History of Science & Technology Q&A (January 10, 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: How often do separate ideas emerge (like convergent evolution) and merge to either compliment each other or "make whole" ideas that didn't have all the answers themselves? - What surprises you most about the history of science and technology? What is there to learn? - What's the history of timekeeping? - How did civilizations create the calendar and clocks? What science supports this? - How would you keep track of time/sync up your devices? Today it's easy with electronic devices. I'm imagining my microwave and stove clock always being a minute or two out of sync from manually setting it. - How did you get to know so much, and in such depth, about such vastly disparate historical topics? Seems this could be fascinating to hear about in and of itself. - Makes me think that maybe blockchains are the evolution of agreed-upon ledgers in one single agreed-upon time. - Do you think the Fourier transform is fundamental to nature? - Historically, it appears in quantum field theory, quantum computing, signal processing, etc. - When did time become an important variable in science?​ - Why do you suppose no one tried to continue with Nikola Tesla's incomplete inventions?​ - As a software engineer, I discover elegant academic programming languages all the time, but they never seem to gain much traction in industry. On the other hand, we have languages like JavaScript, which was pretty much developed as a prototype but is now ubiquitous in web development. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on this history of "organic" development of programming languages. - Are there any pros to using "historical" technology, or is newer always better?