Artful Dodger: I can't access the emoticons here, so you will have to settle for an old fashioned LOL. Hopefully he now uses paper and pen for scribbling his notes, and does not use crayons on the family room wall. My kids were geniuses when it came to knowing when we were paying attention or not. I don't know anything about this kid, but already I'm starting to like him. I payed a lot of attention to how much cereal was in the box, and where the prize could most likely be found. I solved that problem by dumping all of it into a large mixing bowl, and then putting it back into the box after getting the prize. What's his problem with the big bang theory? Is it the idea itself, or because of the exotic math found in string theory? We've infered from the math multiple extra dimansions, and then go from there to say that gravity is leaking into our dimension from one of the others. Something does seem to be leaky, but I don't think it's because of some crack leaking gravity from another dimension into ours. Most of this speculation does nothing more than satisfy the demands of an overly cumbersome mathematical structure, which by the way was originally derived from another equation put together for some other unrelated purpose. I can't imagine this kid saying he likes the steady state universe theory over the big bang theory when the evidence seems to point to some starting point. I'm guessing it's the math he has a problem with. Scientists should stop screwing around with fancy and imaginative theories, and go back to finding simple and common sense anwsers. Do it for the children, like little 12 year old Jimmy, or Tommy, or whatever the heck that kids name is. Doesn't matter, do it for the kids!! So,How am I doing, boss? You think there's a place for me in Democrat party politics?

Artful Dodger: Slight problem in his thinking...

.."..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..."

If just hydrogen and helium.. where did the carbon come from? And what about the other elements??

(V): A twelve year old boy who is naturally able to suspend disbelief long enough to wonder about what he has learned is no big surprise. Just means he thinks like any other 12 year old boy. He is playing with ideas and saying to himself, I wonder what this means, or what would happen (in an equation) if this is also true. His ablilities do seem to be limited to seeing the world almost exclusively through math, but he is also apparently very good with language as well, and is good at expaining his ideas. He has aspergers. I can relate to that, as I have a very mild form of it, virtually undetectable. At least undetectable when I was young, I don't know how my life would have been different if I was 50 younger, and growing up in a much different world than I remember. At least now I have a retroactive excuse for my weird behavior, so I guess it's not a total loss. Kids who had it worse than me might have been labeled weird or retarded or incorrigible, or whatever. I believe I may have just barely slipped in under the radar.

Artful Dodger:

"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."

Only one minor correction for this kid. The earth is made mostly of hydrogen and oxygen, in the form of water. Then its core is made of molten iron, and the crust is made silicon dioxide. Carbon and nitrogen are also important, but carbon is not what the earth is mostly made of.

“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.”

I think he is confused. Carbon fused together? He assumes that matter fuses to create life? Or does he mean elementary particles fusing together into carbon atoms? I think he is confusing one thing with another. Well, he is 12 years old. I would advise him to look at the chemistry starting from the core to the surface of a star, and then look at what most elements are made of. Then I would say, what about the carbon in comets and meteorites? I think he is a brilliant kid, with a lot of learning to do. However, I would remind him that mathematical equations are not nature, they are merely a linguistic representation that tries to match what we see in nature. The Big Bang as a theory makes some big assumptions such as the Cosmologial Principle and the universality of physical laws. To prove the Big Bang wrong one would have to disprove those two underlying assumptions. The Big Bang also requires space of uniform curvature (elliptic, hyperbolic or Euclidean space). If one could prove that space near a singularity is not uniform, then the Big Bang theory would fall apart. Well, I am no specialist in the subject. One of these days I might look at the math for it, and convince myself that it is not all bullocks or wishful thinking!