History of Science & Technology Q&A (December 29, 2021)

The Stephen Wolfram Podcast

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the history science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa

Questions include: Do you think of science/technology as progressing in the way Thomas Kuhn suggested in 'The Structure of Scientific Revolution' (i.e., paradigm -> crisis -> paradigm shift, incommensurability, etc...) or in some other way? - Stephen, is science always been based on finding patterns in nature? - Why did networked computing grow relatively slowly between 1969's Arpanet and 1989's HTTP? Was it a lack of imagining the Internet's potential or technical barriers (e.g. packet switching network)? - ​When did you first get introduced to the internet? Who told you about it? What tool(s) did you use...Mosaic? What was your reaction? - Why do you believe it took so long for highly parallel graphics cards to be applied to scientific fields? It seems like a 10-15 year delay from SGI to CUDA etc - Stephen has said once that he knew Julia Robinson. Would be great to hear more about it - ​Any thoughts on the Heideggerian view of technology and modern technology? - ​How does self-organizing order emerge in physics and biology - are they analogous? Can the universe be said to be in the business of self organization?