At 14, she built an airplane in a garage and flew it.

By 25, she had a PhD from Harvard.

Now she spends her days on an idea so strange it sounds made up. The idea: everything you see — you included — might be a hologram.

Meet Sabrina Pasterski. She’s Cuban-American, raised in Chicago. She studied physics at MIT and earned a PhD from Harvard. And the press keeps calling her “the next Einstein.”

(She hates that label, for the record. Says it’s not accurate and moves on. I kind of love her for that.)

But here’s the part I can’t stop thinking about. And I don’t mean the sci-fi “we’re living in a simulation” version. I mean the real, chalkboard-and-equations one: everything you can see — every star, every planet, you, the kid who asks “is this gonna be on the test?” — could be fully described on a flat, 2D surface. One dimension flatter than it looks.

Let me explain it the way it finally clicked for me — as someone learning this from zero.

Here’s the one picture to hold onto, and everything else hangs off it. Imagine a room — furniture, a couple of people, a cat, dust drifting in a sunbeam. Now imagine that everything in that room could be written down, in full detail, as information on the walls. Not a summary. Not a shadow. A complete transcript — so complete that if the room and everything in it vanished, you could rebuild it all, exactly as it was, using only what’s written on the walls. That’s the whole idea: the walls (a flat, 2D surface) and the room (3D space) carry the exact same reality. Two formats, one story.

The word doing all the work there is complete. A shadow is a flat version of a 3D thing — but a shadow throws information away. You can’t rebuild a person from their shadow. The walls throw nothing away. If that still sounds impossible, here’s a smaller version you already trust. Your whole 3D body — every bone, the shape of your face — is written in DNA. DNA is basically a 1D strand of code: a tiny, flat thing holding the full plan for a big, 3D one. Holography just asks a bigger version of the same question. What if the whole universe works that way?

So why would serious physicists believe the walls thing? Black holes. Your gut says a bigger room holds more stuff — that space should depend on the volume inside. But here’s the shock that started all of this. Physicists worked out the most information you can ever pack into a region of space, right up to the point where it collapses into a black hole. That maximum doesn’t depend on the volume inside. It depends on the surface area of the edge — the walls. The universe measures its storage by the wall, not the floor space. That’s exactly what you’d expect if the real information lived on the surface all along.

That weird clue grew into an idea called the holographic principle. Maybe the full story of any chunk of space can be written on its boundary — one dimension lower. The “inside” and the “boundary” aren’t two different things. They’re the same story, told two ways.

Pasterski works in a field called celestial holography. She’s trying to make that idea work for our universe — the real, everyday space and time we live in. The math of particles crashing around in space gets incredibly messy. Her goal is to re-describe all of it on a flat “sky,” where it might finally be simple enough to solve.

Here’s the nuance I appreciated, because it kept me honest. She’s not saying you’re secretly a flat cartoon. It’s more like this: if two descriptions are perfectly equal, you can use whichever one is easier. Some problems are a nightmare one way and simple the other. The hologram isn’t a trick. It’s a translation.

Physics has two rulebooks that don’t get along. General relativity runs the big stuff — gravity, planets, black holes. Quantum mechanics runs the tiny stuff — particles. Both work flawlessly in their own lane, and they flatly contradict each other in the overlap. Pasterski’s whole bet is that these two rulebooks come from one deeper set of rules we just haven’t written down yet. The hologram might be a way in.

One more thing she works on that we think is wild: the gravitational memory effect. When two black holes collide far across the galaxy, they send ripples through spacetime. The ripple passes through you — and according to this idea, it leaves a tiny, permanent mark. Space remembers that something happened. Future detectors may actually be able to measure it.

We don’t fully understand all of this. And honestly? Neither does anyone. Pasterski is refreshingly blunt about it: her whole field is a room full of brilliant people, confused together. The job is just to get a little less confused each year.

But that’s exactly why we love it. This is physics as wonder — not a formula to memorize, but a real question about what the world is made of. And that feeling — the whoa-wait-what — is the entire reason we started Phantastic Physics.

“A physicist some call ‘the next Einstein’ is chasing a wild idea: that everything in the universe might be written on a flat surface, like a hologram. If she’s right, it could connect the two halves of physics that have never agreed — gravity and quantum.”

Let me tighten up a couple of details — because the details are where physics gets fun. When Lauren says “flatter than it looks,” here’s the careful version. Our universe has four dimensions: three of space and one of time. The idea is that all of it could be written on a lower-dimensional edge. That’s the holographic principle, and it came out of studying black holes and heat. One more: the gravitational memory effect isn’t space itself getting dented. It’s that two free-falling detectors end up permanently shifted — relative to each other — after a wave passes through. Small differences. But that’s the line between “sounds cool” and “is correct.”

— Shawn

“Mind-Benders: 5 Questions That Make Any Class Lean In”

Five wonder-sparking physics questions — black holes, light, the shape of space — each with quick talking points. Print it, file it for fall, and open any class with a “wait, WHAT?” instead of a warm-up worksheet.

DOWNLOAD THE FREE QUESTION PACK →

Write one line on the board:

“If the entire universe could be described on a flat surface, what would that surface look like?”

Give them 90 seconds to argue. There’s no right answer — the argument is the lesson.

Want to turn that wonder into a whole class period? Our Physics Investigation Bureau escape room bundle covers all 8 units — print-and-go mysteries your students will actually beg to finish.

So here’s me daring to think big this summer. Hit reply and tell us: what’s a physics idea that broke your brain in the best way? We read every one.

We’re writing next week’s newsletter from Montana, so it might be a short one. 🏔️

Stay Wildly Curious,

— Lauren & Shawn

P.S. — BTW, this is the exact feeling we want to mail to kids, parents, teachers, physics enthusiasts. Mystery Mail is a physics story-and-puzzle adventure that arrives in your actual mailbox each month — real physics, hidden inside a story. We’re opening a few founding spots soon.

You’ll be first in line.