world with many creative ideas, though how probable is it that I am the one to proof a science like no other? - Do you think the current democracies are the apex of history, or better systems to organize societies has to come? - ​Hi Mr. Wolfram, maybe this is too personal but have you ever experience anxiety or any other of mental health problems, in relation with managing a business and your time? thanks - Why should one start a startup when computer scientist are super paid in already existing companies? - Is this why Professor Feynman insisted on explaining to Plant Workers about neutrons? - I just graduated college in Business Management, but fell in love with mathematics and computer science within my senior year. Is it foolish to go back and get another undergraduate degree?

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 a short wave radio signal go completely around the world? - Will new logic or mathematics operators might be invented/discovered? - Why do we have 2 different things such as (numbers + operators , data + algorithms) and why do we represent many things with those 2 things? Why not 3? Why not 4? Why not 1? - What's the difference between CPUs, GPUs, TPUs, ASICs? - How viable is a big numerical reverse database to identify closed forms of real numbers such Plouffe's inverter?

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 sort of math was ancient India up to? - How were modern shipping containers standardized? What are some of the advantages of optimal standardized packaging? - Are there any developments in replacing or improving workflow for math papers, that is mostly writing in latex and reading pdf if I am not mistaken? What is current trend? - How can we ensure the software generating the proof is correct?

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 What's the best way to build a personal dashboard (e.g. like your swhome.wolfram.com)? - You proudly say, you have 3 children, Elon Musk has 7. What is your opinion on the number of kids? - Have you and Peter Thiel ever crossed paths or interacted? You seem to be the 'poster child' for a lot of his public ideologies and convictions, but some of your core ideas kinda challenge his- I'd like to know what Stephen thinks of the Seasteading institute too -  Do you think it's okay to edit DNA of your potential kid for better? - Would you consider yourself a risk taker or risk averse? - What's that red book on your bookshelf? Third book in from the pillar (all red next to black book near middle pillar) - Is messaging authors a good way to learn background information? - Have you ever thought about going on the Joe Rogan Experience Podcast? Your podcasts with Lex Fridman were great. Were those podcasts also helpful to you in some way?

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 do mathematicians create models if machine learning can create more complex and better models? - Hello, can you create gold from lead by having some lead next to a big pile of plutonium? - How proportionate is public opinion of a person to actual achievement of that person generally? - ​How would one go build an UFO? What technology do we need for that? What mathematical achievements/solutions do we need?

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 much of your work on cellular automata was influenced by Ulam's work during the Manhattan Project? - ​How do you approach studying the history of technology to inform your work on current projects? Do you do very targeted studies when starting a project? How much historical context is enough? - ​Is there a list of Wolfram recommended history of science and technology books? - What was it about ancient Greece that allowed for great advancements in math and science and great thinkers? - Could you talk about the history on Ed Fredkin's work and if its similar to your work about Cellular Automata? - In 2001: A Space Odyssey, the alien monolith is a Von Neumann probe. Is it rectangular because of the cellular automata inspiration? - ​What is the book top right with the horse's head? Just curious! - What do you think is the significance of the antikythera mechanism? How close do you think the Greeks were to a technological civilization? - Have you read Asimov's Foundation? Do you think psychohistory could actually be an actual science with real predictive power? Does it need to find pockets of computational reducibility - ​You said the cellular automata experiments you did in the 80s could have been done in Los Alamos, why do you think those weren't done then?