She wanted to fly, so she built a plane. Now she wants the source code of the universe.
A child reads Harry Potter and asks for a flying broomstick. Her family gives her a Cessna, and by sixteen she has built a plane from a kit and flown it, and when others like it broke up in the air, she modified hers. Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski has been called the next Einstein. The label is unnecessary. She wanted magic and built its working equivalent, and she is doing it again with the sky.
I
A Kit in the Garage
A child in Chicago reads Harry Potter and asks her parents for a flying broomstick. Many children have. The wish was older than the book: her mother dates her fascination with aircraft and spaceflight to the age of four, and the broomstick was only the first form of it a child could ask for by name. What is unusual is the answer she got. Her father, a lawyer, electrical engineer and pilot, turned the wish into flying. At nine she took her first flight and began lessons across the border in Canada, where a student pilot may fly solo at fourteen, two years earlier than in the United States. When she turned ten her grandfather gave her a Cessna 150. Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski tells the story herself in a sentence that has three generations in it: “My dad got my grandpa to get me a Cessna instead.”
The family had a method, and the Cessna was only its largest instance. The spare bedroom in the house was painted chroma-key blue, with pulleys in the ceiling from which a child could be suspended and filmed into a scene in which she flew. Looking back from her thirties, she describes her parents as putting a great deal into finding realistic versions of magical things. It is a good description of a childhood and a better one of a character. Whatever she was told about magic, she was shown where the pulleys went.
In 2006, at twelve, she bought a kit for a Zenith Zodiac CH 601XL, a small two-seat aluminum airplane that arrives as sheets, ribs and rivets. Her father sold his car to pay for it. She already had a company, founded the year before, called Sabrina Aircraft Manufacturing. In the first month she assembled an engine from the parts of three others, and on the FAA paperwork it is the Sabrina O-200A. Seven months went to the fuselage, wings and tail, four to the interior. By October 2007 the family garage could hold no more airplane. It was taken apart, moved to Aurora Airport, painted and put back together. In January 2008 it flew, with her father at the controls. The build had taken two years. At sixteen, before she had a driver’s license, she flew it herself.
That is the point at which most tellings stop, and the point at which the story stops being an anecdote. The Zodiac had been coming apart in the air. By 2009 the National Transportation Safety Board had linked six accidents and ten deaths to the design and asked for the type to be grounded, and that November, after another fatal breakup, the FAA issued a bulletin on the airframe and froze new approvals until an aircraft had been modified. The sixteen-year-old with the Sabrina O-200A was, by the following spring, making the modifications. She had wanted a broomstick, which cannot fall, and had been given an airplane, which can. She did not leave it as the kit had come. She brought it up to the stricter standard the breakups had forced on its makers.
From those years, too, comes the one shortcut she was ever offered. At fourteen, on the day she first flew the Cessna alone, she came home to a signed offer of a job at Blue Origin from Jeff Bezos. She never answered the letter, though she interned there at sixteen. As far as she is concerned, the offer is still pending.
II
The Move
The shape of the thing is now visible. A want arrives in magical form. The magic is declined. The want is kept, and something is built that does what the magic was for, by means that can be inspected, signed off and, if necessary, modified in a garage. Before the broomstick there had been a brief plan to be a Spice Girl, a want she has since discharged at the Met Gala in a dress she printed herself. The broomstick is the one that set the pattern, because it was the first want large enough that the realistic version took two years. Her family made the first of these translations for her, from broomstick to Cessna; by the time the kit arrived in the garage, the move was hers.
She arrived at MIT at seventeen and decided, by her own account, that she had done aerospace and would now be a physicist. The move looks like a change of subject, and it is not hard to read it as the same move again: having built a thing that flies, she wanted to know what flying is made of, and then what everything is made of, and the discipline that answers that question is not engineering. She has said she is drawn to difficulty and underestimated how much of it she was signing up for, which is also what people say at the third month of a kit build. She graduated first in physics with a perfect 5.00 average, the first woman to win the department’s Orloff Scholarship, and went to Harvard to work with Andrew Strominger.
III
Books Kept at the Sky
What she found there was about the sky. Far from any matter, spacetime is nearly flat, and in 1962 Bondi, van der Burg, Metzner and Sachs found that even there it has an infinite family of symmetries, far larger than the handful that special relativity had led physicists to expect. In 1965 Weinberg proved a theorem about what happens when a graviton of almost no energy is added to any collision. And there was an old prediction that a passing gravitational wave leaves a permanent displacement behind it, a memory, in anything it passes through. For decades these sat in separate drawers. Around 2014 Strominger and his collaborators showed that they are one fact seen from three sides: the symmetries imply the theorem, the theorem implies the memory, the memory implies the symmetries. Strominger called it the infrared triangle. The universe, it turned out, keeps books, and it keeps them at the sky.
In 2015, with Strominger and Alexander Zhiboedov, she found a second memory. The first is left by the energy a wave carries; this one is left by its spin, and it shows up as a delay: beams sent clockwise and counterclockwise around the same orbit fall out of step. With it came a second triangle, one order down. In January 2016 Stephen Hawking, Malcolm Perry and Strominger cited the paper in the article in which they proposed that black holes carry what they called soft hair, and so might keep, at the edge, a record of what fell in. She was twenty-two. She met Hawking while she was a graduate student, and later found herself in a conga line with him on a Boston Harbor cruise, which is the kind of detail a profile uses to prove she is human and which here proves something else: she was in the room where the sky’s bookkeeping was being argued over, and she was there because of a calculation.
IV
The Headline
The headline came a week later. On January 12, 2016, the website Ozy ran a profile under the title “This Millennial Might Be the New Einstein.” Within days the “might” was gone from some of the reprints. By the end of 2017 a meme had Harvard itself calling her the next Einstein, and Snopes, checking it, could find no one at Harvard who had. Ozy has since collapsed. The label has not.
She answered it the way she answers things. She posted the article on her own website with the headline rewritten to say only that this millennial is Sabrina. Under a heading called Media Fact-Check Sheet she described herself as a grad student with plenty to learn and little claim on the attention. Nearly ten years on she told Perimeter Institute that what she had felt was not imposter syndrome but “knowing you’re actually an imposter because of clickbait.” The institute’s profile adds that she studied twice as hard so that no one could call her overhyped. This summer she said that two livestreamed debates on artificial intelligence, with Roger Penrose in September 2025 and Sergey Brin in January, had brought the label back, and that she had decided to treat the attention as a resource for Perimeter rather than as a trophy.
The label can be retired, and not out of politeness. A prediction about who someone might become cannot be checked, which is why it invites the very charge she studied to forestall. The broomstick can be checked. It is a description of what she has been doing since she was nine, and it already contains the trait the label was grasping at, which is a refusal to let a want remain a wish. Einstein is a comparison. The broomstick is a method.
V
The Sphere
In 2021 she joined Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario, an institute given over entirely to theoretical physics, which she values for its quiet and for a say in how research is done that a large university would not give her. There she founded a group with an unlikely name, the Celestial Holography Initiative, and the name is the clearest statement of what she now wants.
Her own picture of it begins with an instruction: “Picture yourself at the centre of a giant sphere.” The sphere is the night sky, in the physicist’s sense: not the dome overhead but the sphere of all the directions from which a ray of light can arrive. Whatever happens inside it is written, as a pattern, on its inner surface, and the proposal is that the writing is enough: the four dimensions of space and time within can be read from the two of the sphere. That is not mysticism; it is a lineage. Since the 1990s physicists have suspected that in certain universes a theory with gravity is secretly identical to a theory without gravity in one dimension fewer, written on the edge. Maldacena made that precise in 1997 for a universe with negative curvature. Ours is not one, and for nearly every purpose it can be treated as flat, which is the case his version does not reach. The celestial version is stranger still: it drops two dimensions where his drops one.
In 2017 she showed, with Shu-Heng Shao and Strominger, how the scattering amplitudes of our flat world, the numbers particle physicists actually compute, can be rewritten so that they behave like the correlation functions of a two-dimensional theory on the celestial sphere. The paper’s title gave the field its adjective. If our amplitudes are the correlators of some sphere theory, the task is to find the sphere theory.
That task is what she calls, in a profile published by MIT’s physics department, the search for the source code of the universe, and the phrase is exact rather than grand. Source code is the thing from which the running program follows. A theory without gravity, on a sphere, from which gravity and everything else would follow when you ran it, is source code in the plain sense. She works on paper, she says, because mathematics can be strict enough to check a theory’s consistency in places no experiment reaches. That is an engineer’s reason. The kit plane had to hold together in the air. The sphere theory has to hold together on paper, and there is no FAA to issue the bulletin.
No one has the sphere theory. The field has its symmetries, a dictionary, a Simons Foundation collaboration of which she is deputy director, and rival approaches, some of which may be right instead. It may fail. She knows what it is to build a thing to a design that came apart in the air; the honesty of the enterprise is that you build it and then find out.
VI
Source Code
Set the two wants side by side. As a child she wanted to fly without a machine, and the realistic interpretation of that want was an airplane with her name on the engine. At thirty-three she wants to know the rules from which the world runs, and the realistic interpretation of that want is a theory on the sphere of the sky. The second want is the larger, and the move is identical: decline the magic, keep the want, build the thing that does what the magic was for, and find out whether it flies.
For the Met Gala in May she wanted, she said, to wear physics, so she used an AI model to design the pieces of her dress from a Hopf fibration, a way of filling a higher-dimensional sphere with interlocking rings, printed them on the machine in her office and learned enough sewing to attach a skirt. The Spice Girl want was decades old by then, and the dress reads as the treatment the broomstick got. The robot she said in July she was buying, which she means to make less frightening and more cute, is the same move in miniature. She describes her hobbies as a way to aim a restless mind rather than to calm it.
None of this requires the word genius. What it requires is a family that painted a room blue, a father who sold a car, a grandfather with a Cessna, a network of other builders, the FAA people she introduced herself to at air shows, and a child who, wanting a broomstick’s worth of magic, was shown the pulleys and kept asking for the working version. The gifts came with work attached. The one shortcut she was ever offered, a signed letter from Jeff Bezos that held out the destination without the build, she left unanswered. The first thing she built, she reworked when its design was found wanting. The sky over Lake Michigan, where she flew the plane she built, is the one she is now trying to read. She wants its source code. She is building the sphere.
⁂
Sources: Ari Daniel, “On the hunt for ‘the source code of the universe,’” MIT Physics, April 21, 2026; Jennifer Berry, “This American physicist got an open-ended job offer from Jeff Bezos, but she chose Canada instead,” Be Giant, July 9, 2026; “Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski: From rocket science to more challenging pursuits,” Perimeter Institute, August 21, 2025; Jim Bildilli, “Wondering Where The Future of Aviation Is?” Midwest Flyer, August/September 2010; “The Remarkable Sabrina Pasterski,” Snopes, December 27, 2017, for the Ozy headline and her Media Fact-Check Sheet; Alison Bowen, Chicago Tribune, July 28, 2015; her curriculum vitae; the FAA’s Zodiac Special Review Team Report (January 2010) and General Aviation News (November 23, 2009); S. Pasterski, A. Strominger and A. Zhiboedov, “New Gravitational Memories” (2015); S. W. Hawking, M. J. Perry and A. Strominger, “Soft Hair on Black Holes,” Physical Review Letters 116 (2016); S. Pasterski, S.-H. Shao and A. Strominger, “Flat Space Amplitudes and Conformal Symmetry of the Celestial Sphere,” Physical Review D 96 (2017). The header and interior images were generated with Gemini Argon for this essay and are not likenesses of any real person. The portrait of Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski was generated with Gemini Argon from a 2014 photograph by Cambridge02138 (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0) and is released under the same license. Drafted with Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Opus 5.5; literary editing by Claude Fable 5.1; copy editing by Claude Sonnet 5.5.