A teenager from the Belgian city of Ostend became the second youngest holder of higher education in the foreseeable history. He graduated with honors from a physics course at the University of Antwerp and is now going to defend his master's degree and then his doctoral dissertation in this field. His goal is simple and clear: increasing the life expectancy of a person up to complete immortality by replacing body parts and organs with mechanical or artificial ones.
The Dutch public media NOS writes that Laurent Simons was the best among his older classmates and completed the entire curriculum in just one year instead of three. Before that, the boy mastered the high school program in a year and a half and received a diploma of graduation at eight years old.
The child prodigy became interested in the discipline last April when he took several courses in classical mechanics and quantum physics out of curiosity. Lauren was so captivated by the topic that he immediately decided to learn everything in this area of knowledge. Then the teenager put aside the rest of his interests with projects and dived into physics with his head.
As we can see, recently this hobby has borne its first fruits: a person received higher education at such an early age only once. American Michael Kevin Kearney took a bachelor's degree in anthropology from the University of South Alabama when he was 10 years old (a Guinness record).
The young Belgian's motivation is not a simple pursuit of knowledge. Simons wants to achieve immortality - however, he does not specify, for himself or for all mankind. He even outlined a rough strategy for achieving this goal, broken down into key tasks. The first step is a fundamental understanding of matter, its constituent smallest particles and the interactions between them. That is, quantum physics.
To achieve the longest possible life expectancy, according to Lauren, it is necessary to modernize such a short-lived human body. He is going to do this in stages, replacing parts of himself with mechanical ones, which can be relatively easily improved and made durable or easily replaceable. And for this, in turn, Simons wants to work with "the best professors in the world, look into their brains and understand how they think."
In the near future, the child prodigy plans to continue his studies in the physical field. The next step is a master's degree at the same Antwerp University, the program for which will begin in the fall. Simons intends to write his doctoral dissertation in parallel with the training course. Here, by the way, the child has every chance of becoming a record holder, because his American rival received his PhD only at the age of 14. But for this you need to keep up the pace.
Interestingly, Lauren could have graduated even earlier, but the Technical University of Eindhoven in the spring of 2019 was unable to issue a diploma to the boy until he reached the age of 10 (December 26). The child prodigy attended courses there at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and was not too upset about this outcome.
According to Simons, it is not regalia that is important to him, but knowledge. What, apparently, cannot be said about the boy's parents: having learned about the impossibility of obtaining a "record" diploma, they took him from Eindhofen. Prior to that, the young Belgian managed to attend summer courses at Stanford and Fairfield Universities in the USA and graduate from a high school with a mathematical bias in Bruges.