Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and others) [November 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: Are all pixels squares/rectangles, or have other shapes (which can tile the plane) been used? - Why hasn't all the cosmic background radiation escaped out into the universe by now? How is it still around to be detected billions of years later? - It's weird to talk about time experienced by a photon. It experiences (this is what's possible to be noticed) only two moments, those of detachment and attachment. Between this, nothing is observable now. - Do you need mass to store information? Can you have an organism made purely out of photons or other particles moving at the speed of light? - ​Does time move faster for hot objects? - But doesn't a black hole have a temperature? What happens to a black hole's entropy? - Why doesn't the black hole further collapse on itself? - Do the updates to maintain the structure of space help explain the absurd vacuum energy? - How much more complex are the dynamics of the human brain than the dynamics of a galaxy? - Does a black hole inherit the dimensionality of the spacetime it is forming in? - Interestingly, the number of atoms in a bacterium is also about 100 billion. - Interestingly, the distance to the Sun (1 AU) is about 100 billion meters. - As gravity increases and/or speed increases, time is constant to the participant, but on the outside, space/distance could be greater or lesser. If you had a light year cube of space and shrunk it into a meter, light would take the same amount of time to go through it.

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.