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: What do you think about civilization going to Mars? - Why do the planets orbit in the same plane? - Are Phobos and Diemos also on the same plane? Considering they're asteroids that were grabbed by Mars and now orbit Mars - What makes a planet a planet? -  Why do most planets, stars and galaxies seem to spin the same way? - What did NASA do to avoid astronauts getting great amounts of cosmic rays? - How exactly do you detect Muons? I'm going to be taking a class next year that has a big fun project at the end of the semester that includes potentially making something that detects Muons - Why is water a good radiation shield if it has low atomic numbers inside? - Why does an iron core result in a super nova? - How do nuclear blasts affect computers?

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: Hi Stephen, Why does the universe exist? In a recent interview you said that you have been considering this over the past month - When was the last time you weren't the smartest person in the room? - If all knowledge about physics was be lost, which theory would be most difficult to rediscover in your opinion and why? - Wolfram alpha uses a curated knowledge graph? rather than some Wikipedia crowdsourced approach, you had a bunch of people in an office authoring a lot of data for it? or does it draw from other databases? - Kids and teenagers are less and less interested by mathematics, what do you think is the reason of this? How would you change 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: ​How was DNA discovered? The history behind its discovery? - ​Is there a history of musical digital instruments? Like the synth seems to me the beginning of exploration of "computational music". Maybe electronic music should be called that way.... - can you build a cellular automata for each sound font? how does one construct the CA in general to map onto functions like sine or wave forms? - Is science slowly becoming a meme, considering how strongly supported the theory has been of natural origin of COVID-19 by the so-called scientific community? It appears, a scientist's opinion is more and more becoming a product. -  Question: There was, and seem to be still today, a very discriminating and political approach in the world of science when someone tried to present another or different ways of approaching something. What are your thoughts on how we can improve those "strict/closed" science groups to support a broader and more "open minded" philosophy? - Did summer school and incubator programs exist hundreds of years ago? - Do you think the relationship between the scientific community and media/business/government is fundamentally different today or pretty close to what we've seen in the (typical ebb & flow) past many decades/century?

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 can I experiment with multi-way hyper-graphs in areas other than physics as a hobbyist computational explorer? I am interested in information science but have not taken computer science yet. - How can one convince the scientific community they have inadvertently accepted a false result, when the bug is subtle? - Can a virus mutate and replicate again and again in your own body while the immune system is fighting it? And every time the immune system figures out one form of it and kills it, there is already a new form replicating? A viral cat & mouse game, so to speak.. - Do you think that there could be some low-hanging fruit to be collected in biology? I feel like all the smartest people chose to study physics or math and I wonder if more should go into biology - What techniques do you use to memorize information when studying in such broad fields? Thank You! - Do you have any opinions to why "Mars One" failed? They went bankrupt in - Mars One had a massive recruitment drive since 2012'ish for people to go and colonize to Mars by 2023. - ​How do we know that gravity is not a "pushing force" instead of a pulling force? Do we for certain know that "dark matter" is not caused by shielding of this pushing force; "Dark matter" being an artifact in this case and not a real thing* - If time stops in a black hole, does that mean all matter in the black hole stops aging? - Why do we need to super-cool materials (for superconductors or quantum systems); why can't we drive them mechanically at set frequency, so "cool" them preferentially in one direction? - What is the difference between science and technology and how do they complement each other?

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about business and innovation as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-business-qa Questions include How do you maintain the work-life balance? How do you decide what is more important the meeting or the gym training? - Could you list all of apps and big app projects u ever made? With brief descriptions - How do you decide your employees' compensation? - Why were you a physics prodigy? Did you just fall in love with the subject? Did someone encourage you? - How can venture capitalists identify the most talented young entrepreneurs? - ​What do you recommend for obtaining funding for your new business? - How to gain internal confidence and believe that what you do is right? - Does Wolfram handle its own cybersecurity or use third party MSP? - I have many questions. Do you automate testing? Do you group clients? How? Do you test UX? How? How would you connect CRM to the model of everything? - What is better kanban or scrum? - How do you work with executives when your job relies on long term thinking and investing (ex. cybersecurity) - Would have a question for Mr. Wolfram, how did you overcome the hurdles of being a solo founder - Another cybersecurity question: how do you address the risk of supply chain attacks since your language is used by other companies? - This is probably an undetermined question, but a friend of mine is starting a company in the healthcare software space and he wants me to leave my PhD program and help him co-found the company. What are the criteria that you would use to judge (the company idea, the grad school, and others) to evaluate this decision?

Stephen Wolfram answers general questions from his viewers about science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series. See the full Q&A video playlist: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa Questions include: Can you define "scientific method" ? - What is a double blind randomized control trial? - what caused the split between the evolutionary paths of plant life and animal life? - Why haven't any animals evolved to be the same size as large dinosaurs? For example, the T-Rex and Brontosaurus were massive creatures. - I'm only 12 but how do you deal with detractors, I hear some things about you, it does sound like jealousy if I'm honest, but regardless, how do you continue on your path and disregard the critics?

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 appeared first in math, complex numbers or vectors? What is the relation between them? Would the square root of negatives be a problem if equations were developed with vectors instead of regular numbers? - ​Hi Wolfram. Can you tell a bit about the history of Real Variables, the Rational Numbers and why analysis was so important. Why not stick to integers. Why Cantor and Dedekind was so important. Thanks - What's the largest number you've ever used in a computation? Have you used anything bigger than Graham's number or Rayo's number? - moving from roman numerals to the numbers we use today helped merchants in those days, right? I believe that's what I read. - Was Tau used befor Pi? - ​Did Feynman overestimate Fredkin? Have the string theorists underestimated Fredkin? - ​Did you work much with Murray Gell-Mann? Any shareable stories? -What is your opinion on the resurgence of UFO's?

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 is dark matter? - What is the "fabric" of space-time? What gives rise to it? What is it made of? - Is there something smaller than quarks? - How do black holes appear? Going continuously from 0 topological holes to 1. - Is there a computational system similar to quarks? - In WPP, could something, say a black hole, leave a wake/churn in the atoms of space in it's past light cone? Perhaps there is something lingering that's detectable.  Is the structure a mystery? And if we knew what electrons were made of, would we be able to duplicate objects? - Is it really possible to get something from literally nothing? - It is often said that "nothing can escape black holes, not even light". Can gravitational waves escape black holes? If you manage to send two orbiting black holes that are about to merge into a larger black hole, will the gravitational waves still be produced? Does the Theory of Physics of yours have anything to say about that? - How could we be reliable judges of what is metaphysically possible, rather than what seems possible to us given our current evidence (epistemic possibility)? How could we get evidence about which formal systems are metaphysically possible to be realized? -  ​Implications of "hypercomputation" being a possibility and hence existing? -  What was the last 'crazy' or 'unrealistic but interesting' thought with regard to science or your thoughts about reality, a speculation that isn't based in any research but is an intuition? -  If a piece of space breaks off, does it just "float around" in the universe? If so, does gravity increase where that piece passes? -  ​If a piece of universe detaches from our universe in a supercritical black hole, is that universe contained in such a black hole still subject to hashing radiation?   Was the Universe created from an explosion from a super super super super super... black hole? -  Re the close-to-critical black holes. What would you see the 'handful of threads' that connect it to our universe against? In an actual microscope, you see a structure against black background. what's the background here? -  Could black holes be a pinch in space where it goes inside out? If a black hole rotates with that critical speed could it expose hypercomputation? -  Are there any plans to somehow incorporate any formal method tooling?

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 happens if you fall into the ocean from a great height? From what I have read, it's like hitting concrete. Can you explain the science behind this? - ​Dr. Wolfram, can you explain the origin of white trail from jets at high altitude. Thank you. - If we rubbed mineral oil/baby oil on us would we move faster in the water? -  How long would we survive if the earth left the suns orbit going away from the sun? - Could everything that gets sucked into all black holes everywhere in the universe go to the same place? - Do black holes rotate? Can they distort the time-space around them? - What is the reason for the distribution of matter and antimatter throughout the universe, why is there much less antimatter?

In this episode of "What We've Learned from NKS", Stephen Wolfram is counting down to the 20th anniversary of A New Kind of Science with a chapter retrospective in an ongoing livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/12aAqLklA