According to Harvard University, the world’s next Einstein may have been found out. The Cuban-American Chicago native, Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski, age 23, is the most accomplished and well-known physicist in the U.S. She graduated from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in merely three years having the highest possible grade point of 5.0 on average. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard University with complete academic freedom, meaning that she can pursue her subjects without being forced or interfered by the faculty. Sabrina first got the attention of the world when in 2008, at the age of 14, she built her single-engine airplane and documented the process on YouTube.
Professors of MIT, Allen Haggerty, and Earl Murman saw the video and were astonished. “Our mouths were hanging open after we looked at it. Her potential is off the charts.” At the age of 16, she becomes the youngest person to fly their plane when she piloted her aircraft herself over Lake Michigan. An executive secretary at MIT, Peggy Udden said, “I couldn’t believe it. Not only because she was so young, but a girl.” When Paterski was 9 years old, she had flown a plane. When she casually said that to her teacher at Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, the teacher replied: “That’s nice, but what have you done lately?” Pasterski said in an interview, “That’s become my mantra ever since.”
Paterski says that she is not on social media and has never had a boyfriend, smoked cigarettes, or drunk an alcoholic drink. Instead, she uses her free time to explore the concepts of black holes, space-time, quantum gravity, and the mathematical model that combines space and time into a single continuum. She has published many articles which are mentioned among her achievements on her website, PhysicsGirl.com. Among them, some famous ones are Semiclassical Virasoro Symmetry of the Quantum Gravity S-Matrix, Gaussian Measures and the QM Oscillator, and Low’s Subleading Soft Theorem as a Symmetry of QED.
Her work in the field of Physics has led to some fantastic job offers from NASA and Blue Origins. Paterski’s interest and success in this field has led to a trend of youngsters, especially women, graduating with a physics degree. Before that, new physics graduates were decreasing with every year. However, according to the American Institute of Physics, in 2015 this number reached its peak with 8,081 students graduating with physics as a major. Pasterski said earlier this year in an interview, “Be optimistic about what you believe you can do. When you’re little, you say a lot of things about what you’ll do or be when you’re older—I think it’s important not to lose sight of those dreams.”