Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and others) [March 4, 2022]

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 explain why Earth's air doesn't escape into the vacuum of space, considering gas expands to fill the available volume without a container? - Why are there these phases of matter? Are these phases "real" or do they depend on what we can "observe"? - Sodium chloride makes incredibly square crystals. - The patterns snowflakes are predisposed to follow also drive the patterns that evolving vegetation (ferns, and the two types of trees) grows/grew into. It is all super interesting. - How perfect are crystals? Can they be used to detect the microscopic structure of space? - If the atoms of space act like a superfluid, would that mean vortices may arise if the universe is rotating? - And yet diffusion doesn't work in space. This is why I think it is electrostatic forces that must initiate coalescence. - Could photons frozen in absolute zero create "hard light"?

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.