History of Science & Technology Q&A (May 18, 2022)

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: Why did electromagnetism become a focus of study so late into human civilization? Wouldn't the ancients have observed and studied magnets and static electricity and characterized it as easily as we did? - Why did Turing come up with Turing machines as a basis for computation and not tag or substitution systems, or mobile automata or register machines? - According to Wikipedia, Telex became an operations teleprinter service in Germany in 1933. Maybe not Telex, but ticker tape. Ticker tape was around in the 1800s. - According to Wikipedia, ticker tape stock price telegraphs were invented in 1867 by Edward A. Calahan, an AT&T employee. - The joke was that Gödel was the only one who read it! - Einstein came to regret the name "theory of relativity." Would "theory of invariance" have been a better choice? - It's somewhat ironic that Russell had one of the clearest prose styles of all time and was responsible for one of the most unreadable books! - At least he didn't name it "Spacetime Stuff and Things."

Om Podcasten

Stephen Wolfram is the creator of Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha and the Wolfram Language; the author of A New Kind of Science; and the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research. Over the course of nearly four decades, he has been a pioneer in the development and application of computational thinking—and has been responsible for many discoveries, inventions and innovations in science, technology and business. On his podcast, Stephen discusses topics ranging from the history of science to the future of civilization and ethics of AI.