12-year old challenges the Big Bang

I thought this may be of interest to the LW community. Jacob Barnett is a 12-year old male who taught himself all of high school math (algebra through calculus), has a currently scored math IQ of 170 (for what that's worth) and is currently on track to become a researcher of astrophysics. His current major news worthy claim-to-fame (aside from being really young): The Big Bang Theory is currently incorrect (I believe the article states he has something about a lack of carbon in the model), and he's planning to develop a new theory.

I haven't learned anything serious in physics, so I have nothing to note on his claim. I realize the news article cited puts him claim fairly generally, so I'll ask this: Can someone explain how elements are generally modeled to have formed from the big bang? And is there anything that it Jacob may be missing in the current literature?

He's a smart 12 year old who has some silly ideas, as smart 12 year olds often do, and now he'll never be able to live them down because some reporter wrote a fluff piece about him.

Reminds me of this old article (04.19.01) about Yudkowsky:

Since then, Yudkowsky has become not just someone who predicts the Singularity, but a committed activist trying to speed its arrival. "My first allegiance is to the Singularity, not humanity," he writes in one essay. "I don't know what the Singularity will do with us. I don't know whether Singularities upgrade mortal races, or disassemble us for spare atoms.... If it comes down to Us or Them, I'm with Them."

[...]

Yudkowsky takes it a step further, writing that he believes AI "will be developed on symmetric-multiprocessing hardware, at least initially." He said he expects Singularity could happen in the very near future: "I wouldn't be surprised if tomorrow was the Final Dawn, the last sunrise before the Earth and Sun are reshaped into computing elements."

When one researcher booted up a program he hoped would be AI-like, Yudkowsky said he believed there was a 5 percent chance the Singularity was about to happen and human existence would be forever changed.

[...]

In an autobiographical essay, he writes: "I think my efforts could spell the difference between life and death for most of humanity, or even the difference between a Singularity and a lifeless, sterilized planet... I think that I can save the world, not just because I'm the one who happens to be making the effort, but because I'm the only one who can make the effort."

It truly is astonishing, the number of quotes that XiXiDu has about Eliezer. It's like he has a thick dossier, slowly accumulating negative content...

40Eliezer Yudkowsky15y

Note: This is a LIE. The correct quote was that I said on SL4 that when Douglas Lenat switched on Eurisko, essentially the first time anyone had ever built a Turing-complete freeform genuinely recursive self-modifier with heuristics modifying heuristics, he ought to have evaluated a 5% chance of it going FOOM. I was 4 years old when Eurisko was switched on, and could not possibly have said anything at the time. Declan McCullagh. Write it down. Never trust him. No matter how many terrible things you've heard about the mainstream press, you truly cannot appreciate how bad it really, really is until you have been reported on yourself. It is at least two orders of magnitude worse than you think it is from reading Reddit.