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: Why does an electron fall or lower orbit to its "normal" state after having being in an exited state - ​What does infinite amount of integers and decimals between two integers tell about the nature of the world? -  What is a time Crystal? - What is your opinion on the technological and economic feasibility of asteroid mining? - How does sophisticated philosophy relate to sophisticated math, in the thinking processes underlying them and the intellectual firepower in effect? - How did your mother and father encourage your own pursuits in science? -  ​If knowing absolutely nothing is represented with 0 and knowing everything is represented with 1, where do you think human race is at this moment and what are its limits of knowledge? - What could knowing the machine code of the universe unlock in technology?

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: wolfr.am/youtube-sw-business-qa Questions  include: Does Stephen have a dog? - Josh have any startups that he  thinks could be billion dollar unicorns? If so, what are they doing or  what industries are they in? - Do you think that innovation process is  different based on the societal value? If so, how can developing society  can navigate this process of innovation? - What are some guiding  principles in your lives?

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 there a reason why math has an order of operations, or is it just "because we decided on that"? - What does a day in the life of a scientist look like? - ​What is your opinion about reproducible research? - Stephen, I loved your conversation with Greg Chaitin!!! You made questions that reminded me to the questions that we ask you. Please make some podcast episodes where you have guests to whom you ask questions! - ​Will teleportation ever be possible, even if only for, say, a photon stream? If so could a probe sent into a black hole be able to transmit back images across the event horizon using this technique?

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?