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Alex_Altair comments on Does anyone know any kid geniuses? - Less Wrong Discussion
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Jake Barnett has become somewhat famous recently, although I doubt he's available for personal friendships. I hope you've introduced your friend to the sequences, or at least HPMOR!
From what I've seen and heard of Jake Barnett, he's a very bright kid being overpromoted to an unhealthy extent. I remember reading news articles that casually mention that he's debunked big bang theory. Watching Youtube videos of him explaining his supposed "expansion" of the theory of relativity shows that he has a worse than rudimentary understanding of the theory. I also recall watching a TV show where they had Jake solving a math problem in the background while his parents chatted with the interviewer. I don't remember the details, but anyone with a college-level math background would have realized that he was applying methods that would work on similar problems, but for fairly obvious reasons would not work on this particular problem. The interviewer ignored the fact that the problem wasn't actually being solved and instead expressed great admiration at the fact that the kid was writing Greek letters on a chalkboard.
The Jake Barnett trajectory is exactly what smart kids should be avoiding.
I'd like to see that particular video. I'd paid attention to what he actually said and wrote in other videos, and didn't catch any problem. Plus he is actually doing work for Indiana University, which is a pretty serious accomplishment. Plus he got published in Physical Review A. It is possible that we are both correct and that he learned enough between our observations.
Here's the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBW4S9xcTOk
He starts solving the problem at the 9:50 mark.
He's supposed to prove that a certain infinite series converges, and he applies the integral test for convergence. It is of course extremely impressive that a 12-year-old would even think of doing this, but the test is clearly not applicable in this case. The summand function is neither non-negative nor monotone decreasing, both of which are requirements for the applicability of the integral test.
To be fair to him, though, they (unintentionally?) gave him a trick question. He was asked to prove that the series converges, but it actually doesn't. Also, I'm sure if I was put on the spot in front of a TV camera there's a high probability I'd make silly mistakes.
It is quite possible that he's improved markedly since then, and if he's a university student and published in Phys. Rev. A then I would guess he has.
I am extremely worried to see him in the context of Glenn Beck pushing Christianity. As far as I know, his ideas to disprove the Big Bang have nothing to do with religion, and I sure hope he hasn't written the bottom line. And you're right about the integral test.
If I remember correctly, the Big Bang model was first proposed by a Catholic priest and was initially dismissed as an attempt to sneak religion back into cosmology. If he was engaging in motivated cognition to defend his faith, then wouldn't he not try to "disprove the Big Bang"?
The Catholic Church has enthusiastically supported the Big Bang model since the '50s. But there are strains of fundamentalist evangelical Christianity that don't think the theory is consistent with the Bible and so reject it. The Young Earth Creationist website "Answers in Genesis" is an example: http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/nab2/does-big-bang-fit-with-bible
In America at least, if I knew a person was very religious, I would count that as evidence against the claim that they believe the Big Bang occurred. If I remember correctly, surveys show that a majority of Americans don't believe in the theory, and I suspect this is largely because they think it is in tension with their religious beliefs.
While the Big Bang may be a better fit for theism than the steady state model, it is a worse fit than the claim that the universe came into being a few thousand years ago with essentially the same physical structure it has now.
Christians don't have the criterion of making sense.
Some of them do. In any case, it seems clear to me that the Big Bang model is coherent with theism, but the steady state model is not (or, at least, is much less so).
I am not comfortable with this generalization - particularly when applied across all ages and the Christian being discussed was right.
Beck said "show us what you showed me in my office" implying that he'd been shown the problem before.
But it should be fairly obvious to any calculus student that that series doesn't converge since the limit as it goes to infinity isn't 0... It doesn't even exist. Sine and cosine functions are an immediate red flag to this, all you need to do to look at it is a simple order of magnitude analysis.
Nevertheless, I'm sure he's very smart. But I'm not sure he has much common sense if he didn't see that right away. I'll also echo Alex's sentiments below...
Well my instinctive feeling would've been - this won't converge. The problem with people educated by tests. The tests imply there is an answer. In real world when you do something new you don't have clues like 'it converges'. When i was studying stuff, we just had fairly hint-less questions.
I just realized you're probably asking about the relativity video, not the interview video. I searched for it on YouTube but can't seem to find it any more. It was a video of him talking about an error in standard presentations of the theory. I suspect he took the video down after learning more about relativity.
ETA: Found it. Most of what he says here just sounds like nonsense. The fact that the video is no longer on his own channel does suggest that he's come to realize this.
Of course.