History of Science and Technology Q&A (Feb. 24, 2021)

Stephen Wolfram hosts a live and unscripted Ask Me Anything about the history of science and technology for all ages.

Outline of Q&A
0:00 Stream starts
6:24 Stephen begins the stream
6:35 I am interested in evolution of mechanics from Newton through D'Alembert to Lagrange could you elaborate on this?
38:42 Why was it the Europeans that created the modern mathematical framework and not the Chinese? They obviously had a head start. Why don't we use chinese characters and instead use the latin alphabet?
50:07 Pascal's Triangle was known in China before Europe
58:06 ​Sounds a little bit like comp. graphics programming competitions in the early 90s (was quite popular in scandinavia).. math competitions in logic might have been a similar thing for example in poland. but who knows.
58:39 There's an obvious problem with peer reviewed academic research. is there anything in the way science was developed in the past that we can learn from? were we better at peer reviewing science?

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[silberlinie]

44:06,
that leads you to an analogy in our near future.

That it was the merchants who promoted the
spread and unification of the mathematical corpus.

That therefore in the near future the same will
be repeated.

When we get to know a new aspect of the
mathematical universe through the contact with
extraterrestrial representatives of their civilization -
who are probably, as always, missionaries and
traders.

And it would not be surprising if the works of
Stephen reflect an immense role in this.