Featured Image Credit: Rich Polk/Getty Images for Young Women's Honors
A theoretical physicist who has been dubbed as the ‘next Einstein’ once rejected Jeff Bezos for a brutal reason.
Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski is known for discovering a novel gravitational memory effect.
The 32 year old once flew a plane she designed without any instructor or safety net in place.
This occurred in 2009 when Pasterski was just 16 years old. The aircraft, which is a Zenith Zodiac, was assembled and held together through rivets that the teen had set herself.
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Meanwhile, the engine had been assembled and disassembled by Pasterski at her home.
Since then, she went on to study at MIT before continuing her education at Harvard University, which led to the institution comparing her to Albert Einstein.
While the scientist is in demand from a lot of moguls wishing to improve their tech, Pasterski was invited to Bezos’ Blue Origin, which is his private space company.
However, she turned down the Amazon founder, saying at the time that she didn’t want ‘to make billionaires richer’.
Instead, her motivation is to ‘understand how the universe works’.
And it seems to be gaining her a lot of acknowledgement, with her research having been once cited by Stephen Hawking.
For those wanting to better understand what Pasterski is working on and hear her in her own words, she has got her own YouTube channel, PhysicsGirl, where you can learn about her research.
In an interview with Discovery Canada, Pasterski said: “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. And normally things just change very quickly - kind of irreversibly - if they’re really right.”
Meanwhile, Blue Origin wasn’t the only job offer the scientist turned down as she was also invited by Brown University to join as an assistant professor at the Perimeter Institute in 2021.
This came with a whopping $1.1 million offer but this was turned down by Pasterski.
Instead, she works as a founder and lead investigator of the Celestial Holography Initiative.
There, she leads a team working to encode the universe into a hologram in order to gain a better understanding of spacetime with quantum theory, along with researching complicated topics such as black holes.
Looks like she could well be giving Einstein a run for his money.
