Can someone help me intuitively understand how a wave function works and the role of probability in quantum mechanics? Answer by Mark John Fernee: 'I think that one of the primary questions to answer is, why is the wavefunction necessary? The short answer is: Interference.'

Can you describe what Rwanda was like before it was occupied by Germany during the colonial era? Answer by Stephen Tempest, MA in Modern History: 'Control of cattle was central to socioeconomic status in the Kingdom of Rwanda.'

Why are logic errors more difficult to fix than syntax errors? Answer by
Joe Zbiciak: 'To most folks, it looks relatively normal, although you might vaguely sense something is off...'

Has a supreme court ever ruled that it lacked jurisdiction over a case in any country? Answer by Steven Haddock, 25 years in litigation: 'The case allowed the Supreme Court to dodge a situation where President Jefferson might choose just to ignore the court’s order...'

Can you recommend a book or three on the subject of 'Musicology'? Answer by Alex Johnston:'In the first place you’ll need to get a grounding in what musicology is, and for that I can’t think of a better book than the one that made me want to study the subject itself...'

What potential use cases can you imagine for Meta AI's Llama 3 open source model? Answer by Håkon Hapnes Strand: 'Llama 3 is great for fast inference in applications that require low latency, such as in conversational AI. It's also great for fine-tuning.'

Is there a kind of stroke that would happen to a person that's quite horrible? Answer by Marc Boutet, Canadian Paramedic: 'The 'locked in' stroke.'

What is Alan Kay's advice for smart people who don't yet know what they're interested in working on? How deep should people explore topics like maths before deciding it isn't for them? Answer by Alan Kay: 'Learn the rules like a pro so you can break them like an artist.'

Why don’t baseball players bunt anymore? Answer by Aaron Brown, Columnist at Wilmott Magazine: 'Whether you're asking about the decline since 1945, or the faster decline since 2010, we can rule out many common explanations.'

In economics, would increasing the minimum wage increase prices? Answer by Valerie Rhea, PhD Economist: '...what it really does is guarantee that any low-skilled worker not capable of producing at a level implied by the minimum wage will tend to remain unemployed.'

In old episodes of Gunsmoke, Miss Kitty frequently offers Marshal Dillon a cold beer at the Longbranch Saloon. In the days before electricity, how could the beer have been chilled? Answer by Erik Painter that shows pre-electric, how the ice industry chilled beer and food.

Can the role of a stand-up comedian be similar to the job of a philosopher, where one seeks truth for truth's sake, and the other seeks truth to laugh at? Answer by Frederick M. Dolan, Professor, UC Berkeley: 'Humor can involve perceiving a situation in a new, truthful frame of reference.'

Why can't we transplant other animals’ eyes into humans and gain the benefits of their eyes? Answer by Ken Saladin, former professor of histology: 'We can't even transplant a human eye into another person and restore vision.'

Once I read a description to a numerical methods course and it says 'often in math, it is possible to prove the existence of a solution to a problem but it isn't possible to 'find it'. What does that mean? Answer by Senia Sheydvasser qr.ae/psHGic with a game example.

A modern CPU with billions of transistors, when running a normal program, how many of those transistors are actually used? Answer by Joe Zbiciak: 'Chips and software both have bugs, and chips have manufacturing defects.'

Why can't a physicist make quantum physics understandable to most people? Answer by Mark John Fernee, 20+ years as a physicist: ''Quantum objects are neither particles nor waves. They have behaviors that can be consistent with either.'

Was Einstein too old to work at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project even if he had security clearance? Answer by Viktor T. Toth: 'E = mc² entered the public imagination as though it was this equation that unlocked the secret of nuclear physics. It was not.'

What happened to satellite pictures, why aren't they used to solve some of the worst crimes? I thought they can read a license plate from space. Answer by Dr. Balaji Viswanathan: 'A high resolution spy satellite doesn’t usually cover more than a couple of square kilometers...'

What does Alan Kay think about programming and teaching programming with copilots and LLMs of today? Answer by Alan Kay: 'A simple principle is that for most things that are automated and scaled, the *trust requirements* have to be vastly expanded and made vastly more strict.'

Do antidepressants just cover up the underlying problems? Answer by Jack J. Wu, M.D.: 'In my psychiatry residency training back in 2004–2008, even in the psychiatrist/psychiatry realm we thought that antidepressants, ... were just covering up the underlying problems...'