12-year-old astrophysics prodigy questions Big Bang

[RazorOutlaw]

In some ways, Jacob Barnett is just like any other 12-year-old kid. He plays Guitar Hero, shoots hoops with his friends, and has a platonic girlfriend.

But in other ways, he's a little different. Jake, who has an IQ of 170, began solving 5,000-piece jigsaw puzzles at the age of 3, not long after he'd been diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, a mild form of autism. A few years later, he taught himself calculus, algebra, and geometry in two weeks. By 8, he had left high school, and is currently taking college-level advanced astrophysics classes—while tutoring his older classmates. And he's being recruited for a paid researcher job by Indiana University.

Now, he's at work on a theory that challenges the Big Bang—the prevailing explanation among scientists for how the universe came about. It's not clear how developed it is, but experts say he's asking the right questions.

"The theory that he's working on involves several of the toughest problems in astrophysics and theoretical physics," Scott Tremaine of Princeton University's Institute for Advanced Studies—where Einstein (pictured) himself worked—wrote in an email to Jake's family. "Anyone who solves these will be in line for a Nobel Prize."

It's not clear where Jake got his gifts from. "Whenever I try talking about math with anyone in my family," he told the Indianapolis Star, "they just stare blankly."

But his parents encouraged his interests from the start. Once, they took him to the planetarium at Butler University. "We were in the crowd, just sitting, listening to this guy ask the crowd if anyone knew why the moons going around Mars were potato-shaped and not round," Jake's mother, Kristine Barnett, told the Star. "Jacob raised his hand and said, 'Excuse me, but what are the sizes of the moons around Mars?' "

After the lecturer answered, said Kristine, "Jacob looked at him and said the gravity of the planet ... is so large that (the moon's) gravity would not be able to pull it into a round shape."

"That entire building ... everyone was just looking at him, like, 'Who is this 3-year-old?'"

(AP Photo)

http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookou ... -the-limit

Unfortuately I couldn't find a link from Scientific American, but apparently both TIME and CBS News has reported on him (did a Google search for his name). And because this isn't earth-shattering news, and because the article wasn't very detailed I thought it would go better in SLAM.

But I'm not real familiar with these kinds of stories. Could this article be more exaggeration than not? They didn't even mention what parts were being questioned, or how well they were questioned, or even who the experts were that evaluated this kids "theory". I understand that they might not have wanted to put the cart before the horse, but couldn't they give us a taste?

Anywho, I thought it was neat. Now that I've started questioning it, I'm starting to think I got pulled in by the catchy title.

[Alyrium Denryle]

In some ways, Jacob Barnett is just like any other 12-year-old kid. He plays Guitar Hero, shoots hoops with his friends, and has a platonic girlfriend.

But in other ways, he's a little different. Jake, who has an IQ of 170, began solving 5,000-piece jigsaw puzzles at the age of 3, not long after he'd been diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, a mild form of autism. A few years later, he taught himself calculus, algebra, and geometry in two weeks. By 8, he had left high school, and is currently taking college-level advanced astrophysics classes—while tutoring his older classmates. And he's being recruited for a paid researcher job by Indiana University.

Now, he's at work on a theory that challenges the Big Bang—the prevailing explanation among scientists for how the universe came about. It's not clear how developed it is, but experts say he's asking the right questions.

"The theory that he's working on involves several of the toughest problems in astrophysics and theoretical physics," Scott Tremaine of Princeton University's Institute for Advanced Studies—where Einstein (pictured) himself worked—wrote in an email to Jake's family. "Anyone who solves these will be in line for a Nobel Prize."

It's not clear where Jake got his gifts from. "Whenever I try talking about math with anyone in my family," he told the Indianapolis Star, "they just stare blankly."

But his parents encouraged his interests from the start. Once, they took him to the planetarium at Butler University. "We were in the crowd, just sitting, listening to this guy ask the crowd if anyone knew why the moons going around Mars were potato-shaped and not round," Jake's mother, Kristine Barnett, told the Star. "Jacob raised his hand and said, 'Excuse me, but what are the sizes of the moons around Mars?' "

After the lecturer answered, said Kristine, "Jacob looked at him and said the gravity of the planet ... is so large that (the moon's) gravity would not be able to pull it into a round shape."

"That entire building ... everyone was just looking at him, like, 'Who is this 3-year-old?'"

(AP Photo)

http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookou ... -the-limit

Unfortuately I couldn't find a link from Scientific American, but apparently both TIME and CBS News has reported on him (did a Google search for his name). And because this isn't earth-shattering news, and because the article wasn't very detailed I thought it would go better in SLAM.

But I'm not real familiar with these kinds of stories. Could this article be more exaggeration than not? They didn't even mention what parts were being questioned, or how well they were questioned, or even who the experts were that evaluated this kids "theory". I understand that they might not have wanted to put the cart before the horse, but couldn't they give us a taste?

Anywho, I thought it was neat. Now that I've started questioning it, I'm starting to think I got pulled in by the catchy title.

Whenever a scientists works on anything big bang related, the scientifically illiterate media makes it look like they are "challenging" it. More than likely, he is probably trying to figure out some of the more archaic details, or trying to find a way to make it so the our current models for the laws of physics dont break down very close to it.

That said, there are almost 7 billion people on earth, and a bell shaped intelligence curve. Someone really on the tail end of the distribution is inevitable.

[RazorOutlaw]

I'm not surprised that it's possible for someone to be this intelligent. I'm more curious as to how it was reported because I remember how the media played up the surfer-dude who was solving (or attempting to solve) something in his field and they completely glossed over the fact that he was trained in the first place. What that would mean for this kid, I don't know. Maybe I'm being too critical.

But thanks for the input, it's easy for a layman like me, after reading this article, to think something might seriously be challenged. Frankly, I don't have enough of a physics background to know how or if that would be possible.

[Alyrium Denryle]

I'm not surprised that it's possible for someone to be this intelligent. I'm more curious as to how it was reported because I remember how the media played up the surfer-dude who was solving (or attempting to solve) something in his field and they completely glossed over the fact that he was trained in the first place. What that would mean for this kid, I don't know. Maybe I'm being too critical.

But thanks for the input, it's easy for a layman like me, after reading this article, to think something might seriously be challenged. Frankly, I don't have enough of a physics background to know how or if that would be possible.

The basics of the Bing Bang are pretty solid as far as I remember. However there is a mathematical problem with physics on a large scale (both mass, spatial scale, and energy) being mathematically incompatible with quantum mech. So, the kid may be working on that...

[erik_t]

Yeah...... I'll wait for a better source than Yahoo News before I freak out about a twelve year old changing the landscape of astrophysics, no matter his claimed IQ.

[starslayer]

Plus, at least in one interview (towards the end of the article), he gets really basic stuff about stellar evolution and the BBT flat wrong. He says that stars greater than 1.4 solar masses go supernova; they need to start with at least eight (a white dwarf cannot have more than 1.4 solar masses before it becomes unstable and explodes - this is called the Chandrasekhar limit). I suppose it is possible he merely confused the two when giving the interview.

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?

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, 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.

Then this shows he does not understand the BBT, specifically Big Bang nucleosynthesis. Around the three second mark, hydrogen, helium, and a little lithium were formed out of the primordial particle and radiation soup. A second later, nucleosynthesis stopped, the temperature and density dropping too low to sustain any fusion reactions. This resulted in the early universe's baryonic matter being about 76% hydrogen, 24% helium, with one part in ten billion of lithium. The next element in the fusion chain is carbon; however, this requires three helium nuclei to collide more or less at the same time to form carbon. Only problem is, by the time enough helium had formed to give a sufficient reactant density to form carbon, the second was up, and therefore no carbon or heavier elements were formed.

Massive stars, however, of course make carbon, and they also live very short lives; only 1-10 million years or so, and the first stars formed relatively soon after the BB (few hundred million years). And not only do they make carbon, they make lots of it, and all the other elements too boot, and then are nice enough to spew it all out in a supernova when they die. Since Earth didn't form until ~4.5 Gya, while the first stars formed ~13.5 Gya, it is a pretty easy conclusion to draw that the Earth's carbon was formed in stars. Why he thinks that's wrong, I'm not entirely sure, because all the observational evidence says it's right.

[someone_else]

I'm fine with him challenging whatever he wants.
But it's not like being SuperIntelligent makes him omniscient or infallible, so must give decent proofs to back up his claims.
I just hope he doesn't pervert to a vicious form of creationism.

[Eleas]

I wouldn't go that far, or at least not yet. Still, this kid is definitely being used to promote shopworn misrepresentations of science: most noticeably the notion of science as an innate oracular ability confined to "supergeniuses," and of new evidence and theories as an attack on old and completely wrong ideas.

[Akhlut]

Further, though I have no doubts the kid is smart, I do question his abilities to apply his knowledge of facts into a greater system of a whole. The interview that starslayer provided shows that. He can do the math and can use the facts, but he can't appreciate larger systems and their interfunctionality, it appears.

That, I think, is just him being 12 years old, though. I know that when I was that age, I had an encylopedic knowledge about the animal kingdom; however, I also couldn't really piece it together into a holistic, interconnected system. For instance, I didn't figure out Bergman's Rule (an animal population spread from north to south will see larger animals in the north and smaller animals in the south), even though I had all the information there to deduce it. I suspect something similar at work here; he has all these facts and formulas available to him, but he can't yet arrange them into something coherent. He's trying to, but he's not quite old enough for his brain to do it properly. I'd like to see what he does in 10 years, though.

[blahface]

The kid is clearly smart, but I am very skeptical of the stories about him that his parents are telling. They are making far fetched claims such as he learned to read and play the piano on his own at age two.

[cosmicalstorm]

I see two to four stories like this in various media outlets every year. But I never see any follow up's on these kids. What happens later on? Do they hide away in a quiet lab creating scientific papers that are of no interest to journalists for the rest of their life?

[Zac Naloen]

I see two to four stories like this in various media outlets every year. But I never see any follow up's on these kids. What happens later on? Do they hide away in a quiet lab creating scientific papers that are of no interest to journalists for the rest of their life?

In most cases, everyone else catches up with them and they are just among the multitude of other highly intelligent people.

His IQ is so high because he is so intelligent for his age.

[CaptainChewbacca]

In most cases, everyone else catches up with them and they are just among the multitude of other highly intelligent people.

His IQ is so high because he is so intelligent for his age.

Thats what happened to me. I developed early, and so on standardized assessment tests they OVERcorrected for my age, and inflated my IQ significantly.

[Anguirus]

The kid is clearly smart, but I am very skeptical of the stories about him that his parents are telling. They are making far fetched claims such as he learned to read and play the piano on his own at age two.

I taught myself to read at age two.

However, I failed to learn how to play keyboard, despite a dedicated instructor and daily practice, at the age of eleven.

[Zaune]

I see two to four stories like this in various media outlets every year. But I never see any follow up's on these kids. What happens later on? Do they hide away in a quiet lab creating scientific papers that are of no interest to journalists for the rest of their life?

I suspect a non-trivial number end up having quite serious psychological problems later in life as a result of peer-group isolation and high parental expectations.

[CyrilsScribe]

Sounds like Phaedrus, the pseudo-main character in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, he also has an IQ of 170 but ends up having sever mental problems that caused a nervous breakdown and a short trip into insanity due to some ground-breaking work in the philosophy of quality that he was doing. It is an interesting and mostly autobiographical work that is worth the read.

[EvilKnightSD]

He did an interview on Glenn Beck...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBW4S9xcTOk

No meat there either. Just implying that scientists/intelligensia are wrong. Felt that the kid was humoring Beck.

K

[Zed]

Firstly, IQ is not the definitive measure of intelligence. It's only the definitive measure of capacity to take IQ tests - considering that intelligence is unlikely to be a general faculty, it's unlikely that a single test will suffice to evaluate the whole concept of intelligence in a person. Secondly, it's impossible to accurately establish the IQ of people who fall so far out of the common range.

[Zixinus]

Jesus, I don't care how smart he is (to be honest, I am sceptical whether such a kid even exist), he's freaking twelve. Once he manages to get an actual degree and starts publishing papers, then there is reason to pay attention. Until then, he's a twelve year old who's still trying to grasp a theory that takes smart adults a great deal of time and effort to truly understand.

[Sriad]

Plus, at least in one interview (towards the end of the article), he gets really basic stuff about stellar evolution and the BBT flat wrong. He says that stars greater than 1.4 solar masses go supernova; they need to start with at least eight (a white dwarf cannot have more than 1.4 solar masses before it becomes unstable and explodes - this is called the Chandrasekhar limit). I suppose it is possible he merely confused the two when giving the interview.

Probably the case; explodey white dwarfs are also classified as (1a) supernovae and extremely useful in cosmology.

Like you said though, there's a lot wrong in the rest of the interview.

[Serafina]

What annoys me is that some people claim that he is "smarter than Einstein" or somesuch.
His IQ-score might be higher than Einsteins, or that of many other scientists. But keep in mind that IQ is measured relative to ones age!. It's based on the average capabilities of people in your age category, and your score merely shows how much you are above or below average. It's also known to vary widely as one get's older, especially in such extreme cases - my IQ dropped by 20 points from age 6 to age 12. I did not get dumber, the average standard merely catched up.

Or in simple terms: He is a very smart for a 12-year old. That doesn't mean that he is smarter than a 30-ish person.

That claim also ignores that IQ merely denotes the capability to learn things. It makes acquiring knowledge easier, it doesn't magically give you knowledge from nowhere. This kid has not yet finished any degree, so how do we know that he has sufficient knowledge in, say, astrophysics? Well, we do know because he doesn't have a degree, so he likely doesn't have that knowledge - he might if he thaught himself, but it's unlikely that that is as comprehensive as studying for a degree.

[Darth Tedious]

Further, though I have no doubts the kid is smart, I do question his abilities to apply his knowledge of facts into a greater system of a whole. The interview that starslayer provided shows that. He can do the math and can use the facts, but he can't appreciate larger systems and their interfunctionality, it appears.

It is a definite possiblity he's missing points in what he's trying to address. I can only speak from personal experience here, but my younger brother (who has Asperger's and is incredibly intelligent) often gets so caught up in minute details that he misses the bigger picture. This problem would be compounded by his age.

I have to wonder, did he actually say the Earth is mostly made of Carbon? He might not be quite as bright as they're making out...

[Slacker]

In most cases, everyone else catches up with them and they are just among the multitude of other highly intelligent people.

His IQ is so high because he is so intelligent for his age.

Thats what happened to me. I developed early, and so on standardized assessment tests they OVERcorrected for my age, and inflated my IQ significantly.

Same. And actually, I had a serious problem dealing with higher level math in college that I may not have had such trouble with if I hadn't had it in my head that "You're so smart, stop being so dumb about this and man up" and actually just bore down and plowed through things.

[Zadius]

He did an interview on Glenn Beck...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBW4S9xcTOk

Is it just me or is he being asked to prove that a divergent infinite series converges.

[Sarevok]

I don't like the fact he is being considered special because he has math skills and high IQ. Rather than building something useful or coming up with interesting concepts.

Me ? I prefer prodigies like that African kid who built a wind turbine out of scrap. People should be judged on basis of what they achieve rather than what potential they may have.