History of Science & Technology Q&A (July 24, 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: What was more important to ancient civilizations, philosophy or science?​​ - What have been your observations on the role of history in current science and research? Is it still relevant, or are we advancing fast enough to make it irrelevant?​​ - Can you tell us about the history of the Wolfram Summer School? How did it start?​​ - What is the history of formal verification in computer security? Particularly, how is it related to automated theorem proving and symbolic computation? Do people use Wolfram Language for formal verification?​​ - Would you consider using one AI to formally verify software now?​​ - What are some examples of scientific/technological "dead ends" other than alchemy (although I suppose we did learn things by accident with that one)?​​ - What about ​​Pythagoras? Philosophy or science?​​​​ - ​​Do we have enough information to answer this question (philosophy vs. science) for ancient South and Middle American civilizations?​​