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

Stephen Wolfram

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
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The Story Continues: Announcing Version 14 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica

Stephen Wolfram

So did that mean we were “finished” with calculus? Somewhere along the way we built out discrete calculus , asymptotic expansions and integral transforms. And in Version 14 there are significant advances around calculus. Another advance has to do with expanding the range of “pre-packaged” calculus operations.

educators

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Expression Evaluation and Fundamental Physics

Stephen Wolfram

Since the standard Wolfram Language evaluator evaluates arguments first (“leftmost-innermost evaluation”), it therefore won’t terminate in this case—even though there are branches in the multiway evaluation (corresponding to “outermost evaluation”) that do terminate. As the Version 1.0

Physics 101
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Five Most Productive Years: What Happened and What’s Next

Stephen Wolfram

The fall of 2021 involved really leaning into the new multicomputational paradigm , among other things giving a long list of where it might apply : metamathematics, chemistry, molecular biology, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, immunology, linguistics, economics, machine learning, distributed computing. Let’s talk first about chemistry.

Physics 110
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Even beyond Physics: Introducing Multicomputation as a Fourth General Paradigm for Theoretical Science

Stephen Wolfram

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
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Multicomputation: A Fourth Paradigm for Theoretical Science

Stephen Wolfram

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 60
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Computational Foundations for the Second Law of Thermodynamics

Stephen Wolfram

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.