Sabrina Pasterski: The Physicist Who Pioneered Celestial Holography

At age 14, most teenagers are worrying about getting their learner's permit. Sabrina González Pasterski was already flying a single-engine airplane she'd built herself. By 22, she'd graduated at the top of her class from MIT with a perfect 5.0 GPA and was working on physics problems so complex that Stephen Hawking cited her research. Now at 32, she's leading a team of physicists at one of the world's premier research institutes, pioneering an entirely new approach to understanding the universe through something called Celestial Holography.

Pasterski's trajectory reads like fiction, except it's real. And what makes her story even more remarkable is how she's done it all while staying remarkably grounded, shunning social media, and maintaining a fierce focus on the work itself rather than the attention.

Let's dive into the story of a first-generation Cuban-American from Chicago who's redefining what's possible in high-energy theoretical physics.

The Girl Who Built a Plane

Sabrina González Pasterski was born on June 3, 1993, in Chicago to an engineering family. Her fascination with flight started early. At age 9, she took her first airplane ride and was immediately hooked on understanding how these machines worked.

By age 10, she wasn't just reading about airplanes, she was rebuilding a plane engine. When she turned 10, her grandfather gave her a Cessna 150 airplane as a gift. Most kids that age would be thrilled just to sit in it. Pasterski decided to completely rebuild it.

Over the next few years, with help from a mechanic and encouragement from her family, she worked on constructing the frame for a new aircraft and rebuilding the engine. She documented the entire process on video. By age 12, she had built a complete fixed-wing single-engine aircraft.

On June 1, 2007, two days before her 14th birthday, Pasterski flew the plane solo in Canada. She later received special FAA permission to fly it in the United States despite her age, with the FAA making exceptions for the hundreds of modifications she'd made to the aircraft. On August 24, 2009, at age 16, she conducted her first solo flight in the U.S., becoming the youngest person in the country to build and fly their own aircraft.

She even founded Sabrina Aircraft Manufacturing based on this work. The aviation magazine Midwest Flyer dubbed her "the future of aviation."

But aviation, as impressive as it was, turned out to be just the beginning.

The Road to MIT: From Waitlist to Valedictorian

When Pasterski applied to MIT in 2010, she was waitlisted. For someone who'd already accomplished so much, this must have stung.

But then MIT professors Allen Haggerty and Earll Murman saw the video of her building the airplane. Haggerty later told Yahoo: "Our mouths were hanging open after we looked at it. Her potential is off the charts."

Pasterski was accepted off the waitlist and enrolled at MIT. Looking back on the experience, she told the Chicago Tribune: "It was an interesting experience because it might have actually pushed me a little bit to re-evaluate where I wanted to be. It was a bit of a blow. At some level, I'm glad that I didn't have a safety school, because if I had a safety school, I don't know if I could have pushed myself in off the wait list."

At MIT, Pasterski became the first MIT freshman ever named to the NASA January Operational Internship. She won the inaugural MIT Freshman Entrepreneurship Award. She spent time at Boeing's Phantom Works division. As a sophomore, she worked on the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

She graduated in three years, while still a teenager, with a bachelor's degree in physics. Her GPA? A perfect 5.00, the highest possible score at MIT. She graduated at the top of her class, the first woman to do so in 20 years, and became the first woman ever to win the MIT Physics Orloff Scholarship Award.

Her professors weren't just impressed by her grades. They recognized something deeper: a relentless curiosity and an ability to push boundaries in ways that most students simply don't.

Harvard and the Discovery That Got Hawking's Attention

From MIT, Pasterski went straight to Harvard's Physics PhD program at age 19. She worked under the supervision of Andrew Strominger, the Gwill E. York Professor of Physics and director of Harvard's Center for the Fundamental Laws of Nature.

During her very first few months at Harvard in 2014, Pasterski was part of discovering the spin memory effect. This is a phenomenon related to gravitational waves, those ripples in spacetime predicted by Einstein's general relativity and first directly detected by LIGO in 2015. The spin memory effect could potentially provide an inexpensive way to detect and verify gravitational waves, complementing expensive facilities like LIGO.

In 2015, still a graduate student, Pasterski published a solo paper completing what's now called the Pasterski-Strominger-Zhiboedov triangle for electromagnetic memory. This work explored symmetries in quantum electrodynamics and their connection to memory effects.

Then something remarkable happened. In early 2016, Stephen Hawking, Malcolm Perry, and Andrew Strominger (Pasterski's advisor) published papers on soft hair on black holes. These papers cited three of Pasterski's works: the two co-authored papers and her individual 2015 paper.

Suddenly, the physics world was paying attention. Media coverage exploded. Headlines called her "the next Einstein." Forbes named her to their 30 Under 30 Science list in 2015. She'd already made Scientific American's 30 Under 30 list back in 2012 when she was just 19.

Pasterski earned her PhD in physics from Harvard in May 2019 at age 25.

The Anti-Social Media Genius

Here's what makes Pasterski unusual beyond her academic achievements: she has no social media presence whatsoever.

No Facebook. No Twitter. No Instagram. No LinkedIn. No TikTok. She doesn't even own a smartphone.

In an age where most scientists, especially young ones trying to build their careers, maintain an active presence online, Pasterski has opted out completely. Her only web presence is her straightforward, no-frills personal website (PhysicsGirl.com) where she posts her research, papers, and the occasional video.

When a viral meme spread in 2017 claiming "Stephen Hawking follows her on Twitter," fact-checkers at Snopes had to point out that neither Hawking nor Pasterski had Twitter accounts. The truth, as Snopes noted, was "actually much more interesting": rather than following her on social media, Hawking was citing her scientific work.

Pasterski has been clear about her reasoning. As she told Yahoo: "Physics itself is exciting enough. It's not like a 9-to-5 thing. When you're tired you sleep, and when you're not, you do physics."

She's also uncomfortable with media attention. On her website, she's posted a "Media Fact-Check Sheet" where she notes: "I am just a grad student. I have so much to learn. I do not deserve the attention."

When Ozy magazine published an article in 2016 titled "This Millennial Might Be the New Einstein," Pasterski reposted it on her site with the headline changed to "This Millennial is Sabrina." She doesn't want to be the next Einstein. She just wants to do physics.

What She Actually Studies: The Complex Stuff

So what does Pasterski actually work on? Her research focuses on high-energy theoretical physics, and it's genuinely mind-bending stuff.

She studies black holes, spacetime, quantum mechanics, and gravity. Specifically, she works on explaining gravity in the context of quantum mechanics, exploring Low's subleading soft theorem as a symmetry of quantum electrodynamics, and discovering infinite dimensional symmetry enhancements of the S-matrix (the mathematical object describing how particles interact).

If that sounds incomprehensible, you're not alone. These are questions at the absolute cutting edge of theoretical physics, the kind of problems that might help physicists finally unite quantum mechanics (which describes the very small) with general relativity (which describes the very large) into a single coherent theory.

Strominger, her Harvard advisor, gave Pasterski free reign in her second year as a PhD student to study any subject with any person she wanted. This level of independence and trust is rare for graduate students and speaks to the confidence her advisors had in her abilities.

Celestial Holography: Building a Hologram of the Universe

After completing her PhD at Harvard, Pasterski did a postdoctoral fellowship at the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science. Then came a major decision point in her career.

Brown University offered her a position as an assistant professor with a salary package worth approximately $1.1 million. It was an incredible offer for someone just completing their postdoc. Most physicists would jump at it.

Pasterski turned it down.

Instead, at age 27, she joined the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, as a faculty member. More importantly, she founded and became the principal investigator of the Celestial Holography Initiative.

Celestial Holography is Pasterski's big idea, a new approach to one of physics' deepest problems: how to unite our understanding of spacetime with quantum theory. The initiative proposes that our four-dimensional universe can be encoded as a hologram on a two-dimensional surface at its boundary, similar to how a 2D hologram can contain 3D information.

This isn't just abstract mathematics. If Celestial Holography works, it could provide a framework for understanding quantum gravity, resolving paradoxes about black holes, and potentially unlocking entirely new physics.

Within six months of founding the initiative, Pasterski had hired four postdocs to work on the project. She invited Andrew Strominger to collaborate, and together they secured an $8 million grant from the Simons Foundation. This funding established the Simons Collaboration on Celestial Holography, which is now underway as a major international research effort bringing together experts in amplitudes, mathematical physics, and quantum gravity.

Pasterski is leading this team in what she describes as "a concerted effort to tackle the problem of uniting our understanding of spacetime with quantum theory by encoding our universe as a hologram."

The Job Offers and Recognition

Along the way, Pasterski has received some pretty extraordinary offers and recognition.

Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and the aerospace company Blue Origin, offered her a job. NASA showed interest in bringing her on board. Both were turned down in favor of continuing her physics research.

She's received major fellowship support from the Hertz Foundation, the Smith Foundation, and the National Science Foundation, totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund her research.

She was named to Forbes 30 Under 30 Science list in 2015. In 2012, at age 19, she made Scientific American's 30 Under 30 list as a Lindau Nobel Young Researcher. She's been featured in media around the world, from Russia Today to People en Español to Marie Claire España to le Figaro magazine in Paris.

In 2016, she was invited to the White House as part of the Let Girls Learn initiative, a program launched by President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama to help girls worldwide access education. Pasterski has been a vocal advocate for encouraging young women and minorities to pursue STEM fields.

She's aware of being one of only 23 women named as a U.S. Physics Team semifinalist in her year out of about 300 students total. The experience made her acutely aware of the underrepresentation of women and minorities in physics, and she's committed to creating pathways for others.

The Unexpected Interests

Despite her laser focus on physics, Pasterski has some surprising interests.

She loves motorcycles and believes every physicist should learn to ride one. As she put it: "Every physicist should learn to ride a motorcycle. It gives one a certain physical intuition, as does flying a small airplane."

There's a philosophy there about hands-on experience with the physical world informing theoretical understanding. Building planes, flying aircraft, and riding motorcycles all provide visceral experience with forces, motion, and mechanics in ways that sitting at a desk doing calculations doesn't.

She still flies in her spare time, though "spare time" is probably generous given her research commitments.

And while she shuns social media, she does maintain a YouTube channel where she occasionally posts physics-related videos, staying true to her PhysicsGirl moniker.

The Philosophy: Impossible Is Just a Challenge

When asked about her approach to physics and life, Pasterski has been consistently clear about her mindset.

"I see no limit to what we can achieve and view the word 'impossible' as a challenge," she told Harvard's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. "This kind of physics will create undreamed of advances that transform the way we live and the world we live in."

In a 2012 interview with Scientific American, she reflected on her journey from building airplanes to theoretical physics: "Building an airplane from a kit and flying as a child, I longed to understand the physics, application and reach of flight."

She also acknowledged the role of persistence in her success: "Years of pushing the bounds of what I could achieve led me to physics."

That persistence showed up early. After flying her plane and telling a teacher about it, the teacher responded, "That's nice, but what have you done lately?" Rather than being discouraged, Pasterski took it as motivation. It was only the beginning.

What's Next

At 32, Pasterski is still early in her career. She's leading the Celestial Holography Initiative, publishing prolifically (her publication list includes dozens of papers in top journals like the Journal of High Energy Physics), and continuing to push the boundaries of theoretical physics.

She's described her approach as exploratory: "I don't know exactly what problem I will or will not end up solving, or what exactly I'll end up working on in a couple of years. The fun thing about physics is that you don't know exactly what you're going to do."

The Celestial Holography project is ongoing, with major implications if successful. There's also the tantalizing possibility that the spin memory effect she helped discover could be verified during a rare gravitational lensing event predicted for early May 2028, providing an independent confirmation of gravitational-wave detections.

The Bottom Line

Sabrina González Pasterski's story is remarkable not just because of what she's accomplished, but how she's accomplished it: with focus, humility, and a genuine love for the work itself rather than the recognition.

She built an airplane as a kid because she wanted to understand flight. She pursued physics at the highest levels because the questions fascinated her. She founded the Celestial Holography Initiative because she believes it's the right approach to one of physics' deepest problems. And she's avoided social media and celebrity because they're distractions from the actual work.

In a culture obsessed with personal branding, influencer status, and viral moments, Pasterski is a refreshing counterexample. She's proof that you can achieve extraordinary things by simply being extraordinarily good at what you do and caring deeply about doing it well.

As a proud first-generation Cuban-American and Chicago Public Schools alumna, she's also a powerful example for young people, especially women and minorities, who might not see themselves represented in physics. She's shown that the path to groundbreaking science doesn't require fitting a traditional mold.

Whether or not she becomes "the next Einstein" (a label she clearly doesn't want), Sabrina Pasterski is already making her mark on physics in her own right. And given that she's still in her early 30s with decades of research ahead of her, the best might be yet to come.

Sources

Wikipedia. Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabrina_Gonzalez_Pasterski

Perimeter Institute. Sabrina Pasterski. Retrieved from https://perimeterinstitute.ca/people/sabrina-pasterski

Snopes. (2017). The Remarkable Sabrina Pasterski. Retrieved from https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/sabrina-pasterski-physics-girl/

San Diego Squared. (2023). Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski: The Next Einstein in the Making. Retrieved from https://sd2.org/sabrina-gonzalez-pasterski-the-next-einstein-in-the-making/

Hertz Foundation. Sabrina Pasterski. Retrieved from https://www.hertzfoundation.org/people/sabrina-pasterski/

Harvard University Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. (2015). 30 Under Thirty.

Interesting Engineering. (2017). Sabrina Pasterski: the 'Physics Girl' Who Built Her First Plane at Thirteen Years Old. Retrieved from https://interestingengineering.com/science/sabrina-pasterski-the-physics-girl-who-built-her-first-plane-at-thirteen-years-old

Capitol Technology University. Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski: The Young Woman Dubbed the "Next Albert Einstein." Retrieved from https://www.captechu.edu/blog/sabrina-gonzalez-pasterski-young-woman-dubbed-next-albert-einstein