History of Science and Technology Q&A (January 8, 2025)

Stephen Wolfram hosts a live and unscripted Ask Me Anything about the history of science and technology for all ages. Find the playlist of Q&A's here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa Originally livestreamed at: https://twitch.tv/stephen_wolfram If you missed the original livestream of this episode, feel free to submit a question you would like Stephen to answer in a future Q&A livestream here: https://wolfr.am/12cczmv5J 00:00 Start stream 00:29 SW starts talking 1:04 ​​Any progress on your understanding of Buddhist philosophy from digging into East Asian history? 2:44 How do we address the interesting ways that footnotes in history have led to knowledge? How do we address multiple issues of publication within different texts and the problems of translation? What happens to the "origin" of a text? 14:35 Do you think weird names are an advantage in academics? E.g. one of the translators of the new edition of Philosophical Investigations is P. M. S. Hacker, not something I would have remembered otherwise. 17:52 Who came up with floating-point arithmetic and what is it? 27:37 How would you think about scientific collaboration in the age before technology? How did ancient researchers/scientists collaborate with each other? 34:15 Do you think there is hidden mathematics or geometry in biblical writings or the Egyptian pyramids? 41:06 If you woke up tomorrow in ancient Greece with a pouch of gold coins, what sort of computing machines do you think you could have fabricated? 44:41 Why is there only one species of human beings; isn't that kind of absurd? 49:39 With hindsight, would "Computational Principles of Natural Philosophy" have been a good title for NKS? 52:25 End stream Follow us on our official social media channels. X: https://twitter.com/WolframResearch/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wolframresearch/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wolframresearch/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/wolfram-research/ Stephen Wolfram's Twitter: https://twitter.com/stephen_wolfram/ Contribute to the official Wolfram Community: https://community.wolfram.com/ Stay up-to-date on the latest interest at Wolfram Research through our blog: https://blog.wolfram.com/ Follow Stephen Wolfram's life, interests, and what makes him tick on his blog: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/