History of Science & Technology Q&A (March 9, 2022)

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 is the history of "infinity" in mathematics, or in science in general? - I would like to see a differentiation between eternity and infinity. ​- Can you talk about the history of the "elementary length"? What have people believed to be the smallest possible length, and what events have changed this belief? - If space is discrete, does this mean that the fundamental constants are rational numbers? If the fundamental constants were real numbers, couldn't you encode arbitrary amounts of information into your theory, hiding the complexity in these constants? - ​​At what stage in history did the idea of extraterrestrial alien life start to be entertained? Is this a relatively recent phenomenon, or was it a thing even in ancient Greek philosophy? - When did we first realize that we only see the same side of the Moon?​ - What belief systems/groups of people have historically believed in a fundamentally discrete universe? ​- Why do you think the distribution of new discoveries is so random? See, for example, Nassim Taleb's example of 6,000 years between the wheel and wheels on a suitcase, for example.