The Stephen Wolfram Podcast

Stephen Wolfram plays the role of Salonnière in an on-going series of intellectual explorations with special guests. In this episode, Bob Metcalfe joins Stephen at the 20th annual Wolfram Summer School. Watch all of the conversations here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-conversations

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: Is programming essential for the next breakthrough in neuroscience, both theoretical and practical? if yes, how, and is Wolfram language enough fulfill that purpose? - Any opinions on 'smart drugs'? - Is the Crick-Mitchison theory of REM sleep essential for understanding how mammalian brains work? - Can you comment on the history of plant breeding and computation? Or agricultural as a technology? It seems that old plant breeders think new molecular breeding techniques are a waste of time & money. 'Modern' breeders are using genomic selection with SNPs and gBLUP models... the history of most of our crops is very complicated usually involving strange hybrids. - Will the future bring surveillance and all-knowing government or deep fakes and other things that could be used to fake identity both physical and digital in order to get rid of government presence?

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: Can you tell about the history of the computer until the creation of Apple 2? - ​What is the fine structure constant, and why was Dirac so interested in it? - Can you recall any "what could have been" moments in the development of computers that could have taken off had the right decisions/factors occurred? - What do you think would happen if Archimedes discovered calculus in 200 BC? Thank you for sharing your amazing knowledge. - Do you agree with the people that physics and science has made minimal progress in last 25 years, compared to before? - Did you ever meet Howard Georgi and Sheldon Glashow? - Did you and John Conway get along? Do you have any stories about him?

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 good came out of the pandemic from a business or recruiting point of view? - Can you talk more about what Sergey did when he interned for you? His resume reads, "I developed a code analysis and extraction tool for the Mathematica source code." -  Is there a general rule for deciding when to outsource some aspects of my startup? Especially if it's on a low budget. -  How do you organize your day's activities? Do you like to work from a daily to do list, work towards weekly goals, just get in "the zone" and see what you can do during a day? - Is it more important to be of value or to have a valuable network of connections? -  You sequence your genome, but did you do a 23andme (or ancestry or other) test to find relatives? - Do you fast? Or do any other modern longevity practices? -  I noticed this year has been the year with the least number of days of being sick... quarantine and masks? - How many hours of straight work will you do on a single project in a week and on an average day? - Given a set of interesting ideas that require big efforts to be developed, how do you prioritize which one to pursue? - How did/would you balance ambitious technology projects with dating? -  I have a business question: what's the practical difference between "Wolfram Desktop" and Mathematica? If the difference is negligible, the business facet of the question is, how are you dealing with the branding confusion here? Is "Mathematica" the legacy name, and "Wolfram" the name going forward? -  On managing life: How does your family get along with your long working hours? Do they get enough of you? Do they feel you spend enough time with them? -  What do you do when you get discouraged? Go for a walk? Take a day off? Work harder? (And what causes you discouragement?)

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: Is doing science something intrinsic to the human species, so that if humanity were to be restarted, science would emerge afresh? - Can Wolfram talk about pseudo linear congruential random number generators? -  Stephen, do you think that we as parents should control how much time our kids spent on computers and smartphones? -  ​Is it possible to have "many internets" - internet outside of this current internet? - Will nations be able enforce firewall if someone is connecting to Starlink? - what's your vision for the future and how do your current students fit into that vision?

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?