#312 Sabrina Pasterski - Theoretical Physicist on the Hidden Code of the Universe

**Shawn Ryan** (0:00)
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**Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski** (1:46)
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**Shawn Ryan** (2:17)
Sabrina.

**SPEAKER_3** (2:18)
Shawn.

**Shawn Ryan** (2:19)
Welcome to the show.

**SPEAKER_3** (2:20)
Thank you for having me.

**Shawn Ryan** (2:21)
Man, I've been excited about this. So, you're labeled, and I know you're probably gonna downplay this, the next Einstein. You don't like that.

**SPEAKER_3** (2:30)
No, I mean, it's just not accurate, but I do like this notion of, I don't know, thinking a bit about what that legacy is, and like, our feel as a whole, and how do we kind of leverage that or do good with it.

**Shawn Ryan** (2:44)
Well, I think we're gonna get into all that, but you know, the stuff you're doing, I don't even know how to say it, but it sounds like, and we're gonna get into it in a minute, but it sounds like what you're studying is if everything is a hologram.

**SPEAKER_3** (3:01)
Most literally, yeah, like the thing that I study is that, and I do find it's fun to kind of take a step back and talk to people who are not researchers to see how they interpret the words that we attach to things, or how like visceral, literal, like the researcher versus like the person you're talking to takes it.

**Shawn Ryan** (3:19)
Right on, right on. Are you ready to get into it?

**SPEAKER_3** (3:21)
Absolutely.

**Shawn Ryan** (3:22)
All right, let's do it. I'm going to start you off with an introduction here.
Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski, born in Chicago, Illinois, first-generation Cuban American. At age nine, your first flight lesson ignited a lifelong obsession with flight and physics behind it. Between ages 12 and 14, you spent two years building a single-engine Zenith. Rejected by Harvard, waitlisted at MIT, you got off the waitlist because of the airplane you built. Earned your PhD from Harvard in 2019 in high-energy theoretical physics, leading the Celestial Holography Initiative, a project aimed at encoding the entire universe as a hologram to unite quantum mechanics and general relativity. Named to Scientific American's 30 Under 30 in 2012 and Forbes 30 Under 30 Science List in 2015, one of the Albert Einstein Foundation's 100 Greatest Innovators in 2018
First woman to chair the flagship annual Strings Conference for the Global String Theory Community, first female to graduate number one in MIT Physics. And like I said before, many consider you to be the next Einstein, which you hate, you don't like that.

**SPEAKER_3** (4:39)
I mean, I think I'll probably benefit from it too much, but that's the bad thing. Yeah.

**Shawn Ryan** (4:44)
It's a cool label.
Be proud of that. But, so actually before we get into it, just can you give me a quick, I think I know what string theory is, at least a little bit. But, is this like, what are they called? Quantum communication?