Stephen Wolfram

JANUARY 31, 2023

And indeed particularly in chemistry and engineering it’s often been in the background, justifying all the computations routinely done using entropy. There was also a sense that regardless of its foundations, the Second Law was successfully used in practice.

Energy 88

Energy Physics Argumentation Mathematics 88

Stephen Wolfram

FEBRUARY 3, 2023

Sometimes textbooks will gloss over everything; sometimes they’ll give some kind of “common-sense-but-outside-of-physics argument”. Once one has the idea of “equilibrium”, one can then start to think of its properties as purely being functions of certain parameters—and this opens up all sorts of calculus-based mathematical opportunities.

Computer 92

Computer Energy Physics Construction 92

Stephen Wolfram

AUGUST 22, 2023

It didn’t help that his knowledge of physics was at best spotty (and, for example, I don’t think he ever really learned calculus). In 2015 Ed told me a nice story about his time at Caltech: In 1952–53, I was a student in Linus Pauling’s class where he lectured Freshman Chemistry at Caltech. It’s just my nature.

Computer 68

Computer Physics Science Sciences 68

Stephen Wolfram

SEPTEMBER 9, 2021

Events are like functions, whose “arguments” are incoming tokens, and whose output is one or more outgoing tokens. Chemistry / Molecular Biology. In standard chemistry, one typically characterizes the state of a chemical system at a particular time in terms of the concentrations of different chemical species.

Physics 65

Physics Science Sciences Mathematics 65

Stephen Wolfram

SEPTEMBER 9, 2021

Events are like functions, whose “arguments” are incoming tokens, and whose output is one or more outgoing tokens. Chemistry / Molecular Biology. In standard chemistry, one typically characterizes the state of a chemical system at a particular time in terms of the concentrations of different chemical species.

Science 64

Science Sciences Physics Mathematics 64