The 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics tells a remarkable story about bridging two seemingly incompatible worlds. When the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that John Clarke, Michel H Devoret, and John M Martinis would share this year’s prize “for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit,” they honoured work that transformed quantum mechanics from a microscopic curiosity into a tangible, engineered reality.

For most of the 20th century, quantum mechanics was the domain of the impossibly small — individual atoms, electrons, and photons dancing to rules that defied everyday intuition. Particles could exist in multiple states simultaneously. They could tunnel through barriers as if passing through walls. Energy came in discrete packets, not continuous flows. These were phenomena you couldn’t see, touch, or directly experience. They were mathematical abstractions that, while experimentally verified, remained divorced from the world we inhabit.
The laureates changed that fundamental assumption. Through meticulous experimental work with superconducting circuits, they demonstrated that quantum behaviour isn’t confined to the atomic realm. Their circuits, large enough to hold in one’s hand, exhibited the same bizarre quantum properties that physicists had only observed in individual particles. A macroscopic electrical system could tunnel from one state to another. It could absorb energy only in quantised amounts, refusing intermediate values like a child accepting only whole cookies, never fractions.

This discovery was more than an academic curiosity. The Nobel Committee explicitly noted that this year’s prize “has provided opportunities for developing the next generation of quantum technology, including quantum cryptography, quantum computers, and quantum sensors.” In essence, the laureates built a bridge between quantum theory and quantum engineering, opening pathways that the technology industry is now racing to explore.
Link: https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/physics-nobel-prize-quantum-science-clark-devoret-martinis-10294665/