A brilliant physicist who built her own airplane as a child is being called the “next Albert Einstein” for her work on the universe’s biggest mysteries.
Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski, now 32, began building a real aircraft from a kit when she was just 12 years old. She flew the single-engine plane alone at age 14, long before she could legally drive a car.
Her talent took her to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she graduated in three years with a perfect top grade. She then earned a doctorate from Harvard University. Her research on gravity and space was so impressive that the famous scientist Stephen Hawking quoted her work in his final papers.
Major space groups like NASA and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin tried to hire her. A top American university also offered her a job worth over £800,000 ($1.1 million). However, Pasterski turned down the money and fame to focus on pure science.
Today, she works at the Perimeter Institute in Canada. She is leading an international team to solve a puzzle that even Einstein could not finish: how gravity works at the smallest quantum level.
