Badassery Magazine October 2017 Issue 17 | Page 21

G
reat Caesar’s salad we
human-shaped humans
are a comparative species
aren’t we? We can’t seem to avoid
measuring everything against
something that came before. It’s
like a... ahem. Right.
Dear reader, this train of thought
was sent careening out of the
station by an article I read back
in January of this year (which I
can sadly no longer find online)
about a remarkable young wom-
an named Sabrina Pasterski.
The article described how
Pasterski, now a 22 year old
first-generation Cuban-Ameri-
can born and bred in the suburbs
of Chicago, not to mention an
MIT graduate and Harvard Ph.D.
candidate in physics, caught the
eye of the top professors at MIT
when she built her own single
engine plane.
At fourteen.
So far, she’s caught the attention
of the best and brightest of the
propeller heads at NASA and
even Jeff Bezos, founder of Am-
azon and aerospace company
Blue Origin, promising her a job
whenever she’s ready.
that's not even remotely relevant.
I point it out only because often
articles written about remark-
able women spend inordinate
amounts of time focused on
things that seem at best, frivo-
lous, and at worst, a distraction
from the achievements of the
woman in question. woman could be the “next Albert
Einstein.” That’s quite an hon-
our to bestow on a 22 year old,
and as far I can tell, it’s entirely
warranted. It got me to thinking
(a process that rarely ends well
it must be said) about how, as
humans, we use comparison to
measure and grade our world.
I could prattle on endlessly about
such things, however the shad-
ows grow long and I must return
to the gravamen of my text, lest
I lose you to the beguiling black
hole of vacuous diversion and
distraction that is the world wide
inter-web-net. I admit that my immediate,
knee-jerk reaction to the head-
line was, “Well that’s all well and
good, but instead of the next
Einstein, why can’t she be the
first Pasterski?” Upon reflection,
I realized that the comparison
is just our way of understanding
the significance of this young
woman’s brilliance. As much as
we would love to be judged on
our own merits alone, it can be
difficult to fathom without some
sort of comparison.
Anyway, I began this essay by
suggesting that humans are an
incredibly comparative species:
it seems like ages ago doesn’t
it? We’ve been through so much
together since then. But we can
pick up from where we began.
The headline of the article stat-
ed that this amazingly talented
and obviously brilliant young
This is, of course, science at its
best. Incredible discoveries by
one person are often built upon
the work of others, either by con-
firming or refining previously
Her physics work has revolved
around semiclassical Virasoro
symmetry of the quantum gravity
S-matrix and Low’s subleading
soft theorem as a symmetry of
QED.
Obviously.
To the author’s credit, the arti-
cle doesn’t delve deeply into the
fact that Pasterski has never had
a boyfriend, because honestly,
20