History of Science & Technology Q&A (May 1, 2024)

The Stephen Wolfram Podcast

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: Are there exact matches or just similarities between complexity in nature (bio, evolution), society (political, religious) and technology?​​ - ​​How did the development of atomic theory by scientists such as Democritus, Dalton and Rutherford influence our understanding of discrete structures and the behavior of matter at the atomic level?​​ - How do historians know with certainty the identities of prominent historical figures? Could there have been more to the Socrates, Plato and Aristotle timeline?​​ - ​​Do the majority of historians of physics now have a favorable opinion of string theory?​​ - Is there any scientific reason "pure maths" concepts are picked up by physics much later?​​ - Do you find it our lack of human history odd, considering how long we have lived on this planet?​​ - With regards to notable people in history, humans seem to be completely obsessed with credit for their contributions—an interesting feature of the human ego. Taoist philosophy believes the Tao makes achievements and lays no claim to them.​​ - ​Can we reconstruct the lost works in history with AI scraping through contemporary reference scripts and searching for the influence lost writings had on known writings?​​ - That brings up the interesting point that there were likely MANY people "back there" who had amazing ideas that would have important applications today, but they didn't have the good fortune to be noticed and documented.​​ - How did the concept of zero originate and evolve in mathematical history?​​ - Do zero and infinity have the same origin?​​ - Interesting, but if I had three ducks and gave them all to you, surely the ancients must have had some concept of what that left me with?​​ - Speaking of string theory, what are for you the notable "dead-end paths" taken in the history of math/sci/tech?​​