Well I see nothing impossible,  at 9 I could already solder and had a thing for code breaking, but some examples of electronics that still exist suggest that quality control in  my early work was pretty dire.

However I suspect though this boy will develop like other infant prodigies (anyone else remember   Ruth Lawrence  - age 10 at Oxford in the early 1980s, when the rest of us there were 18 or so..  now a clever adult, but one of many at that level)

While in effect this lad is working at a level of those a decade older right now,  I expect that in ten years time,  many others of his age will have caught up, and in the meantime, for the reasons OMS alludes, those following at a more conventional pace may well  end up with a more rounded out character.


I suspect that like the maths genius, the theory and logic part of the brain has switched on earlier than others of the same age, but on its own that faculty makes one only half a person - the rest required to function in society will come later. Or maybe not, as is sometimes the case in some University researchers, as parodied in the comedy ' Big Bang theory', when at least one of the characters can be described as off the normal spectrum, (even for a physicist ? ).

Do not get me wrong, I wish the boy no ill, and he should certainly keep learning, up to the point he is still enjoying it, but there is more out there to do at that age, that cannot so easily be done later, hopefully he has another 7 decades or so to fill.

Well I see nothing impossible,  at 9 I could already solder and had a thing for code breaking, but some examples of electronics that still exist suggest that quality control in  my early work was pretty dire.

However I suspect though this boy will develop like other infant prodigies (anyone else remember   Ruth Lawrence  - age 10 at Oxford in the early 1980s, when the rest of us there were 18 or so..  now a clever adult, but one of many at that level)

While in effect this lad is working at a level of those a decade older right now,  I expect that in ten years time,  many others of his age will have caught up, and in the meantime, for the reasons OMS alludes, those following at a more conventional pace may well  end up with a more rounded out character.


I suspect that like the maths genius, the theory and logic part of the brain has switched on earlier than others of the same age, but on its own that faculty makes one only half a person - the rest required to function in society will come later. Or maybe not, as is sometimes the case in some University researchers, as parodied in the comedy ' Big Bang theory', when at least one of the characters can be described as off the normal spectrum, (even for a physicist ? ).

Do not get me wrong, I wish the boy no ill, and he should certainly keep learning, up to the point he is still enjoying it, but there is more out there to do at that age, that cannot so easily be done later, hopefully he has another 7 decades or so to fill.