Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski is a Chicago-born theoretical physicist, of Cuban & Polish descent, who taught herself to build and fly a plane as a teenager. She finished first in physics at MIT, co-discovered the gravitational “spin memory effect” at Harvard in research that Stephen Hawking cited, and since 2021 has led the Celestial Holography Initiative at Canada’s Perimeter Institute.
Celestial holography proposes that our universe works like a hologram: everything that happens in our four-dimensional, flat spacetime can be encoded in a simpler two-dimensional theory on the “celestial sphere,” the imagined dome of the sky at infinite distance. It builds on infinite hidden symmetries she helped uncover in her earlier research.
