The Stephen Wolfram Podcast

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: I am interested in the evolution of mechanics from Newton through d'Alembert to Lagrange. Could you elaborate on this? Why was it the Europeans that created the modern mathematical framework and not the Chinese? They obviously had a head start. Why don't we use Chinese characters instead use the Latin alphabet? Pascal's Triangle was known in China before Europe—Sounds a little bit like computer graphics programming competitions in the early 90s (was quite popular in Scandinavia). Math competitions in logic might have been a similar thing—for example in Poland, but who knows. There's an obvious problem with peer reviewed academic research. Is there anything in the way science was developed in the past that we can learn from? Were we better at peer reviewing science?

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

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: Are research papers useful? How should I write them and when? - What do you think of research in engineering. Isn't it better to work in a company that specializes in a certain filed and knows it in and out and come up with something revolutionary instead of working at a university where everything is rather theoretical? - About 20 years ago I heard about holographic storage, what happened with this kind of technology that it didn't went forward? - Why do DVDs need to spin these days? Why not just scan top to bottom directly into memory? scanning optics aren't good enough for that? - How does DVD RW work? never understood that one - ​Follow up question to storing information, is there at present optical end to end computers "not storage" but work memory and the processing unit optical? And would it be easier or harder to have a multi-valued optical computer "not binary" then the electronic?computer "not binary" then the electronic?

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

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 incentivize teams working on subcomponents of larger systems that don't directly impact p&l. - Are you optimistic about the economic future, medium, long term? - Do you think computers will ever be able to become more efficient allocators than free markets? - How would you go about mapping the EdTech industry? I know people building products, doing private equity deals, doing consulting, and teachers using products. Nobody knows what's out there! - Do you think a UBI based economy is coming soon? What are you thoughts about UBI? - How would the bot even evaluate value of the labor? seems super complicated -Why was bell labs so successful? Do you think it can be copied? - I've always wanted to know how to start an R&D lab with only starting out with ideas. For example, Xprize has a carbon capture prize. Looking at a whale's baleen. How feasible is it to have "baleen" filters on container ships that filter carbon from the oceans as the ship moves throughout the ocean. when the ships dock. filters can be swapped out and the carbon can be collected and turned into building materials or "goop" for 3d printers. just a quick thought. - Based on your experience leading a largely remote organization, how do you track and reward the value that team members contribute? - should have smashed 80% of the awards to increase the value of the 20% - How has your company evolved, relative to your expectations when you started it? And, how successful is it in achieving your goals, say out of 10? - Any thoughts on team building / a group becoming a team? - Have you had any failures after your PhD? - If we compare the UK to the US, why does the latter seem much better than the former in terms of developing business ideas from academia to industry? - Maybe time to reflect and present useful things to people, that they're not using after years&years and maybe not let them wait another 20years. - Your record keeping seems incredibly robust. Has that always been the case? What inspired its structure?

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

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: If there's a way to create climate change, that must mean there's a way to reverse it? - Feel like the greenhouse effect was based of Venus's greenhouse effect. - Carbon capture research is all the focus, Isn't this just kicking the can down the road? The carbon is stored but not converted so what is the real benefit? -  Is climate change necessarily bad? As in, what equilibrium we may reach after the instability has stabilized, would that new equilibrium necessarily be worse than the one we have enjoyed for a while? - But if we do that, do we really understand the effect well enough?I I mean you don't know if more plankton is good for carbon dioxide situation, but maybe it may make something worse too -  Think how lucky human beings are - Do you think there are life forms out there where their spectrum of visible light is totally different than ours? - Do you think there's a plateau we must break through for space exploration to be more feasible, or is our progress as is good enough? - Dr. Wolfram, thank you for your time! "Sustainable" energy is a major issue these days, but I'm skeptical that renewables like solar and wind can meet growing demand. What are your thoughts on fission and gen IV reactor technology? - We could study moon rocks in greater detail, and then after that, we can do it again.

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

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: Stephen begins the stream - Hi Stephen. Is there some particular scientific discovery that was "forgotten" and later rediscovered by someone else, whose importance you would have liked to be recognized the first time? - How did theory of computational complexity emerge and is there research in that field that you find particularly promising? -  Has the Voynich manuscript ever been decoded? -  Does a proof not exist to show that NP cannot be done in P, is that the way to solve the P vs NP problem assuming if P is a subset of NP? - Could a computer randomly generate and test all algorithms from a hypergraph of all possible parse tree branches of the axioms similar to the physics project? - Have you done any work with VR? - A cool VR website would a digital Louvre where you enter and walk around looking at NFTs (for those into NFTs) and other type of exhibits

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