From my perspective, it doesn't have to be complicated to be sophisticated, and you can grow the types of questions you can (realistically) explore as his math skills grow.
ITA with Howler
FWIW, and please don't think this is critical in *any* way at all, just an observation
- but my first thought when I read your OP was - you must not be a scientist
Speaking as a scientist (in a family of science geeks and engineers), and as a parent of an obviously future engineer who was coming up with some danged original and very cool ideas about science at a very early age - it sounds like your thoughts were headed in the direction many folks' thoughts default to for kids who are good at science: accelerate in math, and look to Lego League
Acceleration in math is good - as long as your child *wants* it and needs it - (which all of your past posts point to lol!)… but it's also not something that has to happen for a kid who is good at science, and it's also not a given that every child who has amazing scientific ideas and loves science is also going to be gangbusters-excited and interested in delving into uber-math-acceleration
My ds is accelerated in math, but he wasn't when he was little and had all these amazing science ideas and was capable of deep complicated scientific thought processes. And that was ok - his math caught up with him. Had we tried to have him spend extra time on math because of his science interest, that would have backfired (does that make sense? I'm not sure I explained it well).
Re Lego League - it's great for some kids, and it doesn't work out for others - so I would go into it just looking at it as something fun to try. My ds is very much into robotics - but when he was your ds' age our attempts to get him interested in First Lego League fizzled - he was much happier programming his own robot at home. What we ran into was a three-fold: if your group is going to participate in the competitions, it's not all about robotics. Half of the competition for First Lego League is (or at least used to be) a research/presentation project on the topic-of-the-year - which was fun for some of the kids in our group, but ds was never really into it. Second thing was ability - ds could see solutions to programming challenges by osmosis, but many of the kids in the group were much slower to see solutions and also much slower at picking up programming skills - so ds spent a lot of time waiting plus being the 'helper'. Third thing was boundaries on what we could/couldn't do placed on us by the school we sponsored the group through. Please know this isn't everyone's experience - we have a friend with a HG+ kid who is a bit younger than ds who was able to organize a group of kids that really gels and has a good time with it
We also had people suggest learning programming for our ds when he was young - again, I think this is another easy default thought because it's relatively easy to find programming courses online or for some people to learn programming through tutorials or a book. (Please know I'm *not* being critical of learning programming :)). The thing is, don't substitute an activity like that for time spent learning, experimenting, and loving science if *science* is what your ds is interested in. If he's begging to learn programming, that's great, let him. If he's constantly asking questions about science and devouring it when he reads, give him more opportunities to explore wherever his mind leads. Programming can be picked up later when he wants to or has a need to.
Anyway, for a science-minded child I firmly believe the best thing you can do is to follow their lead (which you are doing!) - listen to their ideas and questions, give them opportunities to dig deep into whatever interests them, and just go with it. They don't have to be enrolled in a college-level physics course at 8 to be thinking through high level concepts - as HK mentions, they will come back to the questions that interest them as they learn more about math and other things
Or they may abandon some of their early interests and move on into other areas.
Have fun seeing where your ds' interests lead
polarbear
ps - I would also talk again to the person who brought this up. He might be a person who would be able to suggest a mentor for your ds - a scientist he could spend time with just having "fun" with whatever your ds is interested in. I'm not suggesting tutoring or formal training, but for instance, if your ds was really into bridges and structures, maybe you could find someone who has training in civil engineering to spend some time with ds…. etc
