History of Science & Technology Q&A (May 18, 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: Why did electromagnetism become a focus of study so late into human civilization? Wouldn't the ancients have observed and studied magnets and static electricity and characterized it as easily as we did? - Why did Turing come up with Turing machines as a basis for computation and not tag or substitution systems, or mobile automata or register machines? - According to Wikipedia, Telex became an operations teleprinter service in Germany in 1933. Maybe not Telex, but ticker tape. Ticker tape was around in the 1800s. - According to Wikipedia, ticker tape stock price telegraphs were invented in 1867 by Edward A. Calahan, an AT&T employee. - The joke was that Gödel was the only one who read it! - Einstein came to regret the name "theory of relativity." Would "theory of invariance" have been a better choice? - It's somewhat ironic that Russell had one of the clearest prose styles of all time and was responsible for one of the most unreadable books! - At least he didn't name it "Spacetime Stuff and Things."