Autistic boy,12, with higher IQ than Einstein develops his o

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I have to go against the flow here and say that judging by the newspaper piece, it's pretty much impossible to say what is actually going on.

As far as I can tell, the kid hasn't actually done anything particularly interesting so far, he just says he is working on a theory of his own. The world is filled with people working on various very hard problems ... very few of them actually produce something worth mentioning.

Sure, the kid's has a high IQ and definitely impressive math skills for his age ... but that doesn't mean he is exempt from the rule that only results matter in the end. I believe he has made a significant contribution to relativity theory and/or the big gang theory when I see it documented and verified by a few other professionals.

As usual, this newspaper article is a feel-good piece, offering little evidence of the claims made. I suspect one claim make is factually false: the article says "Scott Tremaine ... confirmed the authenticity of Jake's theory", but the subsequent quotes don't really support this claim.

That said, I wish Jacob luck. He's going to need it

As far as I can tell, the kid hasn't actually done anything particularly interesting so far, he just says he is working on a theory of his own. The world is filled with people working on various very hard problems ... very few of them actually produce something worth mentioning.

Sure, the kid's has a high IQ and definitely impressive math skills for his age ... but that doesn't mean he is exempt from the rule that only results matter in the end. I believe he has made a significant contribution to relativity theory and/or the big gang theory when I see it documented and verified by a few other professionals.

I think the mere fact (assuming it is a fact) that he has learned so much of the known field of physics in such a short time is interesting in itself. He says he's working on a new theory. This may or may not turn out to be anything groundbreaking. But then again, he's only 12. Like you say, results matter in the end. But I suspect that the real results will come when he's in his 20's. There seems to be a pattern that paradigm-breaking physicists break the paradigms while in their 20's (and early 30's?). He may be the first to break that pattern by doing it at 12 (or 13), but probably not. I think it's more likely that he will spend his teens absorbing everything currently known about math and physics- some of which he'll learn by false start theories of his own- and the real breakthrough will come 10 years from now.