Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski said, 'I don’t want to make billionaires richer. I want to understand how the universe works'. She rejected Jeff Bezos and wants to understand how the universe works.
A woman who built her own plane at 12 threatens to de-throne Albert Einstein as the greatest mind of all time - and she doesn’t “want to make billionaires richer.”
32-year-old Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski, built a plane when she was 12, was rejected from MIT, persuaded MIT to take her anyway, graduated top of her class in physics, and went on to study at Harvard.
But she rejects the Einstein moniker. She said: "When Harvard University called me 'the next Einstein', I expressed my rejection of that title, stating, 'I am just a grad student. I have so much to learn. I do not deserve the attention'". It comes during an alarming time for scientists, with a sinister kidnap conspiracy theory emerging over one who burned to death in a Tesla.
READ MORE: Trump caught on camera awkwardly touching Melania's butt at inappropriate momentREAD MORE: Melania Trump's two-word reprimand to Donald as tense moment exposed by lip readerPasterski is working on problems Einstein could not fully explain - but she has always been ahead of the curve. As a child she built a real aeroplane from scratch, learning engineering aerodynamics and physics.
At 16, she flew the plane she built herself in Canada with no instructor or safety net. She said: "Belief doesn't make planes fly. Physics does".
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She applied to MIT and was rejected - so she sent MIT a video of her flying the plane and they asked her to join the next semester.
Three years later she graduated from MIT with a perfect GPA.
Now she specialises in quantum gravity, black holes and the structure of spacetime.
Stephen Hawking cited her work and Jeff Bezos invited her to Blue Origin, his private space launch company. She said no, saying: “I don’t want to make billionaires richer. I want to understand how the universe works.”
While there, she and her colleagues discovered something called the 'spin memory effect', and when she published a paper on it, she was cited by Professor Stephen Hawking.
According to SD2 SD2, Brown University offered her $1.1 million to join them, but she turned them down to join The Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, which is where she works now.
Joining them in 2021, she leads their Celestial Holography Initiative, which is encoding the universe as a hologram as part of a project “uniting our understanding of spacetime with quantum theory”.
She said: "Celestial holography consists of two words: celestial and holography. Celestial literally means looking up at the night sky to understand how to encode the physical universe as a hologram".
If that feels beyond you - fear not - Pasterski also has a YouTube channel, PhysicsGirl, where she explains her research.