I didn't notice about the affiliate links, but her story is undeniably real: reading some of the posts on her fledling physicist blog (previous one) , one is struck with the sense of an immediate and lucid understanding of deep physics problems that probably take other early stage academics many years to grok. And , as GP stated, QFT is notoriously thorny, and an immediate comprehension of that is the hallmark of something very special.
I don't know what her IQ really is, I don't think astronomical, but it is certainly very anomalous. I only have a truly deep perspective on my own abilities, and just based on this I think I can say somewhat confidently she is at least a generation above mine in general ability-, for myself, having jumped from standard engineering undergrad, to software engineering and algorithm design, to applied physics, and now finally to nanoelectronics , each of which I can say I somewhat mastered within the space of a year-1.5yrs, and statisically I konw I am 3.5-4 standard deviations above mean (at age 10 and 14 I tested 164 and 158 respectively), but all of that did not give me the power to so quickly grasp QFT- remained incomprehensible to me in my first year grad school classes, and probably always will, unless I invested massive time into mastering it.
But I want to comment on another thing I find highly strange, which is that someone of such rare intelligence would leave academia (ostensibly she was at one time considering staying in Physics as a grad student) back to software architecture, rather than gravitating to the edge of mathematical physics- or continuing to follow that road to reality, to riff on Penrose. Indeed, I found myself following the inverse path. And ultimately, Moffat & his correspondents in our generation,- possibly another lady, like Pasterski looks like one possible member of this cohort- will be the ones to pave the next part of it.
I don't know what her IQ really is, I don't think astronomical, but it is certainly very anomalous. I only have a truly deep perspective on my own abilities, and just based on this I think I can say somewhat confidently she is at least a generation above mine in general ability-, for myself, having jumped from standard engineering undergrad, to software engineering and algorithm design, to applied physics, and now finally to nanoelectronics , each of which I can say I somewhat mastered within the space of a year-1.5yrs, and statisically I konw I am 3.5-4 standard deviations above mean (at age 10 and 14 I tested 164 and 158 respectively), but all of that did not give me the power to so quickly grasp QFT- remained incomprehensible to me in my first year grad school classes, and probably always will, unless I invested massive time into mastering it.
But I want to comment on another thing I find highly strange, which is that someone of such rare intelligence would leave academia (ostensibly she was at one time considering staying in Physics as a grad student) back to software architecture, rather than gravitating to the edge of mathematical physics- or continuing to follow that road to reality, to riff on Penrose. Indeed, I found myself following the inverse path. And ultimately, Moffat & his correspondents in our generation,- possibly another lady, like Pasterski looks like one possible member of this cohort- will be the ones to pave the next part of it.