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

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: 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?