Harvard student who built her own PLANE aged 14 hailed as ‘the next Einstein’ and has already been offered a job by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos
A GENIUS who built her own PLANE when she was just 14 has been hailed as the world's next Einstein.
Sabrina Pasterski, 23, is already one of the most well-known and accomplished physicists in the US and is currently a PhD candidate at Harvard, one of the world's finest universities.
And Jeff Bezos, aerospace developer and founder of Amazon.com, has extended an open invitation for Ms Pasterski to join him whenever she likes.
She graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in just three years, but her astonishing accomplishments started well before that.
While other teens were playing video games and sleeping in, Sabrina built a single-engine aircraft she had built from scratch in a workshop in her father’s garage.
After the first test of the engine, one that took her 363 days to finish, she told her proud father: "It’s amazing, it just starts spinning. It’s awesome."
Pasterski admits she is unlike many of her peers, having never had a boyfriend, smoked a cigarette, or had an alcoholic drink.
She said she does not use social media and instead spends her time exploring the concepts of quantum gravity and black holes.
Sabrina is being hailed up as a the “new Einstein”, a young woman whose brain works in ways few have ever worked and whose future is limitless.
She is next in line — behind Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein — to take the mantle as the world’s most talented thinker.
NASA is reportedly also interested in recruiting her.
After building a plane, she could be forgiven for resting on her already impressive achievements. But she said she knows she has to constantly reinvent herself, a lesson she learnt the hard way when she was a high school student.
Asked by a teacher what she’d achieved, she replied: “I’ve built a plane”.
The response has become her mantra: “That’s nice, but what have you done lately?”
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Ms Pasterski has moved on from building planes but said it helped her understand physics in a tangible way. Her next project could help us understand the universe.
At Harvard, she is researching black holes, gravity and space-time, areas of study tackled by Einstein and Hawking before her.
“Years of pushing the bounds of what I could achieve led me to physics,” she said in an interview published this week.
She said she liked “spotting elegance within the chaos”.
Her fascination with space started when she was a young girl. She attended the Chicago Public Schools’ Edison Regional Gifted Center and, told reporters at the Chicago Tribune, she decided she wanted to send someone to Mars.
Her website is full of achievements, including a feature in Scientific American where she declared that in 10 years she would be: “On the cover of Scientific American”.
That result wouldn’t surprise anyone who knows her.
The plane, which she flew solo above Lake Michigan as a teenager, got her closer to space than she’d ever been.
She said these days she hopes to push herself even higher.
“I’m harder on myself than other people probably are on me,” she told the Tribune.
“I definitely feel like I have way more to do. It’s great to get recognition now, but hopefully it builds up to something.
"I’ll hopefully be right about having some kind of gut feeling that [will become] rather big at some point. Fingers crossed.”
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