Eight Year Old Physics Student Admitted to College

paris writes to tell us that The Korea Herald is running a story about Song Yoo-guen, the youngest university student that Korea has ever seen. At eight years old Song is already talking about building flying cars and defying Newton's law of gravity while others his age are attending the first grade. He completed his elementary, junior-high, and high school curricula in just nine months, something that usually takes 12 years, and has been admitted as a freshman to the physics department of Inha University.

Comments

Re:Pointless

[Spacejock]

At his age the only thing he should have on his lap top is Linspire.

Re:String theory and cars?

[Haydn Fenton]

Well, theres not any actual physical experimental evidence given by string theory, but you may recall the part of the book where mathematicians and physicists both set upon calculating physical properties of a Calabi-Yau space. Using supersymetry, the physicists used a 'mirror' Calabi-Yau space for which the calculations were much simpler (IIRC anyway, it's been a while since I'v read it). By mirror, I refer to a Calabi-Yau space which is different from the original, but by using space tearing flop transitions (rip space apart, and fix it back together in a new location), can become the other, they sharing the exact same physcial properties (as in, the universe which appears out of those Calabi-Yau spaces) but are a different shape to one another. The physicists reached an answer far before the mathematicians, and later the mathematicians also reached an answer. They weren't the same. After a while the mathematicians realised a mistake in their calculcations and the answer matched the physicists exactly. The physicists came up with a whole new set of mathematics using string theory principles. Of course, that's just evidence, not actual proof. There are a few more thing's which make string theory look like it's correct, but it may be a long time before anything is actually proved.

String theory aside, I think this 8 year old probably understands more than us, good luck to him in creating us geeks our flying cars.

....And I wish bad luck unto the editor who rejected my submission of this story :(