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 do you think there is matter at all? - How does friction affect the motion of an object? - On the topic of physics, what is the relationship between force, mass and acceleration? - Can you explain the difference between static and kinetic friction in the context of Newton's laws? - How do Newton's laws of motion apply to objects moving in circular motion? - How would you structure a discussion on the introduction of physics?

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 often do separate ideas emerge (like convergent evolution) and merge to either compliment each other or "make whole" ideas that didn't have all the answers themselves? - What surprises you most about the history of science and technology? What is there to learn? - What's the history of timekeeping? - How did civilizations create the calendar and clocks? What science supports this? - How would you keep track of time/sync up your devices? Today it's easy with electronic devices. I'm imagining my microwave and stove clock always being a minute or two out of sync from manually setting it. - How did you get to know so much, and in such depth, about such vastly disparate historical topics? Seems this could be fascinating to hear about in and of itself. - Makes me think that maybe blockchains are the evolution of agreed-upon ledgers in one single agreed-upon time. - Do you think the Fourier transform is fundamental to nature? - Historically, it appears in quantum field theory, quantum computing, signal processing, etc. - When did time become an important variable in science?​ - Why do you suppose no one tried to continue with Nikola Tesla's incomplete inventions?​ - As a software engineer, I discover elegant academic programming languages all the time, but they never seem to gain much traction in industry. On the other hand, we have languages like JavaScript, which was pretty much developed as a prototype but is now ubiquitous in web development. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on this history of "organic" development of programming languages. - Are there any pros to using "historical" technology, or is newer always better?

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the future 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 scientific breakthroughs would you like to see in 2024? - Whatever happened to graphene? Is it still a viable product of future technologies? - Could we build "bio-vehicles," e.g. instead of batteries, use synthetic adipose tissue, which is ~50–100 times more mass efficient per kWh? (Is there a future in bio-batteries?) - Based on the level of computational advances this last decade, with the trend only showing even more of the same, do you think that traditional engineering disciplines will be relegated to OpenLLM? - Do you think we'll see mass-producible, room-temperature superconductors in the next decade? - ​It has been suggested that AI will displace coders/programmers. Do you think AI might also replace many physical and chemical experiments? - Any thoughts on "zero-knowledge proofs," i.e. the ability to make proofs without revealing details? - Given that some of our greatest accomplishments as a species have happened when we mimic nature, how important do you think biomimetics will be going forward? - Can you see a time when the discovery of new mathematical theorems and axioms will be generated from AIs? - When Betelgeuse explodes, will humans be okay? - Do you think smart textiles/computing fabrics will take off or be viable? Would you wear, say, a sweater to hear instead of a hearing aid? - But things like math, geometry and especially tessellation have patterns that are universally implicit and can be interpreted as interesting by their own existence, and not just by the view of humanity. - Is there a way we can use Brownian motion at a molecular scale as a type of fingerprint for nano-sensors to create things that are piracy-proof? - Why are the axioms of mathematics necessarily the ones that are effective at describing things we see as well? - What do things like dreams and "higher states of consciousness" spoken about in Eastern philosophies tell us about ourselves as observers? - Would it be easy to have an AI remaster old movies, both real ones and cartoons, so we can watch all the old gems in high-end graphics? - "Interesting" is defined by a "coolness" threshold. - Since the scientific paradigm was a major cause for the Enlightenment, can we expect the (multi-)computational paradigm to kick off a socio-philosophical paradigm of comparable importance? - If someone invented calculus in the Stone Age, it would probably have not been used for anything... Do you think there are some ideas that may be "rediscovered" because they have a better use?

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 have been some of the most fascinating questions you have answered? Are there still topics to explore? - What do you see as the biggest opportunities and challenges facing businesses in your industry in the next five years? - What is the best approach to develop sound computational thinking? Are there really good books or courses? - Are there fields you know have depth but don't interest you at all? I'm a person who gets easily distracted—a jack of all trades, but master of none. I envy people who dedicate their focus on a specific field to become an expert, but I fail to do so myself. As I'm getting older, I still dabble and try to find "my thing." Do you reckon there's an approach that could help me to get more focused on a single field without that initial spark? - How do you keep track of what you want to learn? - How do you manage your time effectively so you dedicate ample time to each of the things you want to learn? - Do you have some activity to calm your brain (perhaps after a long day of concentrating), i.e. to wind down, before you go to sleep? - Learn to surf, then wait for the right wave: what was the wave you would say you caught that kicked off your career? - How has publishing as a singular author on innovative ideas changed your life trajectory? Do you feel like institutional authority was important for you to be heard, or was it truly the merit of your work? - Have you ever thought about leaving the software world and producing hardware? - ​Is it feasible for an individual to start a software company from scratch today the way you developed SMP into a viable, complete product? - Are there other types of technology or software you would like to experiment with for future endeavors? - I am a very big user of the Wolfram Cloud on mobile when I am out and about. I would love for the iOS version to be given more love. - ​​Would you say that the accessibility of education on the internet is making universities obsolete? - I work in logistics and we're FAR away from using AI. We actually took a step backward recently with an internal software solution that does not work for specific customers at all. I do have ideas, but I have to open tickets that are never resolved. I know for sure my ideas can be built into the system. I'm about to give up or write a better system (kidding). How would you approach a huge business about this? - How do we encourage more people to study the difficult mathematics behind machine learning and robot process automation, especially when they're younger and more neuroplastic, so that many of the most groundbreaking developments are accessible to a greater contingent of global society?

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 we know enough neurobiology to assert that the human brain works differently from a machine learning or artificial intelligence model? - How would you begin an introduction to chemistry course? - How are chemical reactions balanced, and why is it important to balance chemical equations? - Is it right to still use the periodic table today, or is it an order of the past? - Is there research on computing outside of the classical (binary) and "quantum" states of electrons, for example biology-, chemical- or light-based data storage and processing? - Molecules are graphs. - The system of balancing molecules and equations is just a new variation of "this" equals "that." - What strategies and techniques can be employed to effectively control and optimize chemical reactions for various practical applications, including maximizing yield, minimizing waste and achieving desired products? - Molecular-level mechanisms govern the magnetic properties of materials. How do these mechanisms lead to phenomena like ferromagnetism, paramagnetism and diamagnetism? What about radioactive substance reactions?

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the future 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 will "prompt engineering" be like if LLMs are super-intelligent? - ​​Maybe language is stopping us to get some ideas because we cannot formulate the idea in our known languages? - ​​Elon yesterday on X was saying how most of our memory is digital now and same will happen with concepts, just stored on some device. - Seems like, for creatures like cuttlefish or octopus where they have the ability to change the shape texture and color of their skin, they must have something "different" going on in their brains, where they are not just capable of perceiving shape color and texture of the outside world, but also the ability to physically "mimicking" it.... Just a thought. - In the future the Earth would probably be a big brain. If every connected computer on the internet was running neuron-computations... - What if we need to deal with concepts that need more neural mass that we possess? - ​What do you think of the plans to shoot feature films in space? - What impact will the Internet of Things (IoT) and 5G technology have on our daily lives, from smart cities to autonomous vehicles? - ​​Someone should start a tourist livestream channel. - Do you think in the future humans could interact with AIs via a visualization of latent space to create new concepts? - Missing the ability to try the food, a major reason to actually go somewhere. Do you think there'd be a way to "taste" via computation? - Thank you for these livestreams. Dr Wolfram mentioned on the stream Wednesday his work on developing a course on computation thinking. I wonder if he could comment on how that is going? - When is AI going to travel the galaxy on its own and create its own habitat on a different planet? - Have you ever had figgy pudding? If so, how would you describe it?

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 handle the pressure of deadlines? Is it better to turn in something rushed/unfinished or complete it fully with the risk of being late? - We are creatures of motion, not stagnation? Not just physically, but also in relation to careers/life events? ​​Parkinson's Law is the adage that work will expand to fill the time allotted for its completion. - ​​Can you discuss working with many people vs. working as a "hermit"? - Did you get lonely during the NKS days, during other periods of your life, etc.? - I learned recently that Ramanujan in his local town in India was discouraged from going to Cambridge because crossing the ocean was interpreted as leaving one's identity behind. How to manage? - I would love to hear your thoughts on making big changes in your life and how you approach them. Are there techniques that you've come to rely on to guide you in life? - Is there value to stimulating and inspiring people other than oneself, in spite of the delays in your personal research endeavors? - When is 14 coming out? - Any upcoming holiday plans? - How do holidays generally affect work life? - How do you manage working for a global company? - What advice do you have with scheduling around time zones and such? - What would be Stephen's 2023 Year in Review? - Not to forget observer theory! Encourage everyone to read the essay. - ​​Will there be a German translation on the second thermodynamics law book?

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: ​Can you tell us some not-widely-known insights about prime numbers? Are the distances between twin primes now quite well known, though? - What does the factoring learned in an Algebra 2 class actually do in a real-life situation? - ​​Assuming one-way functions don't exist, could the uncertainty given by a multiway function be able to save cryptography? - ​​How can we prove this randomness on a big scale? - ​​Could there be an inverse of the law of entropy increase? Something like under certain conditions, structural organization always increases? Which maybe gives rise to something like bioevolution? - Is there really an infinite amount of primes?

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 talk about the history of gazettes, i.e. the recording of "official" information? - Why are some older coins or bills worth more than their original face value? - ​How does Galileo's equivalence principle relate to Einstein's equivalence principle? - ​Important work from bright minds gets shelved, and then we discover the work decades later and put it to use. Have you thought of ways to reduce this happening so much? - Could you elucidate the historiographical development of string theory, assess whether its inception was exclusively within the mathematical domain, and determine if it has yielded any tangible technological advancements? - Some old things are worth more due to nostalgia. Eventually, they will lose their value again. - What is the history behind observer theory?

Stephen reads a recent blog from https://writings.stephenwolfram.com and then answers questions live from his viewers. Read the blog along with Stephen: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2024/05/why-does-biological-evolution-work-a-minimal-model-for-biological-evolution-and-other-adaptive-processes/ Watch the original livestream on YouTube: https://youtu.be/T7h1jfw0oFk

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 manage conducting deep/long-term innovation with short-term commercial and funding necessities to keep the lights on? - How well would you say your current understanding of business and academics is today in comparison to when you first started your career? - What is your perspective on AI's omnipresence and ability to introduce a universal basic income into the strata of societies/economies on Earth? What rules will be applicable? - Do you think that with the disappearance of physical labor due to AI automation, it will make a comeback as a healthy hobby? - ​​How do you anticipate AI-to-AI conversations? What sort of information and insights are likely to emerge from these conversations? - ​​Do you ever take time off? - Would you say that a person whose job is also their hobby is a happy person, or a person lacking in both the job and the hobby? - ​Is game theory useful for running a business? - Not necessarily business, but fun... ​Have you ever been to a magic show? - How have interview processes changed since you began your career? - Are there ways to improve application screening and potential candidates? - Could VR/AR environments be a way to test candidates in the work environment? - Should there be an AI system that does computational language design? - The computational language could then be used to tackle problems of any kind and feed back to the language-design AI. - Do ever worry you'll end up like Wittgenstein, solving philosophy and the boundaries of science with an innovative math-related system, then a couple years later decide you're wrong?

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the future of science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa Questions include: Which do you think is more likely, teleportation or time travel? - I'm curious about accurately reconstructing the past using present data. Imagine a pool table where we can trace ball trajectories backward from current positions and vectors. If this works for a simple model, could we apply it to reality, tracing back to the very first moments of the universe? This could be like a "playback" of history. Do you think it's feasible with sufficient data, advanced computation and AI assistance, or are there insurmountable challenges? What ethical considerations might this raise? - We are definitely generating a germ factory on our keyboards and mice. We should use it. - "There is one more way to get from one place to another." This is what gravitational lensing is when light travels on multiple paths to us, right? - At this level, wouldn't there be some ambiguity, e.g. many different possible motions of molecules would produce the same pattern on sand? - Weren't there recently studies from MIT that were able to make hash collisions on purpose? - ​Will a web browser ever have a native runtime for a language other than JavaScript, e.g. Python, Wolfram Language, etc.? - It worries me, letting a user space code run into kernel space directly. - Is LLM the wrong direction for AI?

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 would you describe what you do? Can you contain it to a single sentence? - What advice do you have for future programmers? - Any advice for someone content to just "get by" financially, with zero interest in the usual understanding of "career" and probably no kids–just looking to focus on other things? - Why don't you quit CEOing and commit full time to investigating whether nature is completely computable? Does running the everyday things help? Or do you just still find it fun? - Do you think there will come a major shift in business planning with AI? - ​How much control do you maintain over the Wolfram Institute? Do you find that loosening your grip on management of the fellows' research allows for a higher chance of success in discovery? - There is this tension regarding remote working vs. being in the office. From my experience in remote-working teams, juniors/new starters take a few months before they are efficient. It appears you have mastered remote working with your teams. What do you think makes remote working a success? - Whenever you were, or are, learning new stuff as part of your independent research efforts (whether that's directly related to your work at Wolfram Research or for your own purposes), do you have a structured purpose, i.e. "I will learn X subject, topic by topic," or do you take a looser approach to things? How do you know how much time to dedicate to your various research interests? - How is innovating "outside the system" different from working within institutions? Is one better than the other for certain fields?

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 did taxation work before money was invented? - How did trading happen between nations that used different number systems? - Can you discuss the role of ancient civilizations, such as the Greeks, in laying the foundations of modern science and technology? - ​Did Isaac Newton spend a significant amount of time attempting to transmute lead into gold? Did he believe in all of the miracles described in the Old Testament? - What was the greatest technological advancement to come out of the Roman Empire? - ​Given what we know now about symbolic representations and languages, what do you make of the break from computable mathematics in the 1800s/1900s and our current set-theoretic foundations?

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 is it that animal species all look relatively similar, or at least similar across a breed (ex: dogs, golden retrievers), yet all humans have unique features?​​ - ​What's your intuition for Euler's number, e?​ - In the recent Halloween spirit, is there any science behind ghostly appearances?​ - If an advanced civilization lived on Earth one billion years ago, would there be signs of there existence in today's time?​ - How does photography work? How are we able to capture an image so easily, whether on film or on a phone screen?​ - Kind of a similar topic: how do mirrors reflect images, and can we trust these images or do they change our perception?​ - Is there a number like e or pi that instead of being small (under 10) is big (like over 100)? How do these numbers get specific notation/names?​ - How many digits of pi can you recite at this moment?​

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: Will startups survive using AI and ML Technology? If so, how to compete with big industries? - How often do you find yourself stuck on what to do next? How do you decide on what project to move forward with? - How do you prepare for conference talks? Do you ever get nervous/stage fright? - Someone asked EW Deming how he felt about his speech and he responded with "I know what I said, but I am not sure what they heard." - I bring my cats to talks so they can look cute if I bomb. - Any thoughts to what a leader or manager can do to support team members to learn and manage stress? - I understand this is a very context dependent question, but lately a lot of large organisations earning profits in the billions have been scaling down their workforce. As a CEO, what would you say are common drivers/motivators behind these trends of scaling down? - What would you say is your favorite aspect of being CEO? What is your least favorite? - I would like your advice. I will retire in about 3-4 years, do you think it is too late to start learning ML, Data science, the entire artificial intelligence environment, with all the mathematics that entails? I was thinking of dedicating part of my day to streaming as a hobby. Something to keep my mind active. - I am in the software QA and testing industry. One of my challenges are convincing decisions makers about investing in early testing approaches to reduce project and product risks later. As a CEO, how would you be convinced to add priority to testing in an organisation? - Any advice on being prolific/focusing as a college student? Specifically the tradeoff between open-ended exploring and focusing. - ​I think a huge amount of the value of college is having informal discussions with small groups of people you care like. Obviously not compatible if you're focused on GPA. - Hermits acquire cats, not children!

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the future 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 will the future of mathematics change? - ​Would there be a way to use the Moon as a gravitational tugboat to slowly tow the Earth away from the expanding surface of the red giant Sun so it can stay in the Goldilocks Zone? - What future applications do you think will come out with the discovery of the ability to measure at the attosecond time scale? - Do you think that new conjectures could also be made by AI/AGI systems? How will humans tackle the abstraction and complexity of them? - SW's TED Talk announcement + discussion of the Wolfram Physics Project - ​Could you speak a bit about energy "as the flux of causal edges through spacelike hypersurfaces"? Specifically, is there some more intuition or narrative you can provide as to why that is the case? - On the topic of conferences, do you think technology will change the format? Or will panels and standard talks remain a constant? Will AIs one day be participants? - What is it like to actually run a task on a supercomputer? - Don't you fear humans will start to live mostly in digital worlds and most cognitive energy will be spent on problems there and not in the natural sciences? - Would it be possible at some point to have both a digital and physical consciousness simultaneously? And then when you sleep, they combine or something to absorb the knowledge of both experiences? - What if we take someone's videos, articles, life notes, a lot of things... and feed them into some specialized AI, and make it answer questions and behave almost like that person? That technology is not so far away... It feels a bit like "concussions transfer." Do you think it can be classified like that? - ​Stephen's livestreams are like mini sci-fi adventures for the mind.

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 talk about the history of quicksort or Hoffman encoding? - TIFF is also lossless... I think in some version... - Standard method for 5G? That is, within 5G, does it operate on the bit level rather than the radio wave level? - There is a similar problem with SIP: not all vendors implement the same standards or follow the standard properly, and you end up with interop problems. - Would that also work with a logographic language? - The future is gonna consist of languages that are just emojis. - ​When did the study of economics form? - What's the history of "double-entry" bookkeeping? Can something as basic be redefined? - ​What were early tabulating machines like (such as the ones IBM sold during WWII)? - Do you think future historians will have a harder time parsing through all the information available in the last 50 years compared to the last century, or even two centuries? What is the best historical record for research in this case? Books, images, video, etc.? - Why doesn't copyright law allow flexibility with people who want to share their works online? When did copyright law begin? - How did legal structures evolve with the creation of the internet? Were completely new structures built because of it?

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 it possible that individual particles have a halo of dark matter, like galaxies have?​ - ​How is antimatter made in the lab, and what makes it so difficult to produce?​ - ​I am curious about your perspective on the recent unveiling of smart glasses equipped with AI assistants (LLMs) by Meta. Do you see this development as a natural evolution of smartphones?​ - But was the separation of matter and antimatter proposed by Feynman, or earlier? And how can this be measured by experiment?​ - Are there anti-neutrons? Anti-elements?​ - Does technology behave differently depending on outside factors (such as atmospheric pressure, temperature of weather, gravity, etc.)? Is there an ideal environment? - Deionized (distilled) water won't conduct.​ - How about solar flares? How do they affect technology?​ - A gamma ray burst hit us last year about this time. It was called the BOAT (biggest of all time). Did we learn anything new from the data from that burst?​ - What determines the color of a leaf when the weather changes? Why are some yellow, some orange and some red?​ - Could there be nanites waiting for more favorable conditions to multiply (nanometer-size robots or organisms) in the samples we brought back from the asteroid Bennu? How could we be sure there aren't any?

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 do you think is the most important aspect to focus on or dedicate the most effort to when running a business? - You were a speaker at the All-In Summit 2023, which was a conference aimed mostly at venture capital folks. What were your impressions of this summit and its attendees? Did you attend parties at the All-In Summit? - Do you get demotivated to do things that AI might be able to do in a fraction of the time in the relatively near future? - What's your take on privacy, especially for digital services and devices (regarding companies using data to manipulate people and things similar to that)? - Could you imagine the web being washed away as it did to other technologies? - How has the concept of "intellectual property" evolved? Is land a good analogy for IP? - Do you know about the recent anti-trust cases brought against Google and Amazon? If yes, what kind of opportunities do you think would open up for competitors if they lose? - ​Have you ever gone through the patent process personally? - ​Maybe ChatGPT can make patenting things easier. - Maybe the ambiguity is a feature of natural language instead of a negative, and it's purposefully not specific to allow more expansive, unpredictable scopes of use. - With LLM lawyers, the patent disputes will end up just being a bunch of robots arguing all the time. - Is diversifying my professional ventures a worse outcome than focusing on one or two occupations that I'm really good at? - There are somewhere between five hundred thousand and two million cuneiform tablets just sitting in warehouses. Untranslated, unscanned, inaccessible. What can we do other than lament? - When you first started making sales with Mathematica, was it mostly to academics or companies? And how did you find these customers? - Let's say an amateur claims to have found a big breakthrough. How do you judge if it is worth the read?