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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.'"
The Indianapolis Star
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!!
What's the theory? How does it "expand" on relativity?
I think he made relativity object oriented.
He doesn't even have his deriver's license yet!
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Why would you expect facts from a news article? They need to crap out articles as fast as possible and damn the reporting.
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.
Someone had to do it.
Daily Mail. Enough said.
Yeah, but he was a loser who couldn't figure out relativity until adulthood. This kid actually has some talent.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Too Old For This Shit
I now feel like a barely functioning, non-contributing member of society. Thanks slashdot.
But how does one calculate integration by parts on non-Windows?
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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.
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!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
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.
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?!
May the Maths Be with you!
I've been saying it for years. Autism isn't a disease, it's the next step in human evolution.
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".
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...
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
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.
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.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
But he likes the song about the Kitty.
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).
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.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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?
Stop using the daily mail as your main source of information.
I mean seriously... STOP.
True. They learned more after they reanimated it.
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.
839*929
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think you're getting your physicists confused - Schrödinger's the one with the pussy fixation...
A marriage is always made up of two people who are prepared to swear that only the other one snores.
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.
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. ;)
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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.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.