The Stephen Wolfram Podcast Wolfram Research

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?

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 can you say about the future of physics? - Something practical: do you think pens and pencils still have room for improvement, or has writing technology been perfected? - ​Should we prioritize adding new senses to ourselves (a magnetic north sense with some device, for example) to discover more physics as pockets of computational reducibility? What possible senses? - ​When will it become the mainstream view that mathematics is merely a branch/form of computational discipline, and as such a physical science, free of Platonistic misconceptions? - ​I like the thought that there are kids now playing four-dimensional multiplayer games. The next generations won't even be able to understand the "trivial" stuff we were thinking about. - How do you envision mathematics (research to application) being practiced in the long-term future? - ​I think World of Warcraft may have helped me understand calculus better. You have a goal with a particular group setup, so what is the optimal scenario for victory given one's resources? - Which area of tech is advancing the fastest? Will this change in the future? - Will you ever invent a new language again? - Is there anything you have recently changed your mind on? If so, what is it and what might the implications be for the future of science and technology?

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 human reaction speed were faster, would that be helpful? How much faster could it be? Is the limiting factor the nerve signal relays or brain processing time?​ - Do you find it weird that on Earth, animals with bigger brains are considered the more intelligent species, but in technology, the smarter computer chips seem to always be smaller?​ - ​Could these (neuron connections) "prove" precognitions with "impossible" results from certain people?​ - Do you think the brain can be trained (or not) like a muscle?​ - ​How will brains change through Neuralink connecting to AI?​ - ​I think some parts of our brains adapted to modern (laggy) typing, so we don't really perceive it anymore.​ - By the way, they have done the same thing to brains of whales etc. and found that those whales actually have fewer neurons than humans. It's just that the size of those neurons is very big.​ - ​I'd say societies/groups are our larger-scale developing "brains." - Would bigger brains run into heating/cooling issues?​ - ​I get the feeling we'll realize nature is so much more efficient than what we hope to do with electronics that we'll soon be relying on cells for major computation.

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/2024/03/when-exactly-will-the-eclipse-happen-a-multimillennium-tale-of-computation/

Watch the original livestream on YouTube: https://youtu.be/7Eqhd34ytoc

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: ​Were the 70s truly the golden age of electronics? - What's the history of hacking? When did security risks become a prominent issue? - ​Did you get to know Carver Mead at Caltech? - What progress did the antigravity research movement gain in the 50s–60s, and why did research eventually stop?