Stephen Wolfram Q&A

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Some collected questions and answers by Stephen Wolfram

Questions may be edited for brevity; see links for full questions.

February 23, 2016

From: Reddit AMA

Which superhero from Marvel do you find most scientifically realistic?

I have seen a bunch of Marvel movies… but I’m no expert on the whole array of superheroes….

What’s ultimately possible is always an interesting question. There are plenty of things that get done even though they supposedly “violate the laws of physics”. (I remember when people said that data would never be transmitted on copper wires faster than 1200 baud… because they didn’t understand error correction/compression etc.) It takes a lot of thought to understand what might be possible, and one still often gets it wrong, because one didn’t think of some engineering trick or another….

I wrote an essay about a few of these things [not superheroes, just what’s ultimately possible in physics] a few years ago: https://www.stephenwolfram.com/publications/what-ultimately-possible-physics/

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