Remove Argumentation Remove Primary Remove Research Remove Social Sciences
article thumbnail

How Did We Get Here? The Tangled History of the Second Law of Thermodynamics

Stephen Wolfram

He starts off by saying about Carnot’s book: The idea which serves as a basis of his researches seems to me to be both fertile and beyond question; his demonstrations are founded on the absurdity of the possibility of creating motive power or heat out of nothing.

Energy 88
article thumbnail

Remembering the Improbable Life of Ed Fredkin (1934–2023) and His World of Ideas and Stories

Stephen Wolfram

In the mid-1990s, researching history for my book A New Kind of Science , (as I’ll discuss below) I had a detailed email exchange and long phone conversation with Ed about this. Richard Feynman and I would get into very fierce arguments. As he told it : I never pressed any issue that would sort of give me credit, okay?

article thumbnail

Can AI Solve Science?

Stephen Wolfram

of what’s now Wolfram Language —we were trying to develop algorithms to compute hundreds of mathematical special functions over very broad ranges of arguments. But when it comes to mathematical research, and the frontiers of mathematics, one doesn’t immediately expect any such constraint. So might AI change that?

Science 122