Meet Hugh
Hugh
Hugh is a happy, kind, funny, 13-year-old who's fervor for theoretical physics has blown us away. We knew he was smart when he learned every make of car there was by 2.5 year old and could identify most without looking at the logos. His sharp sense of humor was another sign. We knew he was gifted when he taught himself to read at age 4. The first word he read was "goldfish" and he used phonetics to read it, not context.
At age 5 he was reading middle school anatomy/physiology text books to me. His favorite word was "duodenum" and he knew where it was located. In that same book, in the back was the Periodic table of elements. I explained to him that we could take 2 of the H's and combine it with 1 of the O's and it would make water. Kind of like in Mindcraft how he would take various things and put them in the crafting box to make other things. We could take one Na and one Cl, put them together and we would get salt. This was all it took, and his little 5-year-old brain was off running. He couldn't get enough. He studied for hours every day for months. It didn’t stop with chemistry as this passion branched into the other sciences. Before long he was explaining to us the difference between centripetal force and angular momentum. He has amassed and retained a large amount of knowledge all of which is purely self-taught.
This page is dedicated to trying to capture the moments Hugh tries to explain scientific facts and phenomenon to me (his mother) while gaining exposure to networking opportunities. Explanations in the videos from Hugh range from negative mass, Higgs Boson particles, how light works, particle accelerators, and on and on. Hugh was 6 years old when we started documenting some of his knowledge. He has an extreme interest in astrophysics, subatomic particle physics, quantum mechanics, general relativity, cosmology, microbiology, and chemistry. He is correcting my grammar and punctuation as I type this. By age 7, Hugh was invited to join Mensa, became a Davidson Young Scholar, and was accepted into the John Hopkins Center for Talented Youth. Hugh loves visiting his favorite astrophysics professor Dr. Arash Bodaghee at college, sitting in his class and interacting with the students. He also loves speaking/lecturing to groups about various theoretical physics topics and attending astrophysics and cosmology lectures.