Sabrina Pasterski - Quantum Gravity, Black Holes and the Holographic Universe Theory | SRS #312

Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski, a Cuban-American theoretical physicist often labeled 'the next Einstein' (a comparison she rejects), speaks with Shawn Ryan about her life and groundbreaking research. Growing up in Chicago with lawyer parents, she was motivated by extrinsic rewards as a child and took her first flight lesson at age 9 after wanting a Harry Potter-style flying broomstick. Between ages 12 and 14, she built a single-engine Zenith aircraft, which became a networking tool that eventually helped her get off MIT's waitlist. She attended a public Illinois math and science boarding school before MIT, where she majored in physics after brief internships at Boeing, NASA, and Blue Origin disillusioned her about engineering careers.

Pasterski earned her PhD from Harvard in 2019, where she worked on gravitational memory effects — specifically the 'spin memory effect,' a variant involving angular momentum loss during gravitational wave events. She explains this as a deterministic imprint left in spacetime after massive bodies like black holes collide, analogous to a permanent shift in the position of distant detectors. Stephen Hawking cited her work, and her dissertation was only the second Harvard physics PhD published in Physics Reports.

The bulk of the conversation focuses on celestial holography — her current research at the Perimeter Institute — which attempts to describe all observables in 4D spacetime through a 2D 'celestial sphere' boundary theory. She frames this as a path toward uniting quantum mechanics and general relativity by finding an equivalent non-gravitational description of quantum gravity, building on the AdS/CFT correspondence but extending it to flat spacetimes more relevant to particle scattering. She is careful to note she is not claiming the universe 'is' a hologram in a literal sense, but rather that equivalent mathematical descriptions one dimension lower may reveal new physical insights.

Pasterski also discusses the sociology of physics: the difficulty of moving between subfields, the over-hype around quantum computing, her complicated feelings about Elon Musk, and her excitement about AI tools like Claude Code democratizing computational tasks for theorists. She expresses enthusiasm for the Perimeter Institute's startup-like research culture versus traditional universities. On broader topics, she is agnostic about cosmological expansion details, skeptical of UFO/UAP conspiracy theories, and thoughtfully addresses the tension between her mother's Catholicism and her own scientific worldview.