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

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: Any progress on your understanding of Buddhist philosophy from digging into East Asian history? - 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? - 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. - Who came up with floating-point arithmetic and what is it? - How would you think about scientific collaboration in the age before technology? How did ancient researchers/scientists collaborate with each other? - Do you think there is hidden mathematics or geometry in biblical writings or the Egyptian pyramids? - 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? - Why is there only one species of human beings; isn't that kind of absurd? - With hindsight, would "Computational Principles of Natural Philosophy" have been a good title for NKS?