12-Year-Old Rewrites Einstein's Theory of Relativity

rhathar writes "A 12-year-old boy by the name of Jacob Barnett is a math genius. Mastering many college level astrophysics courses by the age of 8, he now works on his most ambitious project to date: his own 'expanded version of Einstein's theory of relativity.'"

Comments

Primary Source

[dtmos]

The Indianapolis Star

Re:Primary Source

[xTantrum]

[blockquote]The boy wonder, who taught himself calculus, algebra, geometry and trigonometry in a week[/blockquote] I call bullshit.

Re:Primary Source

[Scrameustache]

the Earth, made mostly of carbon

He's good at math, but he's applying that math on an ignorant premise.

Re:Primary Source

[gstoddart]

[blockquote]The boy wonder, who taught himself calculus, algebra, geometry and trigonometry in a week[/blockquote]
I call bullshit.

How so? It's not unprecedented for people to be savants, and to have singularly amazing mathematical abilities. The human brain is an amazing thing ... I don't even think this is the first time I've heard about a teenager with some form of autism who is a math prodigy.

According to the article:

At this point, Jake's math IQ -- which has been measured at 170 (top of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children) -- could not get any higher.

"You could tell right off the bat, his performance has been outstanding," said Ross, who, at age 46 with a Ph.D. from Boston University, has never seen a kid as smart as Jake.

Sure, it's rare. But, I don't think it's unprecedented to see this.

Of course, I can only imagine that between being this smart (for math) and having some degree of autism is going to make it difficult for him -- I can only imagine how messed up it would be to be doing graduate-level mathematics, and still have all of the other crap a 12 year old has to go through on top of that.

But, I don't dis-believe that he taught himself high school math in a week or two. Some of these kinds of problems are well documented as something that occasionally someone with autism or something similar just "see" and work with naturally.

Re:Primary Source

[Anonymous Coward]

He watches documentaries on the History Channel.

The state of journalism these days. Don't they ever check facts anymore? The History Channel is the bible/alien abduction channel, not the documentary channel.

-l

/Yeah, yeah, sarcasm.

Used to be the WWII Channel a decade ago. Post-2012 it'll probably devolve into the History of Pumpkin Cuckin Channel before hitting a renissance revival and becoming the Bible/Alien Abduction of Pumpkins Chucked during WWII Channel.

Re:Primary Source

[IceNinjaNine]

The History Channel is the bible/alien abduction channel, not the documentary channel.

I thought it was "All Hitler, all the time..."

Re:Primary Source

[fotbr]

That was the 90s and early 00's. Then something happened and they turned into the bible/ufo/aliens/ghosts/monsters channel.

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[Luyseyal]

There's probably some gold in there somewhere. "Alien Thrift Fashions" and "Fix That House, Alien Abductor!"

-l

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[gamanimatron]

Why? Most of those are all fairly obvious abstractions of stuff that goes on around us all the time. Calculus is a bit more abstract and less obvious, but is still pretty well grounded in the world as we all experience it. With so many fantastic tutorials available online to help him learn how other people have labeled those relationships, it's believable that a kid with a better pattern-matching engine than anyone else's could just pick it up.

Scary as all hell, but believable.

Re:Primary Source

[PaladinAlpha]

It's not about being "smart (for math)".

Let me put it like this. What if the kid was a whiz programmer, and they said he had taught himself "C, C++, Perl, Python, Ruby, Java, Lisp, Prolog, and x86 assembly in a week"? It's nonsense. There's more information there than can be read in a week, let alone applied and digested.

What does that imply about the claim, then? Well, for our hypothetical whiz programmer, it means he knows how to write "hello, world" a lot of different ways, but lacks the capacity to use the strengths of each language. He's committed the grievous error of the breadth-first search in an expertise-driven field. And I submit that the same thing holds for our actual math genius, here -- which I would further claim is a tragedy.

If they held this kid accountable and really put him through the full coursework, he could turn into a very powerful mathematician, or physicist. But if they're letting him skate by with thinking he's taught himself everything there is to know about every major branch of mathematics inside of a week, they're ruining his ability to carry his investigation with scientific rigor. What he's learned is no doubt the trigonometric identities, the power and chain rules, and similar "first brush" material, and will spend the next two decades with mistakes and discoveries that have already been made countless times before.

Genius is a reason to work more, not less. Removing responsibility from our best and brightest is one of the biggest threats to our prosperity.

Re:Primary Source

[oliverthered]

I taught myself C++, Prolog and x86 semantics in a week... the rest was easy.

"calculus, algebra, geometry and trigonometry"

All semantics in theory.

Re:Primary Source

[hedwards]

I'm going to have to call bullshit on that. Genius is a lot more work than you give it credit for. Even without accomplishing anything it just takes more work to do just about any task, because not only are you having to deal with the task, but you're also having to manage the things which are tangentially related to the task. And probably having to process everything else that's going on in the room, plus whatever else you've got on the back burner.

Beyond that you're assuming that his knowledge is superficial, but given the access that even the most mediocre of intellect have to information these days, I doubt very much that you can assume that the knowledge is superficial.

But beyond that, just the act of creating takes a lot more work for geniuses. I know that when I was teaching myself to count cards from scratch that while the period of time it took was exceedingly brief, the amount of actual work that was going on was both intense and strenuous. But, from outward appearances you would never have known it. Likewise, when I'm learning just about anything else, it appears like the abilities are just appearing in my repertoire, but in fact there's a huge amount of work going on at a very low level to make it work, and more than that to make sure that the information is integrated. I can't just learn something, I have to also learn how it's related to everything else I know. And that is where most of the work invariably is.

Re:Primary Source

[gstoddart]

It's not about being "smart (for math)".

Again, how so? His disability seems to be offset by the fact that he has a singular talent for mathematics. For a lot of other things, he might be totally lost. He might only be "smart" for math, and struggle with basic language.

If they held this kid accountable and really put him through the full coursework, he could turn into a very powerful mathematician, or physicist.

I'm not sure that would work for him ... we're talking about a kid with Aspergers'. They basically let him do the things he was interested in so they could keep him engaged and not start withdrawing:

The Barnetts decided it was time to follow Jake's lead, adopting a method that some parents of children with autism use -- floor-time therapy -- to help foster developmental growth. They let their children focus intently on subjects they like, rather than trying to conform them to "normal" things.

They've got him attending college courses because people figured that, developmentally, not letting him do it would leave him bored and frustrated. At which point, he'd like tune out and stop trying, which would leave him to wither.

And, really, I don't get the impression he's covered only the "first brush" material:

"He needs work at an instructional level, which currently is a post college graduate level in mathematics, i.e., a post master's degree. In essence, his math skills are at the level found in someone who is working on a doctorate in math, physics, astronomy and astrophysics."

So, we have a 12 year old whose math (according the the college professors who teach him) is at the PhD level ... hardly just a couple of trig identities and simple stuff.

You can't force a kid like this to follow a specific academic path ... the best thing you can do is to let them do the things they excel at, try to help them with the stuff they struggle with.

This isn't so much about building the next genius, as trying to let someone who has some natural talents in a specific area pursue them while he still can. I just figure he's lucky that he gets to play with this stuff and hasn't been shoved into a corner to be utterly bored and frustrated by the math and science his peers are doing.

I certainly doubt most of us here on Slashdot are qualified to actually talk about what is best for this kid -- developmentally, academically, or more anything else.

I for one with the guy luck, and to not have other people tell him how he should be doing this.

Re:Primary Source

[Methuseus]

Different math disciplines are not the same as different programming languages. Yes, he probably skated over some things that he doesn't really understand, and it probably was closer to 2 weeks if nothing longer. If they asked him, having autism, he likely doesn't have a goo perception of time when working on a problem. Nothing from algebra to calculus is terribly hard. I spent a very short time on algebra myself, only taking longer with the other courses because I had to follow along with the class. No, I don't think I could have done it in a week, but probably 6-12 months. And again, he wasn't studying anything else or playing video games at the time either.

This is not to say I think he has really taught himself everything about those four mathematical subjects, but there's no such equivalent as "hello world" in calc, geometry, etc.

Re:Primary Source

[MadnessASAP]

So if I compared your C code from now to your C code from the week after you first learned how to program C, they would look the same? If so god have mercy on your employer.

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[Anonymous Coward]

So there should be no trouble with providing some of this documentation to support your point.

"Guys, we have a Stage 1 Alert - some random Slashdot skeptic doubts a point made in an article. And for various reasons which are not his fault and beyond his control, he can't do his own research."

"We're going to need our TOP men and ALL our available resources to handle this one -- call the Pentagon, call the President, call Rupert Murdoch! Leave no stone unturned until this random Slashdot skeptic is satisfied that the claim is TRUE!!"

Re:Primary Source

[Ben4jammin]

Well, I don't know if you read the article or not, but I did. I assume you are basing your response partly on this:

The boy wonder, who taught himself calculus, algebra, geometry and trigonometry in a week, is now tutoring fellow college classmates after hours.

I would take that with a grain of salt. He obviously has something akin to a photographic memory. FTA:

By the age of three he was solving 5,000-piece puzzles and he even studied a state road map, reciting every highway and license plate prefix from memory.

So a more likely explanation is that he ran through the books very fast because he only needs to read it once to memorize it. I would agree with your point that memorizing facts does not automatically mean you know when to apply them.

But I think they are holding him accountable as evidenced by him attending lectures and providing tutoring services. If he is given the information about the mistakes and discoveries so far there is no reason to believe he can't assimilate it and push it further. He will need to learn scientific rigor, sure, but he is already on his way if the article is accurate when it reports that he seeks out the professors after class to ask questions...what else can he do at this point?

I guess what I am trying to say is your response reeks of "sour grapes" :) I too wish I had a photographic memory. Although my hypnotherapist has helped me greatly in remembering names

Re:Primary Source

[Quiet_Desperation]

I agree with all about the dismal state of some of the "sciency" channels, but Pumpkin Chuckin is awesome. :-) C'mon, is it any worse than Mythbusters? Hell, the guys from Mythbusters hosted the thing last time. There's an art to building a proper trebuchet.

Besides, what happened is that the real science got pushed off into the auxiliary channels. Discovery Science channel is still pretty hard core. They've been showing Brian Cox's series about the solar system a lot.

Re:Primary Source

[WillgasM]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2005/feb/12/weekend7.weekend2

Re:Primary Source

[msobkow]

However, there isn't really that much material at the foundation of Calculus, Geometry, and Trigonometry. They may spend entire semesters going through the material, but the "cheat sheet" notes boil down to a page each.

If this kid has an intuitive grasp of mathematics, he probably started reading about different concepts, basically went "Oh, that's what they call that!", and was on to the next topic without hesitation. Unlike the rest of us, he probably grasped most of the key concepts by skimming the textbooks, without having to read the long-winded detailed explanations and examples of concepts.

I fully believe he could "learn" all that material in a week because he wasn't learning the material in the usual sense -- he was just learning the standard labels and terminology for things he already understood.

Re:Primary Source

[Ihmhi]

Aside from the underlying theories, most of that stuff boils down to learning a handful of formulas and knowing when to apply them. It would be challenging to say the least for an average person, but, ya know, genius...

Re:Primary Source

[Nutria]

Don't forget Nostradamus and Reality shows.

But they still occasionally show Heavy Metal and Modern Marvels.

Re:Primary Source

[Sulphur]

So there should be no trouble with providing some of this documentation to support your point.

"Guys, we have a Stage 1 Alert - some random Slashdot skeptic doubts a point made in an article. And for various reasons which are not his fault and beyond his control, he can't do his own research."

"We're going to need our TOP men and ALL our available resources to handle this one -- call the Pentagon, call the President, call Rupert Murdoch! Leave no stone unturned until this random Slashdot skeptic is satisfied that the claim is TRUE!!"

We have top people working on it.
Who?
Top people, top.

Re:Primary Source

[Methuseus]

I with him nothing. I do, however, wish him luck. I was one of those people utterly bored with math and science, even when n calculus.

And yes, that first sentence was sort of trollish, I do hope you will forgive me.

Re:Primary Source

[EriktheGreen]

I always try to explain this in a way that doesn't mean anything to non nerds for some reason. My point of view is that he's like a DnD character that's rolled up with an 18 INT score. Sure, he'll have a lot of spellcasting ability, but he lacks the WIS to truly understand the subjects he's studying and why they're important. His other stats get dumped because people assume they'll just "develop" and he gets killed by the first kobold that comes along, or spends his life creating complicated ways to change rabbits into interior decorators, ignoring the fact that rabbits have no sense of style.

Too many children are held up as "savants" for doing things like this, which sucks for them. So much of what he could become is dependent on him having normal social and emotional development in addition to his math and logic skills, and being treated like this means he'll never get that.

More to the point, when was the last time you heard of a "savant" like this actually doing something worthwhile? The people who make significant contributions to humanity's knowledge typically do so because they work very hard, not because they're naturally intelligent. There's so much more to being a genius than being smart.

Re:Primary Source

[rubycodez]

An intuitive grasp of some of the concepts of Special Relativity by a child does not compare to working with the tensor calculus equations of General Relativity. By your description of your mathematical ability, such would be and is forever beyond your comprehension.

Re:Primary Source

[oliverthered]

in theory or in practice?

Re:Primary Source

[aztektum]

Someone is feeling mediocre.

Re:Primary Source

[oliverthered]

or to put it another way.... My 'c' would appear to be a lot different to the way it was the last time I wrote 'c', but it would still be c and I haven't been teaching myself 'c' in-between..... so what's the delta?

Re:Primary Source

[Qzukk]

It depends on what exactly they mean by "taught". Can he prove the chain rule? L'Hospital? Or has he simply memorized the equations and learned to make use of them? The latter I could see being done in days if you've got that kind of memory.

Re:Primary Source

[oliverthered]

+ check
-- check
+ check
/ check
( check
  check
* check
typedef check
& check
% check
^ check
void check
int check
# check
include check
define check
return check
etc... check.

my c looks exactly the same.

Reason have mercy on your god.

Re:Primary Source

[Thuktun]

I fully believe he could "learn" all that material in a week because he wasn't learning the material in the usual sense -- he was just learning the standard labels and terminology for things he already understood.

Or as a slight expansion on that, perhaps each new topic was immediately obvious to him.

Re:Primary Source

[hazydave]

I taught myself C, C++, Python, and Java each in a day... not the same week. LISP and assembler took longer, but they were only my 5th and 3rd languages, respectively. And I was 14 for assembler (Z-80), 18 for LISP, 19 for C.... I only taught myself BASIC when I was 12. That took about a month, but I didn't have an actual manual on the BASIC I was using, and no real book on BASIC either, only old copies of "Kilobaud" microcomputing. And I was learning how to program at the same time.. but that was more of an on-going process. And my IQ tested at 161, peak.. and that was under the older systems that allowed scores of 200 or more.

Of course, once you know how to program in several languages, you're just learning the language when you do this. It's very different to claim you leaned to program complex systems in a week. And while I certainly leaned Java in a day... and was actually producing code for a project before the end of that day, I don't claim to have learned, much less mastered, all of the standard library functions. Much less LISP... I'm not sure anyone (ok, maybe Guy Steele Jr.) knew most of MacLisp or InterLisp back in the day, much less Common Lisp. I'm not sure anyone tried -- every LISP programmer carried around books of functions. When you needed something, you looked it up, outside of the general purpose stuff.

There's a big difference between learning the language and learning everything that goes into that ecosystem as a standard resource.

As for leaning calculus, I learned some over the course of ten months in High School... and more in four more advanced college courses. And a good six or more in Mathematics and Electrical Engineering (I double majored at CMU) that applied those methods. So when did I actually "learn calculus"? I do find it hard to image he took in five or six college level courses in a week.

Re:Primary Source

[oliverthered]

finally, just to humor you....

You didn't seriously think everything about calculus, everything that could be done with it now or in the future did you?

Only someone who does no understand what they know could think such a thing, someone who doesn't even understand themselves.

Re:Primary Source

[gstoddart]

I would take that with a grain of salt. He obviously has something akin to a photographic memory. FTA:

Actually, there's nothing obvious about how he does these things, since nobody understands the mechanism fully.

He either has an enhanced ability to work with spacial relationships, or he's memorized it, or something else is at work. I've even heard explanations about how some mathematical prodigies "see" or "hear" the relationship.

Short answer, is there isn't a definitive understanding of this. And, since he can do more than recite the facts, but can apply them and solve problems, there's more to it than straight memorization.

So a more likely explanation is that he ran through the books very fast because he only needs to read it once to memorize it. I would agree with your point that memorizing facts does not automatically mean you know when to apply them.

But, seriously, read the article. He hasn't merely memorized the facts and can't apply them ... he works at an exceedingly high level of math (think PhD student), and solves abstract problems. I sort of get the impression he can look at complex mathematics and "know" the answer right away, without having to work out the solution.

He also has some trade-offs in that, having Asperger's, he's not entirely "normal" like the rest of us (ha!) and will have some areas we take for granted he can't do very well.

My understanding is you wouldn't equate his gifts with an eidetic memory. It's different, and an eidetic memory doesn't give you corresponding problem solving and application to abstract reasoning. It's just an endless stream of facts (if it even is a real thing).

Re:Primary Source

[hazydave]

Learning the language is not the same as learning to program. But take my case... I taught myself BASIC when I was 12, then FORTRAN and Assembler. In college, I learned Pascal and LISP. I didn't get into C until I was 20, working the summer at Bell Labs. That took a day to learn. My C code was and still is more formal than most of what you found in the K&R days, thanks to the Pascal that came before it. And I'm sure I've improved over the years -- but that had nothing to do with learning the language -- your ability to program is independent of the language.

So back to this kid... if he's got some supercharged brain for mathematics, and already basically had a calculus-sized hole in this mathematical understanding, maybe he took this in very fast. Calculus itself is conceptually very easy -- the hard part is the algebra, and understanding how to apply it.

Re:Primary Source

[Austerity Empowers]

I taught myself pascal, C and assembly when I was about 12 too, over the course of a few months perhaps. And no, my code looks way better now than it did back then. But there's a difference between acquiring what is known and using it. He's acquired a lot of knowledge at his young age that almost no one else would have. He's trying to apply it, I'm sure it will go poorly at first, but certainly his efforts will improve significantly as long as he keeps going at it.

There are lots of questions we can ask if we want to sneer at the kid, including would he learn all this quicker with a more mature mind at 18, while getting to enjoy his childhood some while he's 12? Will his ability to ability to apply this information be benefited from learning it at such a young age, or perhaps he's doing more memory and less problem solving and he may get stuck? Will his efforts to teach himself deepen his understanding of these subjects, or does he risk isolating himself and being unable to relate to the community of people who use math? No one can answer these questions, as a useless anecdote I knew someone like this at age 12 who was learning calculus while I was in algebra, and he's doing ok. You won't know his name if I posted it, but he's also not in a nuthouse or living in a refrigerator box.

  I'd take stories like this as interesting side notes about what people are capable of, but continue on living life and raising children as I have been.

Re:Primary Source

[iamhassi]

I would take that with a grain of salt. He obviously has something akin to a photographic memory. FTA:

Photographic memory doesn't really exist the way most people think of it, as in being able to look at a photograph of a forest and later being able to answer how many trees were in the forest or being able to recall the fourth word in the sixth paragraph after staring at a page in a book.

Being able to memorize a deck of playing cards or a book of mathematical formulas is NOT photographic memory. No scientific study has ever found anyone with a true photographic memory... well, except one, but the scientist went and married the girl and she refused to repeat the experiments to other scientists so that's questionable.

So next time you hear someone say "I have a photographic memory" you can chuckle to yourself ;)

Re:Primary Source

[oliverthered]

programming is domain dependent too.

you would program a website, like an OS like a DBMS.

So you have:
calculus, language/rules.
Calculus, patterns.
Calculus, domain application.
The top one should take long.... but may develop further with the other two... but you won't know until you've done everything you ever could do.

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[catmistake]

wow... you are an angry, self-proclaimed math expert? Yes, I believe integrals are far easier than derivatives. If you believe integration is difficult, then it is you that needs to work a little harder at it. And your reading comprehension is about at the level of your lack of mastery of the language, so in that regard, at least you are consistent. Apparently, you think General Relativity is Special Relativity. Well, I really don't believe that, but you just didn't read my post close enough (not even sure why you read it to begin with, but I, however, made no claims regarding General Relativity).

I suspect you must be pals with the 12-year old... or perhaps the punk himself? Nice to meet you. You'll do well here. Now, when you're done mowing the lawn, please... get off and let the adults have a conversation.

Re:Primary Source

[FrootLoops]

The PhD level quote you gave was from "clinical neurophysiologist Carl S. Hale". To outsiders, graduate/PhD level and undergraduate level math look pretty much equally inscrutable (eg. this vs. this). None of the information in the two articles (TFA's or The Indianapolis Star's) or in the video suggests to me that this assessment is accurate. Perhaps they just left it out, but in the video Jacob doesn't give me the sense of "this is incredibly basic; my goodness this is basic; I've gone so much further than this" that I'd expect if he were really at the graduate/PhD level.

He also made more mistakes than I would expect--messing up dx's, messing up constants, and messing with notation. I didn't get the sense that he understood the underlying real analysis backing up his calculus, or that he was as familiar with formal proofs as he would need to be to actually be at the graduate/PhD level. He seemed to be performing the usual algorithmic manipulations and modifying part of a lecture he was given. Certainly he understood the basic calculus he was describing, but it's unclear to me how deep it goes. Relatively few people are qualified to judge his ability, so it would be easy to overstate when faced with lots of magic symbols. I wish I could talk to him for 5 minutes and just determine his general ability level myself.

Re:Primary Source

[gstoddart]

Too many children are held up as "savants" for doing things like this, which sucks for them. So much of what he could become is dependent on him having normal social and emotional development in addition to his math and logic skills, and being treated like this means he'll never get that.

Dude, he's got Asperger's. He had already been diagnosed with it, and he was never going to have a "normal" social and emotional development. Think "Rain Man", for lack of a better analogy ... though, somewhat higher functioning.

This isn't some kid they've shunted into math because he has an aptitude for it and his parents played Mozart to him. This is a kid whose brain works quite differently from you or I, and who just seems to be able to do this stuff. They do this so that he continues to be interested in/engaged in school and doesn't get bored/frustrated and pull back.

He's always going to be slightly odd by most people's standards, and in a couple of years he might lose interest in mathematics and stop doing it.

More to the point, when was the last time you heard of a "savant" like this actually doing something worthwhile?

And, he may not. Hopefully people let him develop his own interests and not force him to become the next uber researcher.

I don't think a 12 year old needs to be forced into doing something like this ... you could suck all of the fun out of math for him. For now, just let him develop in a way that is going to be particular to him and see what happens. Guide him, sure. But don't force it on him.

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[kdemetter]

I was already programming for a few years when i was 12. I remember the books on programming where in an adult section , where i wasn't allowed into yet , so my father got them for me.

I'm glad this guy also has the chance to study what he wants , rather than being denied this 'because he's too young for it' .

Re:Primary Source

[FrootLoops]

I agree that his knowledge is likely superficial. I hope he gets to the more rigorous material (analysis, linear algebra, algebra, ...) he needs to expand beyond basic calculus, or that he's already started it. To be blunt, it's easy to impress most people with calculus, but it's hard to impress real mathematicians that way since it's so simple to people with an aptitude for it.

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[Unkyjar]

Rabbits don't have style?

I was going to cite Dujour (the White Rabbit Girl) from the Matrix, but now that I look at pictures, it DOES seem kinda dated.

Good call.

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[oliverthered]

I'm 34 and didn't start enjoying my childhood till I left school. he looks much happier and enjoying things much more than I did.

I didn't mature, everyone else kind of got lost along the way... some came back-again... if that's what you mean by mature... e.g. getting over puberty, growing up.

I'd be a little more worried about the 'formal' way that he's being adopted and so possibly not being such a free thinker... e.g. he has pre/miss-conceptions.

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[scharkalvin]

And not just in math. Consider W.A. Mozart who wrote symphonies at age 8.

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[Unkyjar]

As he prepared for the more rigorous work of a college class, Jake decided he ought to make sure he could master all high school-level math that would be required in college.

"In one two-week period, he sat on our front porch and learned all of his high school math," Kristine said. "He tested out of algebra 1 and 2, geometry, trigonometry and calculus."

You're right, mom slightly exaggerated. It seems that he had already learned the breadth of the basics of High-school math over the 12 years of his life. What he did was brush up and test out in two weeks to make sure that he had a firm knowledge of it.

Re:Primary Source

[FrootLoops]

but there's no such equivalent as "hello world" in calc, geometry, etc.

I disagree. u-substitution and integration by parts are "hello world"-level in calculus, IMO. Some basic geometry results are similar, like how angles formed by intersecting pairs of parallel lines relate to one another. I'd say the Pythagorean theorem cast into the language of trig and solving an equation like "x - 9 = 10" are also both "hello world"-level for trig and algebra, respectively.

Each of these subjects builds and builds to far more advanced material, while a programming language levels off in difficulty relatively quickly. In that sense the analogy is flawed, but I think it's still worthwhile.

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[catmistake]

In my OP, I only mentioned Special Relativity. It was you that introduced General Relativity into this sorry excuse for a conversation. This was the core of my quip... I was talking about Special, and you go off about how I don't understand General... when I never mentioned it. That's a straw man when you attempt to attribute something to me I never discussed. And now... you've really gone round the bend. I never had a problem (at the time) with integrals, or derivatives (mostly just the trig)... I just felt integration was far easier. That is my opinion. That is the way I see it. You disagree... apparently, you feel the opposite. Great. This pleases me.

That, or you're just trolling

If you are unsure whether there is a troll here, I refer you to your first AC response to my OP, and all your subsequent responses. You want to argue because I liked integrals better than derivatives? You think you can convince me otherwise? O RLY?

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[madprof]

Hah. Brian Cox, as good a communicator as he is, feels a bit dumbed down in his programmes. I kind of get the feeling he'd like to go into a bit more scientific depth but clearly can't due to restraints to keep it "for the masses".

Re:Primary Source

[FrootLoops]

Jean-François Champollion was a prodigy who went on to decipher the Rosetta Stone. Évariste Galois founded the mathematical field that became known as Galois theory as a teenager. I don't know any other examples; I suspect they are quite rare. There's a big difference between being able to understand material at an early age and having the creativity/staying power to make lasting contributions to a technical field. Plus, there just aren't that many child prodigies.

Re:Primary Source

[jcarr]

The best summary yet:

"Rightwing Nutjob Extremist Christian TV Station"

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:History_(TV_channel)

Re:Primary Source

[mark-t]

If a person can quickly read a magazine or book of text at a rate that most people might casually peruse a magazine at a doctor's office to see if there are any articles that look interesting, then after subjecting the person to some level of distraction (playing a game that requires some amount of concentration to play effectively, such as bowling or billiards, for instance), you ask him to recite the words on one particular page, and he accomplishes the task verbatim, as well as describing any pictures or other incidental markings that happened to be on the page, and can repeatedly demonstrate this skill for any page you would care to name, what do you call that? I dunno about you, but I'd sure as hell call that a photographic memory.

Re:Primary Source

[camperdave]

I knew this kid who was one of these genius types. He wound up in university at the age of 14 or 15. He was a social wreck. He wound up drinking a 2L bottle of pop a day into which he would pour a bottle of aromatic bitters (45%alcohol by volume and available in the grocery stores to minors. One bottle is equivalent to a six pack of beer.) He was found unconscious somewhere suffering from alcohol poisoning. Not sure what happened to him after that.

Re:Primary Source

[colinrichardday]

Yes, I believe integrals are far easier than derivatives. If you believe integration is difficult, then it is you that needs to work a little harder at it.

Interesting. It's easy to take the derivative of a product or quotient. And what about the composite of two functions? Taking the derivative of e^(-x^2) with respect to x is much easier than finding the integral with respect to x.

Re:Primary Source

[superdave80]

...the books on programming where in an adult section , where i wasn't allowed into yet...

What kind of freaky bookstore confuses C++ with porn?

Re:Primary Source

[colinrichardday]

Sure, *numerical* integration is a fucking doddle. Draw a bunch of rectangles, find their areas, sum the lot of them together.

But numerical differentiation requires even fewer operations. Take two values of the function "near" the desired x value, evaluate the function, take the difference, and then divide by the difference of the two x values.

Re:Primary Source

[yelvington]

The History Channel is the bible/alien abduction channel, not the documentary channel.

I thought it was "All Hitler, all the time..."

Those were the good old days, when it was actually about History.

When sci-fi was on Sci-Fi instead of wrestling and sharks, the Travel channel had travelogues instead of poker, TLC had something to do with learning, and A&E had "arts" and "entertainment."

The general pattern is: Establish a brand, turn it over to some idiot who corrupts it, then change the name of the network to something that makes no sense at all (Spike).

Re:Primary Source

[sg_oneill]

I dunno man. I think one of the problems with teaching kids math is that often the underlying mechanics are unexplained and so it becomes a case of teaching techniques by rote that don't make sense but can be understood the just repeating the technique. I remember learning parallel equasions and learning these long complicated procedures that didn't mean shit , till an uncle sat down and we just kind of meditated a bit on equality and variable substitution and why x = y+1 means x-1= y (etc), and then *blam* it all made sense. I utterly shot past the class on the topic because I *got* it, and it wasn't a technique anymore but a way of thinking about algebra. I wish I had someone do this with me for calculus.

I doubt this kid would have gotten this far without having worked out the underlying rationality behind it, because rote is just so damn boring. At 12, life feels too interesting to just accept things "because they are". A 12 year olds principle question is "WHY?". And this kid appears to have asked "WHY" to all the right topics.

He's very bright.

Re:Primary Source

[ekgringo]

Many public libraries do not allow children to borrow adult-level books, perhaps because they are afraid they will be exposed to "adult ideas" that they aren't ready to process yet, perhaps because adult books typically cost more than children's books. Would you loan out your copy of an expensive textbook to some kid who claims he'll take good care of it yet his own books have been dropped in puddles and chewed on by a dog?

Re:Primary Source

[gstoddart]

And yes, that first sentence was sort of trollish, I do hope you will forgive me.

Pedantry, while we're discussing someone Asperger's?

Trust me sir, pure brilliance. ;-)

Re:Primary Source

[oliverthered]

knowledge is one thing, wisdom is another.

it seems you cannot tell the difference. That is quality

Re:Primary Source

[jackbird]

Where does Luria's profile of a "mnemonist" figure into that? Predates verifiability? But he made thousands of public performances...

Fascinating read, anyhow.

Re:Primary Source

[pspahn]

having some degree of autism is going to make it difficult for him

I'm sure he'll be fine, so long as math is what ultimately interests him.

An example from my roughly four years as a special ed assistant: It was March 14, Pi Day of course. For math I told the class that the student who memorized the most digits of pi by the end of the day would get a pie.

I did this mainly to see how a few of the severely autistic yet bright kids (mathematically) would respond and take to doing actual work instead of causing behavior problems all day. All of them were void of behavior problems for the day, and all three actually cooperated by testing each other and working to improve their memorization.

There is something about math that can ground the brain of an autistic. I don't really understand why, but it does work and seems to actually alleviate some of common social symptoms.

Re:Primary Source

[rubycodez]

That's funny, that you imagine some insult. GR equations are so very difficult even after 75 years many attempted derivations prove intractable and only a very few living humans can comprehend the mathematics of the work done thus far. Coupled hyperbolic-elliptic nonlinear partial diffy-q's are a bitch. The article was about the child genius making contribution to General Relativity, so ease of understanding concepts of Special Relativity are not germane, SR can be demonstrated with upper grade school arithmetic involving Pythagorean theorem and the axiom of lightspeed being independent of source and observer, you can get e=mc^2 and the Lorentz-Fitzgerald theorem and even special cases of Maxwell's equations to boot)

this is slashdot, not civil human interaction realm (e.g. real world). trolling and mocking are the coin of the realm.

Re:Primary Source

[Tablizer]

The general pattern is: Establish a brand, turn it over to some idiot who corrupts it, then change the name of the network to something that makes no sense at all (Spike).

It's bad design practice anyhow to hard-wire domain information into primary keys. Call it "73604" and then nobody cares if it changes use or category over time.

Spike is thus smart to give it an ambiguous name (at least until they morph into the "Rape Trauma and Therapy Channel").
 

Re:Primary Source

[cheekyjohnson]

normal social and emotional development

What if someone doesn't like either of those things? They're fairly useless.

Re:Primary Source

[cheekyjohnson]

More like: "I made a claim without giving a citation, and when someone asked me for one, I told them to do their own research!"

Giving a citation should be the default decision. It saves people time.

Re:Primary Source

[iamhassi]

what do you call that? I dunno about you, but I'd sure as hell call that a photographic memory.

Mnemonists

"Photographic memory" is what people call it that don't know any better. Even World Memory Champhionship winners call themselves mnemonists using method of loci

"Further cause for skepticism is given by a non- scientific event: The World Memory Championships. Held since 1991, this is an annual competition in different memory disciplines and is nearly totally based on visual tasks (9 out of 10 events are displayed visually, the tenth event is presented by audio). Since the champions can win interesting prizes (the total prize money for the World Memory Championships 2010 is $90,000), it should attract people who can beat those tests easily by reproducing visual images of the presented material during the recall. But indeed not a single memory champion ever reported to have an eidetic memory. Instead without a single exception all winners consider themselves mnemonists (see below) and rely on using mnemonic strategies, mostly the method of loci."

Re:Primary Source

[CptNerd]

Well, they talk about "friends" with "private member functions".

Re:Primary Source

[mark-t]

So it seems that the only difference that would exist between someone with a photographic memory and a mnemonist is that the former would have perfect recall without actually trying or putting any conscious effort into doing so at the time that they collect the information. Is this correct?

Re:Primary Source

[oliverthered]

He should be pleased with you... you are humble.

u can't win. unless you accept failure...

Oh... I could talk when I was 6 months old.... it took me 6 months from birth to learn English, well probably less.

Re:Primary Source

[SacredNaCl]

Okay, I'm somewhere in the middle of calc II ...so I can't comment fully on calculus, but all of trigonometry can be written into 2 pages (1 if you write small). Most of algebra can be written into a couple pages. If you can truly grasp the meaning of those couple pages of concepts, you could get indeed know enough to reason out trig, and algebra problems from maybe 5 pages maximum of cheat sheets. I don't doubt he took a lot longer than week though. The true test of these things is being able to reason out the correct application. That takes some serious time working on actual problems.

Re:Primary Source

[voidphoenix]

If your 'c' would appear a lot different now from the way it was, then you have been _learning_ 'c', even if you don't think you've been "teaching yourself". Your brain works pretty much 24/7 and everything you experience creates ripples in that massive neural net, affecting everything else.

Re:Primary Source

[mcvos]

Only faint glimpses of his theory show through the interview, but it does sound like an interesting point. I don't know enough about astrophysics to know how much carbon gets released in supernovae, but he apparently does. He might be onto something here. Or not, but at least it's going to be an interesting exercise.

He doesn't have to work on his earth-shattering theory right away. He just has to think and learn a lot. It's perfectly okay if his earth-shattering theory comes when he's 20.

Re:Primary Source

[harl]

Why exactly shouldn't the person making their claim have to prove it?

Why should we trust overly broad statements that claim something is widespread?

If these things are true then it's trivial for the author to backup the assert.

Re:Primary Source

[Scrameustache]

I don't know enough about astrophysics to know how much carbon gets released in supernovae, but he apparently does.

He says the earth is made mostly of carbon... maybe he misspoke, but if he meant it, he's way off. Carbon is less than 1% of the makeup of the Earth.

P.S. If you want to learn about why we're sure heavy atoms come from exploded stars, go read about the element Technetium.

Re:Primary Source

[mcvos]

There's more stuff in the interview that's too clearly wrong, like small stars producing hydrogen and helium. They fuse it. These kind of basic mistakes seem rather unlikely when he's able to calculate how long it would take to produce carbon after the big bang. And considering how seriously professors take him, my guess he was either badly quoted in that article, or he just didn't express himself very well. Either seems much more likely than that he's completely wrong on something rather basic and central to what he's working on.

Re:Primary Source

[Scrameustache]

The kid is good at math, people confuse that with being "smart" or "intelligent" or "genius", which are things that they imagine to mean "good at everything". But I think he's just good at math, the way other autistic types are good only at line drawing.

The reporter clearly didn't do any fact checking on the kid's claims, he just took it at face value and reported as is. Lazy, unprofessional, and sensationalistic.

Re:Primary Source

[FrootLoops]

Calculus is an interesting branch of math in that it's relatively easy to have a very strong intuitive grasp of it, but it's difficult to make rigorous. Historically, Newton and Leibnitz developed calculus using infinitesimals in the 1600's, but their methods required a lot of intuition. It wasn't until Robinson's development of non standard analysis in the 1960's that their version was put on rigorous foundations. Calculus was first made rigorous by the incremental development of mathematical analysis, particularly by Weierstrass, in the ~1800's--but this took a different view from the historical infinitesimal approach. I suspect his grasp of calculus is the intuitive one that's common among technical people, and not the rigorous one that's common among modern mathematicians/math grad students.

His video reminded me of myself when I first learned calculus (which was also at a young age, and to be honest also far better than most of my peers). I would love to know if he could come up with a counterexample to the integration by parts formula where the functions involved aren't well behaved. I wouldn't have been able to. I suspect he couldn't, but it's difficult to say. Certainly his grasp of calculus is deep compared to 99% of people.

Re:Primary Source

[lgw]

sort of get the impression he can look at complex mathematics and "know" the answer right away, without having to work out the solution.

The mathematical abilities of savants have been studied quite a bit - and you're wrong about that. Savants do all the same steps that anyone good at doing math in his head does. They just do them very fast and confidently - the difference between an Olympic hurdler and a runner who stops to climb over each hurdle. Because of that they can fit much bigger problems in short-term memory, which makes a big difference in what you can solve in your head.

Savants also make mistakes. This was a bit of a shocker before computing devices became common, because many of the math lookup tables (what's the sign of 68 degrees?) were computed by savants, many without anyone realizing that there was a need to check for errors.

Re:Primary Source

[Quiet_Desperation]

In all honesty, I don't have a problem with that. Whatever gets the "masses" to reconnect with science as something other than movie supervillains or accidental apocalypses is a good thing.

Re:Primary Source

[kalirion]

Let me put it like this. What if the kid was a whiz programmer, and they said he had taught himself "C, C++, Perl, Python, Ruby, Java, Lisp, Prolog, and x86 assembly in a week"?

He didn't learn another language. It's more like teaching yourself "Object oriented programming and functional programming in a week."

Re:Primary Source

[theGhostPony]

Hell, I still remember when AMC used to show actual classic movies. Without commercials. No more.

Re:Primary Source

[oliverthered]

Actually it looked different as I used a new algorithm I'd come across. the delta was I'd learnt some math etc...

Re:Primary Source

[oliverthered]

delta appear vs is.

appear: look: give a certain impression or have a certain outward aspect

Re:Primary Source

[marcello_dl]

> he had taught himself "C, C++, Perl, Python, Ruby, Java, Lisp, Prolog, and x86 assembly in a week"?
Math is different, think about the x86 instruction set, it's the result of design choices in the past not the constant application of proofs over axioms.
Also, he might have photographic memory.

I agree that he should not skip stuff. But if he proceeds at his pace wherever he ends up is good. I just hope he's not pressured too much by parents.

Re:Primary Source

[MartinSchou]

How is this really any different than having highly coordinated feet and becoming a highly paid football player?

Re:Primary Source

[EriktheGreen]

In that case, usually the parents of the child recognize that it's not a guaranteed conclusion that the child will become a famous athlete, if they are aware of the skill at all.

The major difference, however, is the potential impact on the world...mentally, a lot of people (in the US, anyway) categorize a brilliant child the same as other smart, famous people. Usually people who are famous because of hard work or luck, but who are seen as smart because that's their most outstanding attribute. Sloppy thinking like this leads to easily making a connection between intelligence as a cause of the effect of fame, fortune, and importance.

Apart from sports fans, most parents don't know the name of eg. the silver medal winners from the last olympics, but many of them can tell you who invented the airplane.

Erik

Stick this boy in a MRI

[ColdWetDog]

And dissect his brain. Really, it would be interesting to see what a 12 year old math genius' functional MRI looks like. Probably lots of glucose uptake in certain regions. (Unlike mine which has glucose intake concentrated near the doughnut).

Re:Stick this boy in a MRI

[v1]

they already went crazy with einstein's brain and didn't learn much.

Re:Stick this boy in a MRI

[Surt]

Yeah, but he was a loser who couldn't figure out relativity until adulthood. This kid actually has some talent.

Re:Stick this boy in a MRI

[Swarley]

Actually they did learn something. The section of brain next to the spatial reasoning piece never formed in Einstein's brain. This allowed his spatial reasoning section to fill the empty space and be twice as large as a normal person's. This is exactly the sort of thing that makes me dubious of genetic engineering of humans. Knowing beforehand that a piece of brain was simply not going to form would be the sort of thing someone would try to "fix".

Re:Stick this boy in a MRI

[Anonymous Coward]

Talent indeed. It is like this kid is standing on the shoulders of giants.

Re:Stick this boy in a MRI

[similar_name]

They learned that genius didn't require more neurons. They also learned that Einstein's brain had a lot of astrocytes and those could be involved in learning, memory and even genius. Not bad for a dead brain, imagine the difference in an fMRI.

Re:Stick this boy in a MRI

[theCzechGuy]

Einstein actually came up with the Relativity Theory in his twenties and then spent the rest of his life explaining it to the real losers (read: most of the mankind).

Re:Stick this boy in a MRI

[hedwards]

That's the thing, I'd wager that every genius is different. The way that lateralization happens or doesn't has a huge impact on what you get. I've often times grown frustrated with people for failing to grasp even the most simple concepts and the reason why is that my brain didn't ever finish lateralization. Even at age 30, I can learn as I did when I was a child, and develop completely knew talents that I never was capable of before.

More than that, it's how a person uses the faculties they've got and the ability of the person to re-purpose areas for other uses.

Re:Stick this boy in a MRI

[ColdWetDog]

More than that, it's how a person uses the faculties they've got and the ability of the person to re-purpose areas for other uses.

Seems like you've been pretty well and truly stuck here at Slashdot. Just sayin.

Re:Stick this boy in a MRI

[Quiet_Desperation]

True. They learned more after they reanimated it.

Re:Stick this boy in a MRI

[Labcoat Samurai]

Or recreate, if it is thought to create this effect.

Re:Stick this boy in a MRI

[rubycodez]

Some of us are hobbits in our irresponsible tweens, you insensitive clod!

Re:Stick this boy in a MRI

[Surt]

Yeah, I'm sorry if the 'funny' intention of my post escaped you, I do not actually feel that Einstein was a loser.

Re:Stick this boy in a MRI

[ultranova]

The section of brain next to the spatial reasoning piece never formed in Einstein's brain. This allowed his spatial reasoning section to fill the empty space and be twice as large as a normal person's. This is exactly the sort of thing that makes me dubious of genetic engineering of humans.

But it's exactly the kind of thing that supports cyborgization. Suppose you could remove your brains from inside your skull and put them into a giant jar and remote-control your body? Then they would no longer be limited by the need to pass your head through your mothers birth canal. How intelligent could you become, then?

Re:Stick this boy in a MRI

[Tetsujin]

Talent indeed. It is like this kid is standing on the shoulders of giants.

We all do, really. The only reason science can approach the mysteries it faces today is because countless past men of science have already solved countless other problems for them.

Re:Stick this boy in a MRI

[MikeBabcock]

There are still people trying to prove him wrong too. Quite funny personally.

Re:Stick this boy in a MRI

[jsvendsen]

What, you mean like that crazy Einstein guy? Challenging Newton of all people?!

Re:Stick this boy in a MRI

[TangoMargarine]

Yeah, that's what they call "science." How silly.

Re:Stick this boy in a MRI

[l0ungeb0y]

Or worse... they'd purposefully cause that sort of defect to breed labs full of little Einsteins

Re:Stick this boy in a MRI

[quenda]

There are still people trying to prove him wrong too.

What do you mean "wrong"?
Its a theory. It fits the observed universe closely, but not perfectly.
Sure it is wrong, just less wrong than Newton, which is a pretty good achievement.

Aspergers Syndrome

[WrongSizeGlass]

This kid has Aspergers syndrome and is making the most of it. Good for him. Hey kid, invent me a time machine dammit so I can warn myself about all the stupid stuff I did to end up where I am in life!!

Re:Aspergers Syndrome

[WrongSizeGlass]

Hi Michael! Nice to see you around these parts. What do you think of the 'Whiz Kid'?

Re:Aspergers Syndrome

[strack]

well, the real measure of this is to see where he is when hes like 25 or roundabout. theres been a lot of boy wonders who burnt out.

Re:Aspergers Syndrome

[TheLink]

A number of famous mathematicians and physicists did a lot of great stuff before they were 25.

So from pure science POV it matters not that he burns out, but that his flame burns bright enough.

Re:Aspergers Syndrome

[LongearedBat]

Then they better put a cooling system on his head quick smart, before smoke starts coming out of his ears.

Re:Aspergers Syndrome

[Ambvai]

Ignoring the effect to the individual in question, but is it really so bad that some people can achieve a "normal" person's achievements in a third the time? Even if they do nothing for the rest of their lives, they already did as much as other people.

Re:Aspergers Syndrome

[Luyseyal]

I just hope this big bang debunking thing doesn't turn into a conspiracy theory thing that drives him into insanity (like Bobby Fischer).

-l

Re:Aspergers Syndrome

[bberens]

If he's got any sense (as opposed to being intelligent) he'll get a job writing complex trading algorithms for some big Wall Street firm. There's no money in doing something productive, might as well be rich.

Re:Aspergers Syndrome

[hitmark]

Indeed. Just like a music or sports prodigy, he has found something he loves doing and have done it every chance he has gotten.

Re:Aspergers Syndrome

[Zeek40]

What's pathetic is putting up zero-content posts that attack others for no reason. I can help you find some resources to work on improving your self esteem if you would like.

Re:Aspergers Syndrome

[Omestes]

This kid has Aspergers syndrome and is making the most of it.

Does he? Or is that a knee jerk diagnosis for smart people who also don't really care much about social crap? Watching the video, he seems very highly functioning, he doesn't seem at all disabled. Is he mentally ill for holding academics above socialization? Does every nerd have aspergers? Does that even mean anything? Does anyone really care?

I really can't wait for the new DSM, when we all can kiss Aspergers goodbye. Its a completely useless diagnosis. Going by the DSM, I could be diagnosed with it; yet I have a very long term (7 years), cohabitational, girlfriend (sinmate), friends (not a lot, but a small number of high quality ones), etc... So what exactly does that diagnosis show?

Sorry for the almost flamebait. I just don't see why "he has aspergers" is at all meaningful. Shouldn't there articles focus on the fact that he's extremely smart, and applying himself at very interesting problems. Its like reading an article on Einsteins fashion sense... Banal, and it completely misses the point. Or the silly "Einstein couldn't tie his shoes and pissed himself" myths. Yes, it brings highly intelligent people down so the more normal people don't feel quite so bad for not being as gifted. But it often is over stated, and generally completely meaningless. This is especially true for aspergers, which doesn't actually translate to something meaningful or useful. If it actually pointed to an organic cause of this kids extraordinarily talents, then it would be interesting.

Re:Aspergers Syndrome

[cp.tar]

cower in my shadow behind your chosen semitic pseudonym some more, feeb.

you're completely pathetic.

You seem to be saying that a lot.
Your conversational skills remind me of the Borg.

Re:Aspergers Syndrome

[ultranova]

If he's got any sense (as opposed to being intelligent) he'll get a job writing complex trading algorithms for some big Wall Street firm. There's no money in doing something productive, might as well be rich.

If he has both sense and intelligence, he writes a stock performance predictor, uses it himself, and makes money himself rather than enriching some parasite.

Re:Aspergers Syndrome

[MikeBabcock]

He may very well, but there's little to no association between Asperger's and being a savant.

Re:Aspergers Syndrome

[ultranova]

This kid has Aspergers syndrome and is making the most of it.

Does he? Or is that a knee jerk diagnosis for smart people who also don't really care much about social crap?

Usually, it's a self-diagnosis for people who want an excuse for their bad behaviour, one which also makes them seem better than the rest - you know, "too good for this sinful Earth" updated for the sentiments of the age of science.

However, in this case the diagnosis seems to be done by an actual psychologist, so it's probably trustworthy.

I really can't wait for the new DSM, when we all can kiss Aspergers goodbye. Its a completely useless diagnosis. Going by the DSM, I could be diagnosed with it; yet I have a very long term (7 years), cohabitational, girlfriend (sinmate), friends (not a lot, but a small number of high quality ones), etc... So what exactly does that diagnosis show?

Yes, amazingly enough it's possible to lead a happy, succesful and productive life even if you have a mental or physical condition. That might have something to do with how the purpose of diagnosis is not to divide the world into winners and losers, but to identify potential problems that might need to be treated or otherwise taken into account.

But I suppose you can't be faulted for being under such an impression, given the "excuse" aspect of self-diagnosed Asperger's I mentioned above.

This is especially true for aspergers, which doesn't actually translate to something meaningful or useful.

It translates into ensuring that children who have the condition train social contacts enough to become full-functional adults, since that's where the condition often causes problems. It's the same as any other diagnosis: defend against potential problems before they have a chance to develop, and solve any that already have.

Re:Aspergers Syndrome

[SETIGuy]

A number of famous mathematicians and physicists did a lot of great stuff before they were 25.

Unlike authors, musicians, and film makers, scientists don't get paid for the rest of their lives for things they did before they were 25. I know a couple scientists that were asking for change outside the 7-11 following their burn out, and several more doing the equivalent of working at the 7-11. If this kid really is an aspie, burning out is a bad option.

Yeah, science doesn't care if they live or die. Maybe society should.

Re:Aspergers Syndrome

[SETIGuy]

All money made in the markets is parasitic.

Re:Aspergers Syndrome

[srobert]

Go away future me.

Re:Aspergers Syndrome

[TheLink]

Yeah, science doesn't care if they live or die. Maybe society should.

That's the responsibility of a civilized society.

Many countries have universal healthcare, unemployment benefits/welfare, etc.

Re:Aspergers Syndrome

[Omestes]

However, in this case the diagnosis seems to be done by an actual psychologist, so it's probably trustworthy.

Perhaps. I have more faith in psychologists than I do in the lay public, but only barely. Psychology is an art, and most of it has little or no basis in "hard" science, such as physiology or neurology. Autism, aspergers especially is approaching the level of gross over-diagnosis, and trendiness that ADD/ADHD has.

That isn't to say that the kid doesn't have some flavor of it, or has particular problems. Its just odd that we choose to play up the problems, rather than focus on his skills. We wouldn't drop any other mental condition into this context. We wouldn't say "This kid is very smart, and has allergies", or "this kid is very smart and has mild depression". Autism has some silly misplaced mystique. Sometimes its a necessary part of a story (like with Kim Peek, and other savants), sometimes its completely pointless.

My girlfriend used to work with people with functional problems, including people with severe autism. She laughed at this kid, he's charming, and obviously functional.

Yes, amazingly enough it's possible to lead a happy, succesful and productive life even if you have a mental or physical condition

It is. But as one of my psychology proffesors told me, "a trait becomes an illness only when it hampers your ability to function". Merely not being social isn't a problem at all. Its natural (though sadly rare) to value things above mere social immersion. If anything we're too focused on the social, and not nearly focused enough on the individual, or more mental pursuits. Caring more about solving an equation than being popular isn't a bad thing. Most of the intelligent people I know are very socially awkward, and this is fine. When your more intelligent than your peers, some social issues will follow naturally. If you care about mucking with relativity, or solving inegrals, and the rest of your peer group care about football and American idol and can't understand a damn thing you care about... then yes... there will be problems. Is this a psychological problem? Probably not. The kid will grow to work around it; if he doesn't, only then will he have a problem.

Along time ago, when I was in high school, I knew a very brilliant kid. He graduated halfway through his junior year, with a good chunk of college level honors credits under his belt. He managed a to get a full ride engineering scholarship to MIT. He went for a semester, started to get burnt out and went to ASU instead. By his second year, he completely fizzled and dropped out "indefinitely". Did this kid have aspergers? Probably not, as it didn't really exist back then, and he managed to have a decent social circle. But then again this high school had a very high population of nerds, and we all formed a tight knit group, with all of our idiosyncrasies and obsessions. More importantly we could get together after school and talk about math, physics, computers and logic. In a more typical school, this kid would appear socially stunted.

It translates into ensuring that children who have the condition train social contacts enough to become full-functional adults, since that's where the condition often causes problems. It's the same as any other diagnosis: defend against potential problems before they have a chance to develop, and solve any that already have.

There is a risk though of deciding that normal introversion is somehow an illness. Some people don't get fulfillment from texting and checking Facebook every 13 seconds, These people are perfectly normal. If I had my druthers I would ditch every single one of my social responsibilities to sit around and read books and take apart random technology. If the kid doesn't care for people, so be it. The kid I talked about before, after he ditched out of ASU, he quickly found a nice girl and got married. Sometimes you have to grow into soc

Re:Aspergers Syndrome

[badkarmadayaccount]

If my therapist is to be believed, too many defenses of the sort have formed as a result of emotional childhood trauma (where "insult to intelligence" gains whole new meaning), as result choking my own personality, and draining my emotional energy trying to keep myself from cognitive meltdown due to all the pointless internal strain. Until I try and get rid of it, and the vultures come in to feast, jumpstarting the cycle. Any ideas for this type of reverse aspergers?

Re:Aspergers Syndrome

[jvonk]

If he has both sense and intelligence, he writes a stock performance predictor, uses it himself, and then uses a drill to expunge the knowledge from his brain.

FTFY.

Haha, what a great film...

Re:Aspergers Syndrome

[uninformedLuddite]

Maybe he can handle the truth?

Re:Aspergers Syndrome

[cp.tar]

ur mum's face seem to be remind me of the Borg.

cower in my shadow behind your chosen compression algorithm based pseudonym some more, feeb.

you're completely pathetic.

Thank you for your insight. It is completely $adjective.

Oh sure.....

[BLToday]

What's the theory? How does it "expand" on relativity?

Re:Oh sure.....

[WrongSizeGlass]

What's the theory? How does it "expand" on relativity?

I think he made relativity object oriented.

Re:Oh sure.....

[Yaos]

Why would you expect facts from a news article? They need to crap out articles as fast as possible and damn the reporting.

Re:Oh sure.....

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

This has nothing to do with Relativity as far as I can see. He's giving a presentation on integration by parts(to someone else apparently) using his window instead of a whiteboard. I wouldn't have started with the integrals that he did, but otherwise I find no complaint in the presentation.

Remarkable enough for a 12 year old, though it should be noted that there are a always a few precocious mathematicians about. I can say that it's more than I was able to do at 12, or 15 for that matter.

Ordinarily, bright sparks like this one would perhaps be trained to compete in the International Mathematics Olympiad or the like, and would go on to become a research mathematician. Unfortunately those glitterati physicists appear to have poached yet another promising student. Is there no end to their palaver?!

Re:Oh sure.....

[should_be_linear]

Or sticked alarm-clock on it.

Re:Oh sure.....

[mswhippingboy]

But then it couldn't be taught at CMU.

Barnett's Theory

[freakingme]

I'm not aware of a Barnett's theory, so he still gets to think of his own theory - when he is old. When he's fifteen y/o perhaps?

That kind of thing has been done actually

[Sycraft-fu]

They've looked at child prodigies, as in children who can truly excel even by adult standards, in fMRIs with various tests. I cannot find a link right now but the interesting thing they find is that in terms of logic, their brains function like adults, but in terms of emotion, their brains function like children. It is not as though they just develop at an accelerated rate, some things do, some do not.

Re:That kind of thing has been done actually

[HungryHobo]

perhaps the contrast has some advantage, a lot of really groundbreaking stuff seems to get done by the really young geniuses.

Re:That kind of thing has been done actually

[Sycraft-fu]

I don't know. I can't think of too many prodigies who you can name among the top scientists. There's a difference between a genius and a prodigy. For example Feynman was a genius. There is no question of that. However he was not a prodigy. While he was far ahead of most children, as geniuses are, he was not operating and excelling at an adult level as a pre-teen.

You don't see a lot of prodigies, it is pretty rare, and they only seem to happen in music and math (which may really be two sides to the same coin). However the do not seem to go on to become super-super geniuses very often.

Re:That kind of thing has been done actually

[Locke2005]

Feynman real talent was the ability to explain complex physics in terms even a 12 year old could understand. Looks like this kid has that same talent.

Re:That kind of thing has been done actually

[Bob Cat - NYMPHS]

Feynman was repairing radios and getting paid for it when he was a little boy [his words].

Re:That kind of thing has been done actually

[vlm]

Feynman real talent was the ability to explain complex physics in terms even a 12 year old could understand. Looks like this kid has that same talent.

I think you're getting all confused here. "Feynman's real talent" was in physics. He got a Nobel prize in physics for his work in QED. Not for writing books. I don't think any 12 year olds understand Feynman diagrams.

The weirdest part about Feynman's legacy is he did some pretty good lectures against cargo cult science, yet he's been embraced by those same people! Kind of like the situation of Nietzsche and antisemitism.

You want a dead scientist whom was a great writer, try Asimov and check out his non-fiction.

Re:That kind of thing has been done actually

[wisty]

Which is roughly equivalent to a boy getting paid to fix computers these days.

Re:That kind of thing has been done actually

[Garble Snarky]

He was able to do that because of the (apparently timeless) irrational fear of technology - soldering a loose wire was usually all it took. Entrepreneurial prodigy maybe, but not scientific.

Re:That kind of thing has been done actually

[blair1q]

Not to dis Feynman, but, radios were a few orders of magnitude simpler, then.

Re:That kind of thing has been done actually

[dadelbunts]

Whats wrong with hacking PS3's? Thats using the noggin for something productive.

Re:That kind of thing has been done actually

[ColdWetDog]

So, where on this rather depressing pantheon do you put people who don't use spell checkers?

Re:That kind of thing has been done actually

[Anonymous Coward]

You want a Slashdot poster who's a good writer don't look at "vlm" who tries to look and sound clever by using "whom" but is such a lackwit he can't seem to get it right.

Listen carefully.

"Who" is used for the subject -- for the thing in nominative case. In the sentence "The boy threw the ball to the dog", "the boy" is in nominative case.
"Whom", if you should want to use it, is used for accusative and dative cases. In the sentence "The boy threw the ball to the dog", "the ball" is the direct object and is therefore in accusative case. "The dog" is the indirect object and is therefore in dative case. In English the case system has almost entirely died out, but it lingers in Shakespeare, the King James Bible, personal pronouns, and "Who/Whom". It will never die out of the personal pronouns (imagine trying to say "He threw the ball to me" if "I" isn't declined across cases; at present we have "I/me/to me", "he, him, to him" and so forth). It will die out of the Bible eventually when people finally admit they don't understand what it says. Likewise Shakespeare. But it *will* die out of "who/whom", and soon, too, because people *have no clue*. And most people, rightly enough, *don't give a wet fart*. There are two types of people keeping it alive. Pretentious pricks who want to sound clever who keep trying to use it, and people who know how to use it. Alas, the former enormously outnumber the latter.

If you don't know how to use "whom", please don't use it. It's dying out of English and, frankly, since most people have no fucking clue what they're doing it should be left to die.

Re:That kind of thing has been done actually

[spiralx]

The other big exception is Paul Erdos, who published more papers than Euler (1,525) and was publishing up until he died at the age of 83 at a math's conference.

Re:That kind of thing has been done actually

[wganderson12]

I think Feynman's real talent, the talent shared by many of the physicists I know who make real fundamental breakthroughs, is the ability to _understand_ physical problems in terms that even a 12 year old could understand. That is to say, to pare away the unnecessary complexities and reduce the problem to the simplest form that encapsulates the essence of the question. Once you can do that, you can explain what's happening in terms even a 12 year old can understand, because that's how you understood it in the first place.

Re:That kind of thing has been done actually

[gregor-e]

Most of the time it was a dead tube back then. When we were about 12, my buddy and I used to scavenge radios and TVs from the dump, pull the tubes and use the tube tester down at the corner drugstore. Replacing the dead tubes fixed maybe 90% of them.

Re:That kind of thing has been done actually

[vlm]

"Whom", if you should want to use it, is used for accusative and dative cases.

I was using it completely wrong then. I exclusively use it to troll grammar trolls on /.. Its fun, trust me.

I did get a good laugh out of your post and I feel bad you posted as AC or I'd quote you in my sig file.

Have a bright and cheerful day of unicorns and balloons!

Re:That kind of thing has been done actually

[vlm]

I think Feynman's real talent, the talent shared by many of the physicists I know who make real fundamental breakthroughs, is the ability to _understand_ physical problems in terms that even a 12 year old could understand. That is to say, to pare away the unnecessary complexities and reduce the problem to the simplest form that encapsulates the essence of the question. Once you can do that, you can explain what's happening in terms even a 12 year old can understand, because that's how you understood it in the first place.

Sounds like a good engineer. Emphasis on good. You'd probably like Dr Robert Pease formerly of national semidestructor, he writes a nice column in electronic design called "Pease Porridge"

Re:That kind of thing has been done actually

[Anonymous Coward]

Go attack string theory (I guess that wasn't enough of a challenge?) HAH!!

Shut up Sheldon !

Re:That kind of thing has been done actually

[Locke2005]

I did radio maintenance one summer. I was told to fix a 30 year old 2-way radio with no schematics that was basically a bunch of tube sockets with wires running between leads on each socket. After testing all the tubes and doing a visual inspection, I gave up. But one of the radar technicians was able to figure out that a diode in the power supply had gone bad and kludged in a ridiculously oversized diode from the radar parts! Of course, I was 18 and he was about 50...

Re:That kind of thing has been done actually

[Locke2005]

Face it, any fagot can get a job, procreate, and get wealthy.

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Re:That kind of thing has been done actually

[Locke2005]

Unfortunately both "faggot" and "fagot" are acceptable spellings of this unacceptable term.

Re:That kind of thing has been done actually

[ynp7]

He won a Nobel for his work in QED? Where can I download his Quake maps?

Re:That kind of thing has been done actually

[eleuthero]

If you are all that concerned about grammar, might I suggest you take into consideration the wonderful invention of the comma. It is a little used device, more common in French and less in Spanish, but it excels in the English language at dividing up clauses within a sentence. I like commas. Commas probably would like me if they liked anything, but either you don't like commas or they don't like you.

More importantly, we aren't in grammar school. I like grammar--my students think I grade them too hard on it, but... we are here to simply discuss things... you understood what the gpp was referring to by using "whom"... just as you understand (I hope) what I am doing by using ellipses...

Getting caught up in grammar that still communicates should not be a problem and distracts us from the purpose of this discussion section (a 12-year old genius getting headlines in sensationalistic media for having 're-written' Einstein's theory of relativity). Is grammar important? Yes. Do we need to be so focused on demanding rigorous adherence to formal grammar that we lose sight of the point of our discussion here? No. Do we need to be so focused on formal grammar that we lose sight of the beauty of linguistic change? No.

Re:That kind of thing has been done actually

[underqualified]

Feynman real talent was the ability to explain complex physics in terms even a 12 year old could understand. Looks like this kid has that same talent.

Looks like this kid read Feynman's book.

Re:That kind of thing has been done actually

[tibit]

I don't think any 12 year olds understand Feynman diagrams.

Around the age of 14 I was lucky to have access to a copy of the Douglas Robb Memorial Lectures given by Feynman. They were many generations from the original, the quality was horrible; in spite of it those were perhaps the most clear physics lectures I have heard at the time. At least he made me understand what the diagram is, even if I was nowhere near any of the math needed to use the diagrams the way they are usually used. Never mind that having a basic understanding of what QED is all about isn't anything to be scoffed at IMHO.

Re:That kind of thing has been done actually

[tibit]

Agreed. Pease and Feynman have a similar approach to things. To me, that's the quintessence of genius.

Re:That kind of thing has been done actually

[elronxenu]

I can confirm that; the radios and TVs I repaired as a kid had pretty simple faults. Rarely a non-simple fault came around which I couldn't fix.

Re:That kind of thing has been done actually

[unitron]

Not to dis Feynman, but, radios were a few orders of magnitude simpler, then.

Which actually made them more complex to work on, in a way. Nowadays you don't have to, or have to know how to, or even understand why you need to, align an IF strip, you just replace a chip.

Re:That kind of thing has been done actually

[sandytaru]

They happen in languages too, but it's not as impressive. As a child, I was 20 years ahead in age for reading comprehension and writing, but only barely above average in math. Yet no one suggested I go take college level English classes in middle school. Instead my English teachers just let me go off to the library and write for an hour during class time, which was fine with me.

Nonsense!

[gestalt_n_pepper]

He doesn't even have his deriver's license yet!

Re:Nonsense!

[Locke2005]

Wow... he's rewriting relativity, and he can't even derive yet!

Re:Nonsense!

[sweatyboatman]

that is so bad I was forced to comment

Re:Nonsense!

[Nameisyoung007]

I'll admit it- I misread it as "driver's license", but all that means is that he can't use a VW Beetle at the speed of light. He'll have to use the bus.

Re:Nonsense!

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

But he is in integrator, not a deriver so he does not need one.

Re:Nonsense!

[sconeu]

Just remember... Math and alcohol don't mix, so PLEASE DON'T DRINK AND DERIVE!!!!!!

Re:Nonsense!

[makubesu]

I for one welcome our new 12 year old overlords.

Re:Nonsense!

[Methuseus]

Actually, some breakthroughs have come from being "under the influence", some of Einstein's included.

Re:Nonsense!

[History's Coming To]

Isn't that a little....*puts on shades*...derivative? (With apologies to xkcd, I couldn't resist)

Re:Nonsense!

[antdude]

Deriver? :P

Re:Nonsense!

[Geminii]

Fortunately, he's not old enough to drink and derive.

The Big Bang

[Anonymous Coward]

"But far from complaining, Jake has turned the sleepless nights to his advantage - debunking the big bang theory."

Wait...what? I think we need more of an explanation on this little gem.

Re:The Big Bang

[skids]

IIRC when I read this a day or two ago, it was due to not enough time available for the formation of carbon by the time it was supposed to be there.

Re:The Big Bang

[ThatMegathronDude]

Daily Mail. Enough said.

Re:The Big Bang

[Culture20]

"But far from complaining, Jake has turned the sleepless nights to his advantage - debunking the big bang theory."
Wait...what? I think we need more of an explanation on this little gem.

Explanation at http://www.indystar.com/article/20110320/LOCAL01/103200369/Genius-work-12-year-old-studying-IUPUI
Jump down to "Thinking big is what he does"

Re:The Big Bang

[Hogwash McFly]

He finds the characters contrived, the jokes laboured, and the acting sub-par at best.

Re:The Big Bang

[tycoex]

I like all these "theoretical" substances. Instead of just admitting when a theory doesn't make sense, we like to make something up that would allow the theory to stand.

Doesn't that just fly in the face of the entire premise of science?

Re:The Big Bang

[AvitarX]

Doesn't big bang theory basically say "magic" for that first instant though?

I think the fact that he is sussing out a new theory is good, and quite possibly correct, but the hole, not enough time for carbon I don't quite buy, as again, "magic" (for example one, then two dimensional space).

Re:The Big Bang

[danbert8]

And really, who believes a show where nerds have sex with hot women? It was much better when the sexual tension was unresolved. Now it's just Friends with science...

Re:The Big Bang

[PvtVoid]

Explanation at http://www.indystar.com/article/20110320/LOCAL01/103200369/Genius-work-12-year-old-studying-IUPUI

Here is his "debunking" of the big bang:

"So, um, in the big-bang theory, what they do is, there is this big explosion and there is all this temperature going off and the temperature decreases really rapidly because it's really big. The other day I calculated, they have this period where they suppose the hydrogen and helium were created, and, um, I don't care about the hydrogen and helium, but I thought, wouldn't there have to be some sort of carbon?"
...
I calculated, the time it would take to create 2 percent of the carbon in the universe, it would actually have to be several micro-seconds. Or a couple of nano-seconds, or something like that. An extremely small period of time. Like faster than a snap. That isn't gonna happen."

This is total gibberish. There is no carbon created in the Big Bang, only hydrogen, helium, and lithium. This was understood in the 1970's. All of the carbon in the universe is created in stars. This is likewise well understood. Also, the earth is mostly iron, not carbon. If this kid's new theory of relativity is anything like his theory of cosmology, he needs to be back in school getting an education, not doing independent research.

Re:The Big Bang

[blair1q]

But he likes the song about the Kitty.

Re:The Big Bang

[FSWKU]

He also finds the meatloaf to be shallow and pedantic.

Re:The Big Bang

[should_be_linear]

Actually, coming up with his own ideas and then learning why that woudn't work is pretty good way to learn stuff really fast comparnig to listening years of lectures first.

Re:The Big Bang

[j00r0m4nc3r]

"I have a truly marvelous demonstration of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain..."

Re:The Big Bang

[Noughmad]

I thought that The Big Band Theory lost its original funniness after the first two seasons, when it became more about relationships that about scientists, but I never figured it was because of a twelve-year-old.

Re:The Big Bang

[Luyseyal]

I think the kid's original point — lost in the article by the clueless writer — is that enough time hasn't passed for stars to have created all of it. In that case, you'd have to get it from the big bang and he thinks that's impossible.

Prima facie, it seems a reasonable approach for an argument but without a Real Paper[tm] it's just angels on the head of a pin.

Having said that, I agree with you that he is probably reinventing the wheel here and perhaps a few lectures and some reading could help him get a little further along in finding avenues for original research.

-l

Re:The Big Bang

[millennial]

No, it doesn't. You have a model. It works, mostly. You discover new evidence that points out a flaw in the model. You hypothesize a possible solution to the flaws. You gather evidence and make observations to try to determine if the hypothesis is correct. That's the current state of dark energy - hypothesis. Observations and calculations have shown that the assumptions made about dark energy have fixed some of the flaws in the model and made more accurate estimations and predictions than the model could make before. The fact that we don't know what it is isn't really relevant; the evidence seems to point out that something is going on there. Figuring out what it is is a separate question to figuring out whether or not it's there.

Re:The Big Bang

[bloodhawk]

No it isn't, all he is doing is flailing his arms around pointlessly, you don't learn faster from wasting your time, that is like saying someone will learn basketball faster by being left alone with a court and a ball, it simply isn't the case.

Re:The Big Bang

[pankajmay]

Doesn't big bang theory basically say "magic" for that first instant though?

It is "magic" in the same sense that this is magic: Lim_{x -> \infty} {1/x} = 0
The first instance is a limiting case, in that we can only postulate it by coming arbitrarily close to that first instant.

Re:The Big Bang

[tycoex]

Well, thanks for an actual response instead of saying "LOL L2SCIENCE NUB."

Re:The Big Bang

[mfnickster]

This is total gibberish. There is no carbon created in the Big Bang, only hydrogen, helium, and lithium. This was understood in the 1970's.

I guess after rewriting Einstein's theory of relativity, he re-wrote the Alpher-Bethe-Gamow theory of stellar nucleosynthesis. :)

Re:The Big Bang

[Sparx139]

You know, what's always bugged me about Fermat's Last Theorem is, what if he didn't actually have a proof? That he made the note in the margin knowing that someone would one day find it, and then chase after a theory that may or may not have actually existed - it being a coincidence that the statement is correct. It would have been a fantastic way to troll the entire mathematical community.

Re:The Big Bang

[nurb432]

Sometimes an 'education' is counter productive as restricts your thinking and forces you to conform to the 'accepted truths' of the day, which are not always right.

Re:The Big Bang

[Lehk228]

that is true to a point, but flailing uncontrollably into provably wrong territory is rarely helpful, especially when it is as wrong as thinking that earth is mostly carbon

Re:The Big Bang

[boristhespider]

You can even go further and simply say that the phrase "dark energy" just says "the universe appears to be accelerating" and the phrase "dark matter" means "there appears to be more gravitating matter around than we see". Those "appears" are very important. So it's not really inventing some substance to patch a hole; it's more simply naming an exceedingly puzzling observation. Dark energy is far the more disturbing of the two of them, and a myriad of solutions have been suggested. These range from vacuum energy - the same thing that gives rise to the Casimir force and therefore experimentally observed, in principle... extending that to cosmology is, shall we say, non-trivial - to changing our cosmological model from its currently over-approximated condition and introducing no physics, all the way to modifying the laws of gravity itself. In the midst of all these sit the "generally accepted" models, which are either vacuum energy or dynamical scalar fields arbitrarily introduced basically in lieu of anything better to introduce. Constraints on their parameters at least tell you how your ignorance should behave. I don't think anyone is genuinely and seriously believing their scalar field model of dark energy; it's just phenomenology to give us a handle on how something behaves. In very many ways, that's no different to the 19th century physicists and chemists who developed thermodynamics which is nothing more than a phenomenology giving sketchy hints to the underlying behaviour.

Re:The Big Bang

[boristhespider]

Nah, it doesn't really. The "big bang" theory only applies when general relativity applies (and the universe can be taken to be totally smooth and homogeneous). General relativity breaks down on quantum scales -- it must do, not least because it would contradict something like quantum electrodynamics which has been tested to a precision gravitational theorists can only dream about. The best guess of the scale where it breaks down is the "Planck" scale, which is extremely small but still finite. That would basically be a minimum scale at which gravity should become quantum in nature. So, running time backwards, as soon as the universe begins to approach the Planck scale the big bang theory cannot be trusted anymore. QM gravity effects would totally alter cosmology.

So basically the big bang theory just says "given that at some time the observable universe was a picometre across and had *this* nature, whatever that nature was, this is what we'd see now". Extrapolating it back any further is extremely dubious given the antagonism between relativity and quantum mechanics.

The best studies I've seen of what might happen instead come from loop quantum gravity, which at heart is a much more conservative (and hence realistic) approach to quantum gravity than string theory. People (Bojowald was the first, I believe) have argued what modifications to cosmology should come out from the micostructure of loop quantum gravity. The result is a theory that contains a "bounce" -- there never was a big bang, if you believe loop quantum cosmology. Of course, then you're left with the question "so what came before that, then? If there was a universe before all this?" and the more subtle but enormously more troubling question "Why is the universe's entropy so low if there were cycles beforehand, during which entropy only continued to grow?", but we're always going to be left with some unknown questions.

Re:The Big Bang

[boristhespider]

You're not the first to suggest that possibility... I can't remember where I first heard it but it always sounded persuasive to me. Either he was mistaken (there is no way on Earth he proved it the way we now do, and a simpler proof would have come to light before now) or he was trolling us all. I like the idea that he was trolling us, to be honest. It would reaffirm my faith in humanity.

Re:The Big Bang

[dontbgay]

Daaaaaaang... You sound so smart! It seems like the kid beat you to it though.

FTA:

"Otherwise, the carbon would have to be coming out of the stars and hence the Earth, made mostly of carbon, we wouldn't be here. So I calculated, the time it would take to create 2 percent of the carbon in the universe, it would actually have to be several micro-seconds. Or a couple of nano-seconds, or something like that. An extremely small period of time. Like faster than a snap. That isn't gonna happen."

So he's 12. And he does math. And he thought of that. From what I can tell, the numbers he's crunched stated that there should have been some carbon but there was none. Nice work on the quick reaction though.

Obligatory XKCD

[Anonymous Coward]

Too Old For This Shit

Jebus

[SomePgmr]

I now feel like a barely functioning, non-contributing member of society. Thanks slashdot.

Re:Jebus

[Anonymous Coward]

No contribution is still better than "negative contribution" (for instance Wall Street).

Re:Jebus

[harl]

Give it 5-20 years. You're feel better after he burns him self out.

You always hear about child prodigies but you never hear about successful middle age people who were child prodigies.

Re:Jebus

[Zelaron]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_child_prodigies

Re:Jebus

[harl]

Thank you. You prove my point. No info on the great things they're doing today. Only the great things they did at 6 years old.

William James Sidis (1898–1944) set a record in 1909 by becoming the youngest person to enroll at Harvard College, at 11 years old.

Later life (1921–1944)
He only took work running adding machines or other fairly menial tasks.
taught small circles of interested friends his version of American history.
He worked in New York City and became estranged from his parents.

March Tian Boedihardjo (born 1998), passed the A-level math exam at the age of nine years and three months

Lists no accomplishments post childhood.

Sufiah Yusof (born 1984) a Malaysian girl, gained entry into St. Hilda's College, Oxford University, in 1997, to study mathematics at 12 years old.

In March 2008, a reporter working undercover for the News of the World found her advertising as a prostitute under the name Shilpa Lee, quoting a rate of £130 an hour. One of her friends described her change of fortunes as "desperately heartbreaking", adding that "her gift [for mathematics] really has been a curse".

Re:Jebus

[harl]

He would be an exception case. Check out the people listed below. It's a laundry list of train wrecks.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_child_prodigies

Re:Jebus

[JonySuede]

That is the curse of the gifted child...

Re:Sounds like someone i know...

[blai]

No, Cooper was 14...

Haters gonna hate

[Locke2005]

"I gave the bitch an expanded Theory of Relativity. Bitches love expanded Theories of Relativity!"

Yep, the women are gonna be all over this kid like prepubescents on a Beiber...

Works on Windows ....

[drpimp]

But how does one calculate integration by parts on non-Windows?

Re:Works on Windows ....

[EventHorizon_pc]

I'm sure I could get it working on my blackberry, if it was still working.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAG39jKi0lI

Of course, the blackberry wouldn't have much space. An apple would be a little easier to work with in that respect, though not as easy as on windows.

Re:I hear he's also quite the ladies man

[Locke2005]

Einstein had a one-track mind. He would get fixated on one subject and obsess about it for days, to the exclusion of all else. Imagine what happened when he got fixated on pussy!

Sounds like he's good at math.

[pclminion]

So, the kid seems to be great at math. Question is, is he great at physics? Manipulating equations in startling ways is cool and all, but if the result doesn't agree with reality, or if it produces nothing testable, then you're just messing around. Period.

Einstein always struggled with the mathematics and didn't consider himself to be very good at it. Einstein's contribution was the physical insight behind relativity.

Re:Sounds like he's good at math.

[hitmark]

theoretical physics have already reached the point of being untestable unless one can launch a spacecraft into close proximity to a black hole...

Re:Sounds like he's good at math.

[slimjim8094]

Sounds like a test to me. Nobody said it would be easy or cheap to do these tests (hence the LHC).

The problem is when you have things like string theory that don't really make testable predictions. Not that predictions are mad but are hard to test. Curvature of space is hard to test too, until you get the chance to look at a gravitational lens around a star.

Re:Sounds like he's good at math.

[mbkennel]

"Einstein always struggled with the mathematics and didn't consider himself to be very good at it."

Yes, but his 'reference frame' in this matter was his collaborator/friend/rival David Hilbert who is the most important mathemetician of the 20th century (maybe with Kolmogorov).

Re:Sounds like he's good at math.

[hweimer]

theoretical physics have already reached the point of being untestable unless one can launch a spacecraft into close proximity to a black hole...

Ahem, not all of theoretical physics is like that.

Re:Sounds like he's good at math.

[lennier]

theoretical physics have already reached the point of being untestable unless one can launch a spacecraft into close proximity to a black hole...

Good news everyone! The Large Hadron Collider will soon make it possible to rigorously test General Relativity, as soon as we can construct a sufficiently well-armed microscopic space fleet.

Re:Sounds like he's good at math.

[pclminion]

Ha ha, have you been paying attention to physics over the last 50 years? "Produces nothing testable" is pretty much the dictionary definition of modern physics.

Quarks were testable. Neutrino oscillation was testable. Relativistic frame dragging was testable. Quantum teleportation was testable. Electroweak unification was testable. Vacuum polarization was testable. Shall I continue?

Re:Sounds like he's good at math.

[Locke2005]

Even if you can launch it into a black hole, how do you get the experimental results back after the spacecraft passes through the event horizon?

Re:Sounds like he's good at math.

[Locke2005]

Yeah, some of it is worse!

Re:Sounds like he's good at math.

[Locke2005]

He is trying to say that there is more carbon in the universe that would be predicted by the currently accepted theorems about no carbon being created in the be big bang, the universe being 13 billion years old, and all carbon being created inside stars past a certain size. No, I don't get that from his explanation, I get that from other people's interpretation of his explanation. I'm too stupid to refute his theory, but I don't think it means that the big bang theory is wrong. Rather, it means that one of several different theories about the universe is inaccurate. He's probably just wrong in assuming that carbon is uniformly distributed rather than their being local minima and maxima -- areas close to several supernovae would have an abundance of carbon, and we might be in one such area.

Re:Sounds like he's good at math.

[boristhespider]

Easy. Connect an ethernet cable to a computer on the spaceship and to a computer on your orbiter. Send the spaceship in and get it to signal back. If that doesn't work, program it to tug on the cable with a little motor and send signals in Morse code.

Re:Sounds like he's good at math.

[boristhespider]

dude, he's 12

cautious optimism

[shipbrick]

The important part will be if he formulates a new theory or extends Einstein's theory such that we could make more or more accurate predictions about the universe. His math skills are not the only prerequisite here. Einstein himself said "Imagination is more important than knowledge"

"Professor John Ross, who vows to help find some grant funding to support Jake and his work " This we have to watch out for. Science funding can be difficult to get, especially in tough economic times, and hopefully this child isn't simply exploited to bring in money (or fame) for John Ross. Hopefully Robin Williams will help this kid out if necessary.

Re:cautious optimism

[hedwards]

That's the thing, there's a lot of ideas that I've personally got that are unlikely to ever see the light of day, because I haven't got facilities to do the research. Getting a PhD would help, but even there it's not really enough to guarantee you get funding. Once you've got funding you then have to worry about actually conducting the research which isn't always easy, especially for cases like when Einstein was working on Relativity.

Jake Barnett = Sam Beckett?

[LordStormes]

Quick, enroll this kid in MIT, get him 7 degrees, and drop him off in the desert. I need a Quantum Leap Accelerator.

Evolution..

[daitengu]

I've been saying it for years.   Autism isn't a disease, it's the next step in human evolution.

Re:Evolution..

[Anonymous Coward]

So guys with autism get more pussy?

Re:Evolution..

[smelch]

I've been saying it for years, Autism is what uncomfortable people use to make themselves feel ok about never quite understanding humans because they were too busy thinking instead of experiencing. Also, in rare cases used to refer to a mental disorder.

Re:Evolution..

[Culture20]

If we were all autists, society would fall apart. High-functioning autism is great for specialized tasks, but it's nothing like neuro-typicals, and those with autism who aren't high functioning are essentially mentally retarded. They're like rain-man without the card-counting (or worse). High functioning autists are special gene sequences that bubble up every now and then, but environmental and sociological pressures will prevent them from being the norm.

Re:Evolution..

[Anonymous Coward]

So guys with autism get more pussy?

We're still working on that part.

Re:Evolution..

[Anonymous Coward]

Or they were too busy experiencing something you don't understand.

Re:Evolution..

[zegota]

Or maybe, you know, different people are different, and we need a diverse mix to build an efficient, progressive society. But no, you're probably right, human society would be much more advanced if we got rid of the whole socializing thing.

Re:Evolution..

[Hermanas]

If we were all autists, society would fall apart. High-functioning autism is great for specialized tasks

And if ever an autistic person happens to specialize in procreation, it really would be tickets for society.

Re:Evolution..

[Anonymous Coward]

Asking maybe a dumb question, how does sexuality and intimacy go along with autism? I mean, how easy it is to actually procreate for autists and raise children then - I still memorize "Idiocracy" movie, a shockingly illustrative movie about natural selection and "evolution".

Re:Evolution..

[Grygus]

I doubt that. Autism has too many social downsides; without social acceptance, the ability to procreate is negatively impacted, and survival/procreation is what evolution is all about.

Re:Evolution..

[DigiShaman]

But will it pay off? Once you introduce specialization in a species, they're often that more co-dependent on each other. Prior to human civilization, these people would not have survived (or in great numbers at least) for very long. But if they can survive in large enough in numbers to procreate, we could be witnessing much more specialized diversity within the human race.

Re:Evolution..

[Trentula]

I'm not sure I'd label it as the next stage in evolution, but perhaps a simultaneous branch.

We need people who are capable of interacting with other people as well as those who are able to focus incredibly well on particular things at the cost of being able to interact with other people.

To claim one is better than the other is, I feel, foolish.

Who cares if one is brilliant if one isn't able to effectively articulate and communicate ideas to others who can help a concept come to fruition?

To me, it seems that most advancements in STEM these days come from a team effort, not lone wolves

Re:Evolution..

[blair1q]

Evolution is geared towards traits that enhance the probability of procreation. Autism, not so much. Unless you're proposing to make Autistic children the "Queens" of our hive, and relegate everyone else to supporting them and their broods...

Re:Evolution..

[Culture20]

and those with autism who aren't high functioning are essentially mentally retarded.

Very poor conclusion. You abviously have never been around many people with Autism.

Actually, I have. And what I said is true. If someone suffering from autism isn't otherwise intelligent (autism does _not_ make you more intelligent, despite rain-man movie inspired beliefs), they're on the low end of capability for normal functioning. And if they're in the population that is autistic _and_ less intelligent, then they're crippled intellectually and socially; they are unable to function without care.

Re:Evolution..

[smelch]

Foolish? why? because you fail to read? Have you honestly never run across all the people claiming to have Aspergers, or being accused of Aspergers because they're weird? Perhaps you are the foolish one and believe its true. I on the other hand think its relatively rare that the person actually has the disorder and is not looking for a way to feel better ("I'm wicked smart!") and have an excuse ("But I'm awkward cause this disorder.").

Re:Evolution..

[Lumpy]

Thanks sheldon... Go back to your research...

Re:Evolution..

[Culture20]

And if ever an autistic person happens to specialize in procreation, it really would be tickets for society.

"Hey Baby, wanna go back to my hotel room and watch People's Court?"
"I'm not wearing any underwear."
"That's okay, we still have time to stop by K-Mart before People's Court starts."

Re:Evolution..

[MobyDisk]

I suspect that the reason you keep saying it is because you autistic. That might explain why you repeat the phrase 50,000 times before you can get out of bed and eat breakfast.

Re:Evolution..

[zmughal]

Branching? Reminds me of the Eloi and Morlocks from the "The Time Machine".

Re:Evolution..

[smelch]

Sorry I flipped the Autism/Aspergers switch reading too many comments. I meant Autism, but it pretty much applies equally to both. Just don't want people to think I don't understand the difference.

Re:Evolution..

[hedwards]

It's definitely not the next step in human evolution. Saying it's not a disease is plausible, but if all or most people had autism, society would implode pretty quickly.

Re:Evolution..

[19061969]

So you're saying that people with autism are more likely to successfully pass on their genes to the next generation than people without?

Evidence, please.

Re:Evolution..

[Anonymous Coward]

Vaguely related, and I love the quote.

"Introverts almost never cause me trouble and are usually much better at what they do than extroverts. Extroverts are too busy slapping one another on the back, team building, and making fun of introverts to get much done ... I can pass for normal most of the time, but I understand perfectly why some of my autistic patients scream and flap their arms - it's to frighten off extroverts." Mark Vonnegut, MD

Re:Evolution..

[Omestes]

neuro-typicals

Is there really such a thing? From everything I've read, learned, and experienced shows that there is no strict "typical" in humans, just a range of traits collapsing on a bell curve. Some people may be more typical in certain metrics, vary in others, and only when taken as aggregate turn into something somewhat mirroring "typical".

High functioning autists are special gene sequences that bubble up every now and then, but environmental and sociological pressures will prevent them from being the norm.

I haven't read any reputable research showing anything like this. Autism, and the soon to be defunct aspergers, is a spectrum disorder, meaning showing a specific genetic or physiological cause is very difficult, if not impossible. This is especially true thanks to its largely subjective nature, and the fact that it might be more over-diagnosed than ADD/ADHD now. Psychology is an art, and lacking in objective measures, it is to science what criticism is to art. When we have a solid physiological basis for autism, or large swaths of the spectrum, then I'll sit up and pay attention.

Autism isn't as interesting as the actual, Rainmanesque, savants. Sure they aren't as potentially useful, but they are much more interesting, and may prove to be more scientifically useful. Kim Peek, the man who Rainman is loosely based on, was fascinating, and studies of him might likely prove very important to cognitive neuroscience. But then again, science often learns much more from the edge cases than from the rank and file.

Re:Evolution..

[ScentCone]

Autism isn't a disease, it's the next step in human evolution.

If, by "evolution" you mean "an adaptation that will - like so many others - prove to make for an interesting episode that fails to produce anything useful," then ... sure. Autism (especially the heavy-duty kind) doesn't produce humans that can function in the sort of social groups that form advanced societies (or reproducing pairs, for that matter).

Re:Evolution..

[rozz]

I've been saying it for years. Autism isn't a disease, it's the next step in human evolution.

amen to that! people just like to classify as sick whatever they do not like or understand.
and also, I always thought that the big bang in the 3rd biggest scam in the history of the mankind ... with no1&2 being money and religion
good luck and all the best to lil jack

Re:Evolution..

[daitengu]

Is it a dead branch? look at this kid. He seems quite able to function in society.  Evolution requires many, MANY 'misses' before it gets a 'hit'.  Take a look at homo sapiens for example, and all the various "missing links" before it.  those species all died out because they were dead branches. 

Re:Evolution..

[GoNINzo]

A positive evolutionary trait usually provides the mutated with a better survival rate, or attracts a better mate, or gives an advantage in an most circumstances. Yet even the most successful of the autistic usually have a lower survival rate, a worse chance at attracting a quality mate, and their advantages are in very focused circumstances. I would not say that it fits with the standards of evolution. Only the most successful are going to survive, of course, but those instances are rare, while the rest are much less successful, leading to a realistic evolutionary dead end. Excellent concentration abilities has it's price, especially if it involved memorizing pokedex's.

Of course, this assumes that autism is mostly nature and not nurture or environment, which is not proven yet either.

Re:Evolution..

[lennier]

If we were all autists, society would fall apart.

Hey now, I went to aut school and got an aut degree and now I design autwork for Aupple, you insensitive Claude!

Re:Evolution..

[TheTyrannyOfForcedRe]

The first test for dead branch status is "Do others find them fuckable?" Sadly for most Autistics the answer is no. Whether or not their offspring would flourish is irrelevant when they can't score a mate.

Re:Evolution..

[MarkRose]

But note that only the very maladjusted individuals on the autistic spectrum stick out. Others do quite well: Zuckerberg, Einstein, Dan Akroyd, and on and on.

For full blown autism, the chances of reproducing are slim. But for Asperger Syndrome? They're not bad. As people with AS tend to not know what to say in social situations, they come across as the strong, silent type, which women find quite attractive. It's not hard for an individual with AS to get laid if they learn how to act the part in the mating game.. it's just a social dance. Much harder is the long term relationship where emotional communication is important, where there is no act to follow.

Re:Evolution..

[TheTyrannyOfForcedRe]

Humans are dead simple to understand if you take the time. The hard part is identifying all of the lies that society tells itself so that it can sleep at night. Once you've uncovered those reading people is like reading a book. Unfortunately, you need to pay a lot of attention to people and their petty bullshit for a number of years. I can't say it's worth it. If you "don't like people" before you understand them don't think you'll like them any better afterward. Quite the opposite in most cases.

Re:Evolution..

[nullCRC]

No, you're foolish because you assume everyone with autism is high functioning, or a savant, which they are not.

Re:Evolution..

[Draek]

Yes, because the problem is that some people think too much.

Re:Evolution..

[daitengu]

You've answered your own question there with the word "most".

*SOME* are.

Re:Evolution..

[HoboMaster]

Truth. Fact is, humans need to be proficient at a lot of things in order to live properly. A few autist people is great, because they have a hyper-focus that is useful in certain situations, but even they require others in order to function on a day-to-day basis. It is extremely inefficient and very evolutionarily undesirable. Autists are unable to handle situations outside of their specialization. That's unsustainable for a large number of people. "Specialization is for insects." -Heinlein

Re:Evolution..

[LateArthurDent]

Foolish? why? because you fail to read? Have you honestly never run across all the people claiming to have Aspergers, or being accused of Aspergers because they're weird? Perhaps you are the foolish one and believe its true. I on the other hand think its relatively rare that the person actually has the disorder and is not looking for a way to feel better ("I'm wicked smart!") and have an excuse ("But I'm awkward cause this disorder.").

Foolish because you think "being awkward" or "weird" is something that needs an excuse. That mentality, very prevalent in society, is what causes people to self-diagnose themselves as having some form of autism. "Well, everyone is telling me that I'm not normal, I see online that people with my characteristics appear to have this disorder, so I must have it." Foolish because you implied these people need something to "feel ok...because they were too busy thinking instead of experiencing" as if they're missing out, and just need to fix themselves by conforming to what you believe they should be.

I can play your game. I could be as ridiculous as you, and turn it around. I could say that you make those statements because you're jealous of people with the ability to get totally lost in their own thoughts. People who can have as much fun solving problems alone in their room as you do when you have a night out on the town. I won't, though, because I don't believe that. What I do believe is that most people, you included, like to think the way that they live their lives is the best way to live, and that everyone who doesn't agree is "missing out." The highly intelligent people who "don't understand humans" think that about you. They think you're missing out, unable to see the wonder of the world that they can. You think they're missing out, because you don't understand them. If you stopped trying to tell each other that there's something wrong with the other group (they're awkward and you're unintelligent), then we'd stop trying to find something to explain our behavior, whatever that behavior is. We'd simply be able to say, "this is what I like to do" and that would be explanation enough.

Re:Evolution..

[duk242]

Valid Point. The next step in human evolution is those that have the advantage so they can breed more. Looks like the human race is doomed to become a bunch of arse holes :(

Re:Evolution..

[SoVeryTired]

Have you ever met someone who is *actually* autistic? Not someone who has Asperger's and is socially awkward, but someone who has the full-blown condition?

When I was in secondary school, we took a course where we interacted with autistic people on a day-to-day basis. Autistic people can not be expected to care for themselves in any way. Forget taking advanced maths. It's a hard slog to get these guys washed and dressed every day.

I think both the OP and the GP are romanticising the condition. Yes, sometimes people on the so-called autistic spectrum have "sitzenfleich" - the ability to sit down and slog through difficult technical material, day after day, hour after hour. Don't count on it though. In general, it's just a very sad condition that limits a person's ability to understand and communicate with others.

Re:Evolution..

[Lehk228]

that is only one layer of fitness, next order is prevalence of a trait in a community improving aggregate survival even if the individuals are at a disadvantage, as long as the disadvantage isn't too bad OR the trait is a recessive trait or at least a more complex trait than a simple dominant trait it can increase it's own prevalence by strengthening and growing communities. example of this would be familial altruism,

Re:Evolution..

[Boronx]

Autism is the "sickle cell anemia" of one of the next stages of evolution.

Re:Evolution..

[smelch]

I'm refering to the self diagnosers out there. I'm not denying autism or implying awkwardness needs an excuse. I'm deriding the people who use the excuse, which is quite ridiculous. I don't think they're missing out, they think they're missing out. If they didn't, they wouldn't be offering the excuse.

Re:Evolution..

[smelch]

Or maybe you can't read and I'm not assuming that at all, just pointing out a trend where more and more people who are smart and weird are categorized as having the disorder, usually by themselves. Don't be a douche and read in to what I said as an attack on autistic people. It wasn't.

Re:Evolution..

[Geminii]

Wow, imagine a society where the majority were high-functioning autistic.

No reality TV, no celebrities, no lying on advertisements (and probably fewer of them), no hucksterism, politicians would serve the interests of their electorate (and that's assuming there would even be a need for a completely hierarchical government instead of regional agreements), policies would be based on raw data instead of chest-thumping, religion would be little more than a curio, and there'd probably be gazillion-bit-data channels in every household.

Sounds, uh, terrible?

Re:Evolution..

[jvonk]

Unless you're proposing to make Autistic children the "Queens" of our hive, and relegate everyone else to supporting them and their broods...

I am cognizant of the tongue in cheek nature of your remark, but strangely, eusocial mammals are not without precedent.

Very bizarre. I had always considered eusociality to be the exclusive domain of the insects...

Phebe, meet Jacob

[UBfusion]

Jacob must be the male equivalent of "Phoebe in Wonderland" - an excellent movie on a non-geeky deviation from "normality" which was attributed to Tourette's syndrome. The success of this film is that we don't see Phoebe doing anything much abnormal, she just seems to overreact a bit to her environment.

However, after having read Foucault's History of Madness I am not totally convinced these cases are truly "syndromes", in the sense of pathological deviations from 100% healthy humans. The fortunate thing is that Jacob's parents were not idiots and had the guts to ask university professors whether their son's gibberish made any sense. I welcome such stories getting media coverage because I don't think that the majority of parents would ever consider the case their erratically misbehaving children might be savants and not psychopaths.

Re:Phebe, meet Jacob

[Locke2005]

That's the problem with spectrum disorders... they are things that everybody does, but some people do more than others. It's nearly impossible to determine a point at which it becomes a "disability".

Re:Phebe, meet Jacob

[c6gunner]

Car accidents are a spectrum between minor rubbig while parking and a full head-on collision at a closing velocity of 250+ km/h. It's nearly impossible to determine the point at which one becomes "fatal".

Oh ... wait ....

Re:High hopes

[Culture20]

Barnett doesn't realize, for example, that big bang carbon levels are well understood, so he's just wasting his time there.

That sounds a lot like "Don't pay any attention to the man behind the curtain!". If the carbon levels really are well understood, then he'll eventually learn this through induction/deduction instead of rote like most young astrophysicists. Good for him.

Rewrite e=mc^2?

[jiteo]

Easy! c=sqrt(e/m)

Re:Rewrite e=mc^2?

[ashvagan]

The idea is to find e, not c. c is a constant.

Re:Rewrite e=mc^2?

[gknoy]

Does that discard one of the roots?

Re:Rewrite e=mc^2?

[Luyseyal]

c = (e/m)^.5

I like to use fractional powers to mess with kids.
-l

Re:Rewrite e=mc^2?

[blair1q]

Oh? So what happens when m is negative?

Re:Rewrite e=mc^2?

[cforciea]

Uhm, the same thing that already happens when m is negative: e is also negative. Were you being facetious?

Re:Rewrite e=mc^2?

[Mr Z]

Uh, how you figure? E = mc^2. 'c' is a fixed, positive constant (approx 3*10^8 m/s/s). So if 'm' is negative, so is 'E'.

Re:Rewrite e=mc^2?

[boristhespider]

Sure, if you're happy with the idea of a negative speed*. The rest of us will carry on taking the positive root, thanks.

* Speed, not velocity. Speed is by definition greater than or equal to zero. That's the speed of light appearing there.

Re:Rewrite e=mc^2?

[JonySuede]

but c could be positive or negative, I do I know it is not -c ;)

Re:He does NOT have Aspergers Syndrome

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm guessing the part where they say he has Aspergers "Jake was diagnosed with Aspergers syndrome, a mild form of autism, from an early age." But I agree about the Einstein thing, he is unquestionably incredibly intelligent comparing him to Einstein using a false comparison is unnecessary but it's the Daily Mail, allowances have to be made.

He's in for a shock

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait'll he finds out the "E" in the equation doesn't stand for "Elmo".

Re:obligitory

[Locke2005]

Wait... when did 12 become a "teen"??? I always thought teens began with thirteen and ended with nineteen...

Before they were 25

[alexander_686]

Most breakthrough work is done before a person is 25 – [Well, 30] – so I am not sure what that proves.

It’s is not so much people burning out. It is the difference between a young flexibly mind who is willing to put in ungodly hours to write an original thesis vs. a family man of the status que who needs to teach classes and shepherded Phd candidates.

To Jake, one mind to another.

[DontLickJesus]

Go for it kid, and I wish you all the luck. Having a mind like this is exciting, but it burns a lot of us out. It's become even harder with the diagnosis or Aspergers and ADD/ADHD, as many of us end up on medication which robs us of the gift. I love the fact that you are getting the opportunity to share with other people at such a young age. All too often folks won't listen because they simply don't understand. This in turn causes us to retreat, which is the worst outcome possible.

My words of warning: As described in the article, the numbers come to you constantly. Your sleepless nights will likely continue the rest of your life, and later it will likely affect your relationships with the opposite sex. Just as you have learned substitution in integration theory, so should you apply descriptions you give of the world around you. Most persons don't want to hear numbers all the time, and the beauty of the world around them holds great significance. While we both see numbers as beautiful in their way, most others see them as cold. Just learn to substitute your larger mathematical concepts with equivalent adjectives. You don't have to hide the fact you are doing this, but for those you get to know well, it will help them grow closer to you.

Rise on brother.

Re:To Jake, one mind to another.

[blincoln]

"It's become even harder with the diagnosis or Aspergers and ADD/ADHD, as many of us end up on medication which robs us of the gift."

On the other hand, many of us end up on medication that lets us make the most effective use of our gift(s).

Re:To Jake, one mind to another.

[spiralx]

Bollocks. After 32 years without, going on medication for ADHD has been the best thing that's ever happened to my ability to live my life and do things.

Re:To Jake, one mind to another.

[theskipper]

Now that's a fascinating post (seriously). There's something interesting going on here but I can't quite figure out what it is.

Re:To Jake, one mind to another.

[DontLickJesus]

Sorry, I didn't mean for this to come across as a rant on ADHD medication or anything of the sort. It does help most sufferers to live a normal life. In my generation is was also used to control children who were unruly or otherwise generally hyper. I also understand that these sort of abilities often manifest themselves so aggressively that one would welcome medication to control the situation as to live a normal life.

Just understand that in the beginning, and sometimes even today, those medications were prescribed too loosely. Some people are just different, and some really need help. I can't be the judge of that, and I wont be.

Re:To Jake, one mind to another.

[DontLickJesus]

I admire your family's courage in going this route. My personal preference is to try other routes before using medications. Difficulties in integrating with society can be very scary, so spending the time with someone to help accomplish this is no easy feat. To blicncoln: Not every gift is best served by medication. I tell you from my own experiences that in the math instances it usually robs us of the creative aspect in it.

Re:To Jake, one mind to another.

[jcarr]

The exception to this advice is only when you lick the holy spirit first. These sightings are indeed rare. When they happen, many pilgrims will travel there. Afterwards, it is ok to lick Jesus also. This mecca is something you must do once in your life.

Re:To Jake, one mind to another.

[cheekyjohnson]

If you don't have the social skills to keep yourself from getting fucked, people take advantage of you.

"Social skills" and "gullibility" are different things. An intelligent person would be able to analyze the situation at hand logically, or so I think. Some people merely prefer to be alone. There is nothing wrong with that, even if they don't understand social skills. Society needs to get over the fact that not everyone is incredibly pleasant to be around, and instead of approaching everything emotionally, as most people seem to do, they need to approach situations logically.

Re:To Jake, one mind to another.

[unitron]

...You do know he's gay, right?...

From the original article:

"He plays basketball with friends, has a girlfriend and recently attended his first dance."

Re:To Jake, one mind to another.

[unitron]

If you don't have the social skills to keep yourself from getting fucked, people take advantage of you.
If you don't have the social skills to climb the ladder, you toil in agony over frustrated ambition.

Oh, so it's like it is for the rest of us?

Re:Don't burn out, dear child.

[obarel]

I thought that Erdos proved that it's possible to be a bright spark until you die (at a reasonably old age), even if you don't have a life outside mathematics.

Every person is different.

Re:I hear he's also quite the ladies man

[SniperJoe]

You're treading on dangerous ground. Apparently a lot of things in the bedroom are relative ... wait a minute!

Stick this boy in a proper school...

[denzacar]

And away from sensationalist reporters going for "OMG! Big Bang didn't happen says genius kid!".

http://www.indystar.com/article/20110320/LOCAL01/103200369/Genius-work-12-year-old-studying-IUPUI

Meanwhile, Jake is moving on to his next challenge: proving that the big-bang theory, the event some think led to the formation of the universe, is, well, wrong.

Wrong?

He explains.

"There are two different types of when stars end. When the little stars die, it's just like a small poof. They just turn into a planetary nebula. But the big ones, above 1.4 solar masses, blow up in one giant explosion, a supernova," Jake said. "What it does, is, in larger stars there is a larger mass, and it can fuse higher elements because it's more dense."

OK . . . trying to follow you.

"So you get all the elements, all the different materials, from those bigger stars. The little stars, they just make hydrogen and helium, and when they blow up, all the carbon that remains in them is just in the white dwarf; it never really comes off.

"So, um, in the big-bang theory, what they do is, there is this big explosion and there is all this temperature going off and the temperature decreases really rapidly because it's really big. The other day I calculated, they have this period where they suppose the hydrogen and helium were created, and, um, I don't care about the hydrogen and helium, but I thought, wouldn't there have to be some sort of carbon?"

He could go on and on.

And he did.

"Otherwise, the carbon would have to be coming out of the stars and hence the Earth, made mostly of carbon, we wouldn't be here. So I calculated, the time it would take to create 2 percent of the carbon in the universe, it would actually have to be several micro-seconds. Or a couple of nano-seconds, or something like that. An extremely small period of time. Like faster than a snap. That isn't gonna happen."

"Because of that," he continued, "that means that the world would have never been created because none of the carbon would have been given 7 billion years to fuse together. We'd have to be 21 billion years old . . . and that would just screw everything up."

Plenty of time for Carbon at the beginning of things.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallicity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple-alpha_process
http://www.solstation.com/x-objects/first.htm

IANAA, so my GUESS here is that kid lacks the knowledge necessary to put the whole thing in perspective.
As indicated by astrophysics Professor Scott Tremaine's reply to his theories that suggests "Jake to spend as much time as possible to learn more and to further develop his theory".
It's a polite way to say "Well thank YOU Mr. Smartypants. Us poor astrophysics scientists here would have NEVER thought of THAT had YOU not come along. NOT!".

And the journalist simply doesn't have a clue on the subject and is clearly going for a sound-bite.

Re:Stick this boy in a proper school...

[mbkennel]

He is obviously very smart and motivated, but the smartest person is not going to know more than the combined experience of a civilization, in particular, the work products of a few thousand people, quite a few of whom were pretty talented when they were 12 years old, but have now read papers describing the observational evidence.

Pretty soon he will be in a domain (early universe modeling) where you cannot figure it out "in your head", though your head is certainly necessary.
Scientists have to make hypotheses, program and run dynamical simulations---and then compare to observed facts.

These simulations are hard *work*, and are the types of labor that graduate students and postdocs do. They aren't fun, but they're necessary.

Re:Stick this boy in a proper school...

[FrootLoops]

I find it difficult to sort out the journalist's inexperience from their sensationalism. For instance, The Indianapolis Star version mentions a "calculus-based physics class he has been taking this semester" but then says "he needs work at an instructional level, which currently is a post college graduate level in mathematics". There is a big gap between calculus-based physics and graduate level math--at least serious graduate level math. Differential geometry would seem to be right up his alley, but there's no (even horribly obfuscated) mention of it.

The highest level of math directly mentioned in the article that I was able to figure out was "funky letters and upside-down triangles", presumably meaning Greek and the gradient symbol (it has other uses), which are undergraduate level. The video only discusses basic calculus at a level that perhaps one in a thousand high school freshmen reach; it's remarkable, but not "12-Year-Old Rewrites Einstein's Theory of Relativity" remarkable. The article mentions a YouTube video on quantum mechanics but I couldn't immediately find it. I agree with previous posters that the subtext of the quotes of the letter from Prof. Tremaine is "I want to encourage you, but, aside from your age, your ideas are unremarkable at my level of physics."

Without more info, my opinion (FWIW) is that he's got a great memory and is at a relatively advanced undergraduate level in physics and math. He'll probably make a great researcher after a few more years of maturation, which is probably why he's been offered a research position--for his potential, not for his current work, as some of the article text implies. I wish him the best of luck, and all the creativity he'll need to make truly interesting discoveries.

Re:Stick this boy in a proper school...

[anyaristow]

Still, I'd consider it an achievement if an astrophysics professor gave me any attention at all at 12 years old, even if it was to say, "You got some more learnin to do."

Re:Stick this boy in a proper school...

[Chris Burke]

There is a big gap between calculus-based physics and graduate level math--at least serious graduate level math.

Indeed there is, and for someone who is obviously taking a very non-traditional curriculum, there's nothing that odd about being at very different stages in two subjects, even related ones. For example I took college-level calculus when I was also taking HS freshman biology, for a not particularly noteworthy example.

My interpretation is the kid is more advanced at math than he is at physics. Nothing unusual about that.

I agree with previous posters that the subtext of the quotes of the letter from Prof. Tremaine is "I want to encourage you, but, aside from your age, your ideas are unremarkable at my level of physics."

Yes, it does sound that way. Heh, well, hopefully he stays interested.

Re:Stick this boy in a proper school...

[MikeBabcock]

Actually there are a litany of problems with the big bang, not the least of which is relativistic time. That said, I haven't seen a good reworking of the Big Bang theory taking relativity properly into account yet.

*I'm not saying there isn't one, I'm saying I haven't read one.

Re:Stick this boy in a proper school...

[bill_mcgonigle]

Yes, it does sound that way. Heh, well, hopefully he stays interested.

And hopefully he's not getting his ego inflated to the degree that he assumes that because he's so smart he can always see farther than others.

Re:Stick this boy in a proper school...

[SETIGuy]

I feel sorry for this kid, because these stories/videos aren't going to go away. The kid is talking about things he partially understands, and maybe he has some insights or ideas, but other people have probably already had those insights. He's got a lot more to learn before he'll be reworking general relativity. Maybe he'll be working on it in graduate school. The problem is, that these videos will follow him there.

I think this happens to all the physics freaks at that age, but we old timers didn't have video cameras following us around when we were explaining to the rest of the class why the detection of cosmic ray muons at ground level is good evidence for special relativity. I tried to build a version of special relativity with quantized space-time when I was in middle school. Of course I didn't succeed, but I've still got the papers somewhere. It's extremely stupid and I did learn things in the attempt. But with a little more knowledge I wouldn't have even tried it. But fortunately I (and more importantly, my colleagues) don't have video of TV interviews with a 13 year old me saying things that any physicist undergrad would know were wrong.

So let's leave the kid alone and let him fail at these unattainable goals without us looking. Then he will go to college and grad school and become a scientist that might actually do some of these things. If we keep bothering him, and make his inconsequential failures public, he'll probably end up an accountant.

Re:Stick this boy in a proper school...

[Locke2005]

Unless, of course, the professor was also a Jesuit priest...

Re:Stick this boy in a proper school...

[Locke2005]

I'm still having a problem with that whole "inflation" thing myself...

Re:Stick this boy in a proper school...

[md65536]

The video only discusses basic calculus at a level that perhaps one in a thousand high school freshmen reach; it's remarkable, but not "12-Year-Old Rewrites Einstein's Theory of Relativity" remarkable.

I'm rewriting special relativity, and I'm practically a retard. When I saw this story I actually got worried, thinking that this kid could write everything I've done for the past year, in a week. But then I read GP's post and realized we're not approaching this from the same angle. He's exploring problems with it. I'm developing a new understanding of it from the ground up. If he finds a serious problem with GR, it will be monumental, but GR is pretty good at fending off attacks.

Re:Stick this boy in a proper school...

[GrumpySteen]

So basically he's about 4 years ahead in development.

Most kids don't start thinking they know everything until they're 16, after all, and he's only 12.

Re:Stick this boy in a proper school...

[idlehanz]

Explaining the knowledge gap in a nutshell (apologies to the many fine teachers I know).

Those who can, do > those who can't, teach > those who can't teach.... report

The reporter probably should have brought along an interpreter.

Re:Stick this boy in a proper school...

[FrootLoops]

My interpretation is the kid is more advanced at math than he is at physics. Nothing unusual about that.

Maybe. The article mentions quantum mechanics and relativity (whether it's special or general is unclear, showing just how little the journalist knew about what they wrote), which are both more advanced than calculus-based mechanics (which is what I take the calculus-based physics reference to mean). It doesn't mention any math more advanced than calculus. From these sparse references I come to the opposite conclusion--that he's more advanced in physics than math, and like most physicists his command of math flows from describing physics.

Re:Stick this boy in a proper school...

[FrootLoops]

GR is pretty good at fending off attacks, except that it doesn't mesh with quantum mechanics. Best of luck with your reinterpretation of SR; it sounds interesting.

Re:Stick this boy in a proper school...

[FrootLoops]

Haha. I would have happily been the reporter's interpreter. I'm sure they could have found someone if only they knew what circles to look in. It would have been so refreshing if the article had been truly well-informed. I suppose it goes to show how huge the gap between most people and technical specialists is.

Re:Stick this boy in a proper school...

[Chris Burke]

You're concluding that he's more advanced in physics than math, because the physics described doesn't use advanced math.

I'd say it's exactly because the journalist doesn't know what they're writing about that no math more advanced than calculus is mentioned, and relativity and QM were name-dropped. However you don't need to know any math to correctly report that someone is taking graduate-level math, so that statement is likely to be correct.

Re:Stick this boy in a proper school...

[FrootLoops]

You're concluding that he's more advanced in physics than math, because the physics described doesn't use advanced math.

No; sorry I wasn't clearer. I'm concluding that he's more advanced in physics than math since there was no reference whatsoever to math more advanced than calculus, while there were references to branches of physics more advanced than calculus-based mechanics. I tend to put calculus and calculus-based mechanics on the same footing difficulty-wise. Ultimately I suppose this speculation doesn't really matter. You may well be right that he's studying more advanced areas of math that the journalist never mentions--though somehow I think they would have name dropped them. "Jacob is studying analytic number theory and algebraic topology" sounds impressive, even if you have no idea what those things are.

However you don't need to know any math to correctly report that someone is taking graduate-level math, so that statement is likely to be correct.

The bit of the article I think you're referring to,

That did not happen to Jake, thanks in part to a third psychological evaluation done nearly two years ago. It showed that this fifth-grader was not regressing but was simply bored and needed to be stimulated -- in a very big way. As in dropping out of school. "Indeed, it would not be in Jacob's best interest to force him to complete academic work that he has already mastered," clinical neurophysiologist Carl S. Hale, Merrillville, said in a report provided by the Barnetts. "He needs work at an instructional level, which currently is a post college graduate level in mathematics, i.e., a post master's degree. In essence, his math skills are at the level found in someone who is working on a doctorate in math, physics, astronomy and astrophysics."

is from a neurophysiologist. It doesn't say that Jacob is taking graduate-level courses, just that he should. It's difficult for outsiders to recognize the difference between undergraduate math and serious graduate/PhD level math, though to specialists the difference is huge. I also suspect the statement for a few other reasons. "post college graduate level" is a non-standard phrase in my experience; most people would simply say "graduate level". Doctorates in those fields require vastly different amounts of math, which also varies greatly by specialty:

Experimental physicists and theoretical physicists are usually on completely different levels in their math ability (and conversely in their ability to perform experiments). One of my old physics professors is a fantastic theoretician, but from what I've heard is absolutely terrible in the lab. He once told us how he almost didn't get in to his doctoral program because of his poor experimental skills. I remember a story about some physicists (I don't remember the names) in the early days of quantum. They found experimental evidence for the existence of the spin of electrons. One of them turned to the other and said "we need another degree of freedom", and the other said "what's a degree of freedom?". He must have been a good experimentalist, but clearly he was not into developing theory. Anyway, it just seems that if the neurophysiologist knew what they were talking about they would have been clearer and more accurate.

Re:Stick this boy in a proper school...

[MikeBabcock]

Consider relativistic acceleration and faster than light travel in there too.

Re:High hopes

[chichilalescu]

um... humanity advances because kids get to use the answers the parents already have. our entire culture exists because we learned how to talk and trasmit answers to various questions from one to the other. I pity the kid if he's not patient enough to learn what has already been done.

you mean eloi and morlocks?

[circletimessquare]

because an autistic has no ability to socialize with others well or organize a coherent life strategy. meanwhile your average guy with charm and drive can take a bunch of autistic kids, and put them to some use in a coherent way they agree to, and are happy to do, whether by deceit or genuine sense of accomplishment, and actually derives some sort of beneficial arrangement, if only to the manipulator lording over his autistics

so autistics are not the morlocks in the analogy, as you might have presumed, the autistics are the eloi. two races of man: the high mechanical/ mathematical iq class, slaves to the high social iq class

communication is more important than intelligence

the guy who can articulate a common idea well, is going to go a lot further in this world than the guy who can articulate a great idea badly. in the social jungle that defines our lives, it is far more useful and important to manipulate and arrange the people around you than it is to manipulate and arrange numbers or shapes

communication is more important than intelligence. what makes homo sapiens so successful a species is not our ideas, but our ability to communicate our ideas to others

Writing on Windows

[jluzwick]

Seriously, why do all smart/knowledgeable people have to write their equations on windows with markers!! We invented paper so we wouldn't have to write on surfaces that don't save well!

Re:Writing on Windows

[Noughmad]

He's obviously a paid Microsoft shill.

Re:High hopes

[blair1q]

So far he's figured out that the Big Bang couldn't produce a lot of carbon.

And I'm like, "duhhh".

He just hasn't made the inductive leap to figure out where the carbon came from.

Which means he's good with the equations, not so much with the imagination.

Difference between.....

[Lumpy]

A walking Calculator and a Genius is that the Genius can formulate his own theories and hypothesis. This kid so far is simply regurgitating mainstream information. There have been several relativity "rewrites" and I'll bet that if a professor were to review his work he will see a regurgitation and not creation. Critical thinking and mental experimentation that is required for high level mathematics cant be something you are born with. It's learned with time and experimentation. Being 12 years old, he has only had 6 years of time for any real experience in cause and effect.

I'm not saying he CANT do it, I am saying that he is too young yet.. Some things you cant skip... the experience of failure is what creates great men and women.

Re:Difference between.....

[GodfatherofSoul]

I'm not saying he's right, I just don't want to poo poo on a fresh idea that isn't polluted with "common knowledge." Let him work out his little theory and lets test the results. I agree that the odds are well against him, but as relativity was an leap of insight, maybe he'll come up with the next step. IANAAP, but I've always felt that black holes are proof that there's a big hole in relativity.

Re:Difference between.....

[cheekyjohnson]

I am saying that he is too young yet.

Age has little to do with it. It's more about knowledge than that.

Re:Difference between.....

[Lumpy]

And that would be great, but he does need more experience with failure and recovery from failure. What I am saying is that the Press and 90% of the population equate genius with something that impresses them. Many times it's not genius, just someone that can do something that they can not comprehend. This kids may well be a major genius but he simply has not developed everything he needs to fully utilize it. Honestly the new story makes him out to be better than Einstein and at the age of 12 everyone is too busy oohing and aahing to do some real research and investigation into the child.

Honestly, why does academia not latch on and really look into kids like this? Give the kid a free ride and the parents some cash to get the child an advanced education to match his or her abilities.

Instead we let them sit and wait, "he has to be a kid" no he CANT be a kid. he is a weirdo in society's definition and other kids will do nothing but torment him. He would be happier in a academic environment and given the tools to let him grow, test, experiment, fail and gain more.

And yes if he turns out to be a calculator regurgitating... then academia can detect that and maybe be able to point the kit at a real path of creation and discovery.

Re:Difference between.....

[Lumpy]

Knowledge = time = age. Or are you telling me he broke relativity and was able to send his knowledge from his 42 year old self to his 12 year old self. NOTHING allows us to gain knowledge without spending time. You are not born with knowledge.

Re:Difference between.....

[cheekyjohnson]

You're right, but it doesn't take into account the speed at which someone can come to understand and memorize knew knowledge. The fact that he's young does not automatically mean that he has less experience than someone older. It might make it more likely, but assuming that from the start is rather arrogant, I feel.

Re:Difference between.....

[bbasgen]

Hence what is, at times, the tragedy of prodigies: their inability to successfully fail.

Re:to think i

[blair1q]

You'd still need 1.7X as much time. And would be highly unlikely to get there.

IQ measures don't really indicate where the barriers are for most people.

Limitless

[orateam]

anyone thinking this?

Integration by parts

[Lord Lode]

This kid is clearly a genious AND a good tutor.

Integration by parts is boring though. I found it sleep-inducing in high school. Computers are for solving that. The human brain should do creative things with all this math instead!

Re:Integration by parts

[MasterPatricko]

He gets the final result wrong, and many of his explanations are incoherent. He doesn't seem to have a good idea of what dx means, for example. I was expecting more than bad high-school level calculus from someone who claims they've rewritten relativity.

Re:Integration by parts

[Old Wolf]

Could you explain what dx means?

Re:Integration by parts

[MasterPatricko]

The simplest rigorous way to understand integration is to understand it as Riemann described it, as calculating the area under a curve of by partitioning it into rectangles and taking the limit as the rectangle width tends to infinitely small (but not zero!). "dx" is not something just tagged on to the end of every integral, it represents what is actually being summed over - an *infinitesimal* in x.

When you then go on to write things like dv = dx, you are then describing a relation between infinitesimals, which you have to be careful with. The key property of infinitesimals used in this fashion is that dv = (dv/dx) * dx - which seems obvious but its not, dv/dx is a well defined derivative of v w.r.t. x in Leibniz notation (not a division of dv by dx!), but dv and dx are both quantities almost but not quite zero ("infinitesimally small"), that take some serious math to define rigorously. If you write it as dv = v'(x) dx using Lagrange's notation it doesn't look so obvious, for example, but it is the same relation. Therefore when you write dv = cos(x) dx, what you mean is that dv/dx = cos(x). Note again that this is a derivative, not a division of two quantities - it just happens that using Leibniz notation makes it *look* trivial. Therefore v = sin(x) + c by the Fundamental Rule of Calculus and you can continue your integration by parts. Usually the extra constant of integration is left out because you get one from the second integral as well, and the two can be combined into one constant.

Calculus can be deceptive at times, what looks trivial often isn't and it took a lot of work to create a sound foundation for it mathematically.

Riemann_integral Infinitesimal

Re:Integration by parts

[MasterPatricko]

Actually on reflection I'm not at all correct in my explanation of why there is no constant of integration in v.

Looking at the integration by parts template: integral u*dv = u*v - integral v*du
If v had a constant part c, i.e. was equal to say v(x) = w(x) + c, then
integral u*dv = u*(w+c) - integral (w+c)*du
= u*w +u*c - integral w*du - integral c*du
= u*w +u*c - integral w*du - u*c
= u*w - integral w*du
i.e. any constant part cancels out and we can safely choose the antiderivative of v that has no constant part.

So I prove my own point about assuming things are trivial when they're not.

Re:Integration by parts

[sandytaru]

I did creative things in calculus lab. Instead of working through my 3D volume homework, I instead made nifty pots and vases by spinning equations around the Y axis in fun shapes. Way more entertaining than the actual math.

Re:High hopes

[Culture20]

I pity the kid if he's not patient enough to learn what has already been done.

He's going to learn everything you and I know about astrophysics in the next year or so and surpass us. I don't pity him at all. If this were a prodigy civil engineer and he reinvented the wheel at 1, the screw and lever at 2, the arch at 3, suspension bridges at 4, etc, I'd laud the attempt. He's not wasting time. He's probably the type of mind that can't learn well unless he proves something to himself (instead of just believing something told to him).

Re:obligitory

[mbkennel]

"Wait... when did 12 become a "teen"???

In *this* reference frame, about a year from now, but that depends on the observer.

Chat rooms clearly have a strong non-Newtonian metric, as 57 becomes 19 with additional thermodynamic effects, judging by how "hot" they are.

Re:Don't burn out, dear child.

[mbkennel]

"But as he grew older, his emotions did not. He was incapable of keeping a job, incapable of holding onto money and incapable of keeping friends. He was extremely and unbelievably good at music and not much else.

How did that end for Mozart?"

Actually he got some pretty good gigs pretty consistently though he spent his money pretty fast. He also had a very hot and sexy wife. He died from an illness like many other people.

Re:High hopes

[Culture20]

He just hasn't made the inductive leap to figure out where the carbon came from.

He knows the standard model where carbon (and heavier elements) comes from stars, but he thinks it would take longer for the types of stars that produce carbon-infused explosions (supernovas) than the time periods that are currently discussed.

Which means he's good with the equations, not so much with the imagination.

He's twelve, and he probably started thinking about it a month ago. It will probably come to him when he's playing Pokemon.

There Is No Box

[pgn674]

For a long time, I've wondered if the suggestion "think outside the box" would be easier to follow if you were not aware of where the box was. Could a child prodigy, or any person who is very intelligent yet not highly 'educated', have an easier time of coming up with strange ideas out of right field? Ideas and theories that most educated people would not come up with because at a glance they seem to ignore the facts of the universe that have been ingrained in the educated, but upon further investigation the theory is actually plausible?

Re:There Is No Box

[speaker4thedead]

Do not try to think outside the box — that's impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth: there is no box.

Re:Don't burn out, dear child.

[harl]

Which IQ determination method was used on Mozart?

/. Stop using the daily mail

[jhoegl]

Stop using the daily mail as your main source of information.

I mean seriously... STOP.

Re:/. Stop using the daily mail

[the eric conspiracy]

Please mod parent UP. The Daily Mail is complete rubbish.

and the warning goes unheeded

[OglinTatas]

Hey kid, invent me a time machine dammit so I can warn myself about all the stupid stuff I did to end up where I am in life!!

It wouldn't do you any good anyway. Our parents warned us time and again, yet here we are. Our children won't listen to us either.

He is smarter than a journalist

[O'Nazareth]

I am not the kind to trust what journalists claim when it comes to having found a genius child. Especially when there are keywords like "Einstein", and "relativity". We have the impression to read a new-age spirituality article. I would be more impressed if the child was interested in working on some domains of which no non-scientist have ever heard. This is how scientific research is (except those biologist who still work on very simple ideas, "let's dissect a frog!").

I remember a teen who was invited for an interview on TV in France. Do you know why the journalist called him a genius? You will laugh. He had a Microsoft certification.

OK, let's say that they did not use an Internet website to measure the 170 of IQ, but I doubt they used a very good test, the source does not say. What is an IQ of 170? It is 4.667 standard deviation. Which is around 1 person every 653327 (thank you Wolfram Alpha, my brain already hurts after this day of work). Note as well, IQ for children are usually measured relatively to their age class (and not to Einstein). So if you have 653327 12 year-olds, you will have probably one who has 170 of IQ. People who are 12 years old are 2% of the population. So there are approximately 213 children as intelligent as he is. It is genius. But it happens! It happens like there are people who win the lottery, but we do not make much noise about it. What I would call extraordinary is when a child has an IQ so high that the expected value of children of this IQ is less than, I would say .01, so that we can say it happens once every century.

While the video convinced me he is obviously in advance in his age (and that he is smarter than he was, obviously, me fool), it does not convince me that he is the level to be in college. Integration by parts are seen in high school. And it is not even a really hard thing.

does he mean general realtivitly?

[peter303]

Special relativity doesnt require calculus. It is most algebraic geometry. It could be taught in a high school physics course.
The core equation in general relativity is a tensor. Its beautiful, but difficult to extract solutions. People are finding new quirks in its solutions every decade.

Re:does he mean general realtivitly?

[Coryoth]

Special relativity doesnt require calculus. It is most algebraic geometry.

Not so much -- you might want to check what algebraic geometry actually is (hint: it's not high school algebra, nor is it analytic geometry). While algebraic geometry doesn't require calculus per se, it can be helpful to understand things. It is also very advanced highly abstract mathematics (at least since Grothendieck recast everything in terms of categories and sheaves) that is quite irrelevant to special relativity.

Fagot

[rubycodez]

Most people over 25 are Spanish bassoons? Even if I accept this magical transformation into a musical instrument by the underachievers and ungifted of the human race, I really doubt it would universally be into one with such specific ethnicity. And a doubt any musical instrument could either gain employment or procreate, without human intervention.

Re:obligitory

[Noughmad]

In most non-english, non-german speaking countries, a special prefix is gives to number from 11 through 19.

You insensitive clod!

Need a new Godwins Law for smart people

[Moof123]

Perhaps we need a new law that states that comparison to Einstein for smartness immediately means you lose/fail.

Einstein as a measuring stick is both cliched and flawed.

Re:That is because you are arrogant.

[Locke2005]

...only the stupidly arrogant think of "ordinary" people as "barely functioning, non-contributing member[s] of society."

News flash...the overwhelming majority of the highly-functionaly contributing members of society are just ordinary (non-brilliant) people.

Those telephones aren't going to sanitize themselves!

Re:High hopes

[Locke2005]

Agreed. Making your own mistakes is the best way of learning. But he will need some mentor(s) to direct his energy into more productive areas in the near future.

No Carbon in the Big Bang

[SoTerrified]

Meanwhile, Jake is moving on to his next challenge: proving that the big-bang theory, the event some think led to the formation of the universe is wrong.

"The other day I calculated, they have this period where they suppose the hydrogen and helium were created, and, um, I don't care about the hydrogen and helium, but I thought, wouldn't there have to be some sort of carbon?"

I'm no astrophysicist, just a lowly programmer with a background in engineering physics, but I thought it was pretty much the standard (and understood by all) that carbon and anything heavier was produced by the stars? And I'm pretty sure I knew that by 12....

So no surprise he 'disproved' the big bang by making the assumption carbon must've been present. Hey kid, you're right, there was no 'Carbon Big Bang'. But that's not the big bang the rest of us are talking about.

How do we get more of these people?

[ChrisMaple]

The people able to do the tough brain work are unusual, and make possible some of the major advances in civilization. Understanding the essential way that these people differ, and how to encourage that happening more often, would be a major boon for mankind.

Give the kid a break

[itsybitsy]

Directed at those being critical of Jake or viciously critical of his ideas.

SLASHdot, how vicious of you... he's just a kid... give him a break. Minds take a lot to develop and some of the nasty critical comments seen here don't help him any at this stage of his development.

The maws of slashdot, chew up the people in a story, slash them to pieces with criticism and spit them out. Yikes, don't any of you have any self respect or compassion for others?

Seriously how many of you at his age could do what he's working on?

The comments on this story that are critical of Jake reveal the dark side of slashdot - too many critical geeks with nothing better to do than to slam smart kids. Consider yourselves rebuked. Go stand in the corner facing the two walls for eight hours. Go on. Git into the corner.

follow a dead end, or do vital research?

[foszae]

well, being a math prodigy is fine and all that. just, the thing is that it means he probably spends a lot of time with mathematicians. and if he's working on a refinement of special relativity, i hope for his sake that he doesn't get mired in the same thought processes which turned the field of physics into an quagmire forty years ago. yes, it's necessary to understand where we are to see where we're going, but frankly if you listen to a modern physicist, they are so utterly lost in the minutiae of particle decays that they're missing the right-in-their-face boots-on-the-ground reality. the last few decades of research have brought us practically nothing except the word "string". and even then it is inconsistently applied, poorly conceived of, and utterly obtuse to a layperson anyhow. sure kid, it's neat that someone proved the photon can be particle or wave purely on circumstance. but if you start obsessing over trying to make a followup experiment to prove some minor particle effect, you will end up just as gobsmacked by the new reality as the rest of the physics faculty.

Re:follow a dead end, or do vital research?

[Masterofpsi]

I have no idea what you mean by "right-in-their-face boots-on-the-ground reality." I'm not a physicist, but to my knowledge, classical mechanics and such are essentially solved. It sounds to me like you're criticizing physics for becoming complex while investigating a complex reality. If it's too complex for a layperson to understand, well that's just too damn bad -- what's true is true.

Re:noob

[0111 1110]

Someones going to be a virgin til their 40

You missed the part about him already having a girlfriend at age 12.

Re:I hear he's also quite the ladies man

[city]

Magic Johnson?

Re:I hear he's also quite the ladies man

[History's Coming To]

His cousin, mostly. Still, when you're a man who won't use a toothbrush because you think they're too abrasive and begrudgingly submit to a comb (which I sympathise with entirely) then setting up house with your cousin isn't all that odd. Einstein was also a late talker by some accounts (OK, Wikipedia), which is a trait shared by Mr Barnett.

As regards the autism tag - I can't help but feel that it's sometimes used to label a kid who is simply smarter than the doctor. From watching the (admittedly short) video he doesn't seem to have any socio-linguistic problems that aren't directly attributable to:
A: The fact that we're watching a 12 year old explain undergrad calculus, and
B: The fact that the 12 year old is probably trying to deal with a world where he's starting to realise the majority of adults around him need him to talk down to them if they're going to understand him. It's enough to mess with anyone's concentration.

Incidentally, anyone got a link to what his theory actually is? Are we talking about a reformulation or a modification (a la MOND) or what?

Re:obligitory

[Locke2005]

Unless that prefix is "teen", twelve years olds still wouldn't be called "teens", would they?

Re:I hear he's also quite the ladies man

[Odin's Raven]

Imagine what happened when he got fixated on pussy!

I think you're getting your physicists confused - Schrödinger's the one with the pussy fixation...

and he has a girlfriend!

[0111 1110]

Not only am I envious of his big brain, but he already has a girlfriend at age 12. I just hope he doesn't get so obsessed with pussy that he loses interest in anything else. He's super-intelligent and not ugly. Shouldn't there be a law against that or something? It's so unfair.

Re:and he has a girlfriend!

[badkarmadayaccount]

OK, now I'm officially depressed. Screw his incoherent math and physics bablings (they make sense, in a way, but, as many posters said, they are sub-high-school level). How the hell did he get a girl. I could have wiped the floor with him at his age, if I had actually wasted time screwing with numbers, instead of swallowing physics concepts whole. With 50 pt lower IQ still. And yet, the sorry little bastard got a girl. *sigh* Might as well set up as a drug dealer - there is no fair play in life.

Re:obligitory

[Noughmad]

Eh, sorry, it's a postfix, not a prefix. But anyway, they wouldn't be called teens in the other language, but the best english translation is still teenagers.

Re:I hear he's also quite the ladies man

[kilfarsnar]

I can imagine...

Relativity?

[xirtam_work]

Sorry, I didn't see anything about relativity in the video or the article apart from them referring to it. Is he published? I'm agree that he's very smart and has learnt a lot of math. Can anyone provide links to a critique of his work or his actual work? I'm interested to read more.

Wrong

[Fujisawa Sensei]

Yes, when someone is a Genius reward them with more work.

That is really ignorant. When I was rewarded with more work, I just stopped doing it because I didn't appreciate getting to homework till 11:00 at night when I was in grade school.

The kid will learn that the less he did for them, the less they would ask him to do. And to more time he has to do other fun stuff.

I had to work my ass off through grade and middle school, doing extra work because I was smart. Then I said screw it. Went through HS, and college doing exactly the minimum and life was a lot more fun.

I was hated by many because I coasted through semiconductor physics breaking test curves while never doing any homework.

I think he's saying there is.

[Chris Burke]

I'm no astrophysicist, just a lowly programmer with a background in engineering physics, but I thought it was pretty much the standard (and understood by all) that carbon and anything heavier was produced by the stars? And I'm pretty sure I knew that by 12....

Um yes and he knows that too; he says so in another part of the quote. He's not saying the big bang predicts too much carbon too soon.

What he's saying is that it would take too long from the birth of the universe for sufficient carbon to be formed in stellar fusion for enough of it to be here in time to form earth. Thus "wouldn't there have to be some sort of carbon?" or "We'd have to be 21 billion years old . . . and that would just screw everything up."

I've heard observations like this before, along with cosmologists saying that there are theoretical explanations. I'm betting what others said is right -- he's not on to as much as he thinks, and not the first to think of this. But I'm willing to give him some credit. ;)

Re:I think he's saying there is.

[rk]

As smart as he is mathematically, his ignorance of high-school level geology is rather shocking* if he's going to make pronouncements like this. The Earth is 62% iron and oxygen, not carbon. Carbon's not even in the top ten. Even in the lithosphere, carbon is only 0.03% (yes, three HUNDREDTHS of a percent) of it. I'm not qualified to say if his hypothesis would have issues with the oxygen and iron abundance, however. I recall iron being a sort of low energy state with respect to nuclear reactions, where fusion reactions with elements with atomic weights below iron being generally exothermic and fission being generally endothermic, and the reverse being true of elements heavier than iron. But in thinking the earth is primarily carbon when it's not he's starting out with a false premise.

*- Well, however smart he is, he's still a 12 year old boy so I should cut him a little slack.

Re:I think he's saying there is.

[mcvos]

I think you are completely missing the point he's making. It's not about the exact amount of carbon on Earth (who cares about that?), it's about the total amount of carbon in the universe and where it comes from. He's claiming that according to the current theories on how it's created and released by stars don't predict enough carbon; the universe would have to be 21 million years old.

He might be wrong, but I'm pretty sure he already knows more about this particular subject than 99% of the people on Slashdot, and he's going to learn a lot of interesting things on his quest to figure this out. It might lead to a new Big Bang theory, or something else entirely, or maybe just an even better understanding of math and physics. In any case, something good is going to come out of this. A boy like that shouldn't aim too low.

Re:I think he's saying there is.

[mcvos]

I think you are completely missing the point he's making. It's not about the exact amount of carbon on Earth (who cares about that?), it's about the total amount of carbon in the universe and where it comes from.

I don't think it's missing the point. If he said the Earth is mostly carbon, either he is misinformed or he didn't explain himself very well.

Or he's misquoted. Personally I consider it more likely that he expresses himself badly in an interview or that he's misquoted, than that he's wrong about such a simple fact that's easily checked and rather central to his theory. (Though it's obviously not merely about carbon on Earth; it's about carbon in the universe that's not locked in white dwarfs and other heavy stars.)

No, his most ambitious plan...

[Snaller]

... is to figure out how to get a date - EVER.

Make me think of "Men In Black"

[Tigger's Pet]

Zed: May I ask why you felt little Tiffany deserved to die?
James Edwards: Well, she was the only one that actually seemed dangerous at the time, sir.
Zed: How'd you come to that conclusion?
James Edwards: Well, first I was gonna pop this guy hanging from the street light, and I realized, y'know, he's just working out. I mean, how would I feel if somebody come runnin' in the gym and bust me in my ass while I'm on the treadmill? Then I saw this snarling beast guy, and I noticed he had a tissue in his hand, and I'm realizing, y'know, he's not snarling, he's sneezing. Y'know, ain't no real threat there. Then I saw little Tiffany. I'm thinking, y'know, eight-year-old white girl, middle of the ghetto, bunch of monsters, this time of night with quantum physics books? She about to start some shit, Zed. She's about eight years old, those books are WAY too advanced for her. If you ask me, I'd say she's up to something. And to be honest, I'd appreciate it if you eased up off my back about it.

I think they got the name wrong.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

I think that boy is named Asok. Before he did the course on Directed Reincarnation and Advanced Shape shifting. But you never know, he also seemed to have done the minor in False Humility.

Wrong track

[nilbog]

When the kid stopped paying attention in elementary school they should have done what all good schools do: tell the kid he's stupid and make him start repeating classes and giving him detention.

Re:High hopes

[Locke2005]

No, he's learning by working through the numbers himself. There is also a chance that he might have some new insights, no matter how small that chance might be. What little I learned of Physics I learned by redoing the experiments others had done 100 years earlier. Give this kid a chance to go down some of the blind alleys that others have already gone down; he'll get an appreciation of what Physics is really all about.

Re:High hopes

[Locke2005]

Right, 'cause scientists have never reversed themselves about anything in the history of science, especially in the fields of medicine and astrophysics!

Re:He does NOT have Aspergers Syndrome

[Sparx139]

Based upon what I see in the article, the kid is quite normal socially - maybe even above normal since he's quite able to effectively tutor people ten years his senior.

While the aspergers diagnosis is already been pointed out, I'd like to add that this the "more effectively" thing here is wrong. I have aspergers. I'm only a first year undergraduate math student and can't do the stuff this kid does, but I was smart enough to - with some help by speech pathologists - learn to function properly, to the point where people are surprised if I tell them I have the condition. However, I still struggle with social interaction, and if I encounter a situation that doesn't fit into one of the models (if this happens, do this, etc.) I've built then I don't know how I should proceed.
Before I was diagnosed, I can remember growing up, and any friends I had were always older than me or younger than me - the difficulty lies in being able to communicate with people our own age. I can only speak for myself here, but communicating with people from other age groups was always easier.

For someone with an extremely high intelligence, it is possible that he's worked out how social interactions work. I know people who've been to P.D. seminars run by people with full-blown autism, who have masters degrees and PhDs. It doesn't necessarily mean that he still doesn't struggle with it. He could, like me, just have built up a series of models for behaviour that he follows.

Re:I hear he's also quite the ladies man

[Sanat]

Incest is relative

full of bull

[PJ6]

Come on, guys, you should know better even if forgot most of your calculus; there's a big difference between a genius and a barking seal.

Hold everything!!

[FShort]

He forgot to carry the 1.

Where's the beef?

[rs79]

Ok so he rewrote the theory of relativity. Where did he write it? Somewhere where we can see?

I know how to integrate. Talk about bait and switch. I wouldn't have clicked on "see a bad integration lesson from a boy and his dog".

Re:Don't burn out, dear child.

[cheekyjohnson]

and had a musical understanding greater than this kid's mathematical understanding.

Making sounds changes society as we know it!

*cough* HOAX *cough*

[xettera]

How has this kid existed for 12 years and stayed out of the news?

Re:High hopes

[Mr Z]

Sometimes it really is best to learn by trial and error, with past experience providing some amount of guidance so that the cost of "trial' isn't quite as high.

Yes, if you locked this kid in a informational vacuum with nothing but a pile of blank paper, some pens and Galileo's first telescope and said "derive astrophysics from first principles", it'd be a total waste of time.

Fact of the matter is that this child is building on existing knowledge. He's just not accepting it wholesale. Challenging new ideas when they're new to you (even if they're not new to everyone else) is completely natural and healthy. It means your B.S. detector is functioning and that you don't just take knowledge on authority.

Re:Don't burn out, dear child.

[Mr Z]

Of course, Erdos fueled that spark with a ton of coffee and some amphetamines....

Re:High hopes

[boristhespider]

Well, exactly. Also, he's 12 for fuck's sake. I love to think that when I was 12 I was a genius, excellent at maths, science, language, creative writing, history, geography and general knowledge. In truth I was simply above average. By the sound of it, this kid is well, well above average. So what if he makes a bundle of mistakes? He's got plenty of time to pursue questions on his own (which even I, totally pedestrian scientist though I am, did - the usual farcical attempts at solving quantum gravity along with a couple of calculations about whether gamma-ray bursters could be electron/positron collisions (they can't, not the way I modelled them) and other things like that) *and* learn from the experience of everyone who's gone before him. So long as he doesn't let all the publicity go to his head and make him insufferably arrogant, to the point where he ignores his lecturers because they're not as smart as him and therefore not worth listening to, I can't see the slightest problem here...

People keep bringing up Feynman, too. Well, perhaps unlike many commentators, I've read through Feynman's lectures on gravity. (Not the lectures on physics, which were undergrad level, but the lectures on gravity which are graduate level.) They're brilliant in many ways, very simply deriving gravity by positing a massless, spin-2 particle and working out what the force it would carry would look like. The answer is "linearised relativity", and it was the first thing I read that made me understand quite why a graviton is slightly more than just an arbitrary invention. But they're also flawed. For one thing, Feynman believed that because it was so easy to derive relativity from introducing a graviton, quantising it would be easy. Obviously this is something he absolutely failed to do. Worse, there's a chapter on massive stars in his book on gravity. Interesting, well-reasoned, entertaining -- and totally wrong. Feynman had sat there and decided to derive everything himself, and because he didn't work from others' previous mistakes, he made quite a few of his own. Does that make Feynman any less of a genius? God, no. Even though it was flawed, what he did on massive stars, pretty much in isolation, is impressive. Moreover, making a mistake - even a big one - doesn't take anything away from all the rest of his achievements, which were very profound. So he went wrong going through something on his own? So what...?

The same applies here - with the added point that this kid is *twelve*.

Re:High hopes

[unitron]

He's heading into puberty and he's got a girlfriend*, he's not going to have time for Pokemon.

* (which is probably the real reason he's getting so much /. hate)

Re:Don't burn out, dear child.

[unitron]

Which IQ determination method was used on Mozart?

He never signed with an RIAA label or an ASCAP or BMI publisher, so he actually got the money.

Re:Big Bang Theory

[unitron]

"Jake has turned the sleepless nights to his advantage - debunking the big bang theory."

I can't think of a better way to battle insomnia than a big bang, can you?

Re:impressive, but the hard part is ahead of him

[repapetilto]

Actually a child genius might be the best possible person for that kind of task.

First assume a perfect sphere...

[DarthVain]

I remember seeing a joke (probably on XKCD) about mathematicians when solving a problem... ...first assume the cow is a perfect sphere and that it exists in a vacuum...

or something like that, I can't remember.

Re:First assume a perfect sphere...

[Scrameustache]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_cow

Spherical Cow, the visual image sticks :)

and Justin Beiber

[DarthVain]

Can sing about love and relationships...

Daniel Tammet

[TapeCutter]

The mathematical abilities of savants have been studied quite a bit - and you're wrong about that. Savants do all the same steps that anyone good at doing math in his head does

Not sure how those studies managed to read the minds of savants but the only known "idiot savant" who's verbal skills are such that he can articulate his own number crunching thought processes is Daniel Tammet. He describes it as "I'm seeing things in my head like little sparks flying off and it's not until the very last moment that those sparks tell me what on earth they mean".

I don't know about you but it sounds nothing like the steps I take to solve numerical problems in my head. Of course there are people who can do "olympic level"math in their head and they may be considered savants by some definition, but we are specifically talking about autistic savants (sometimes unkindly called "idiot savants"), their abilities are way above olympic level.

BTW: The sign of 68 degrees is positive, no need for lookup tables or savants to work that one out. ;)