The 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to John Clarke, Michel Devore, and John Martinis for bringing the strange phenomena of quantum mechanics to the macroscopic level.
What the scientists discovered
In 1984-85, at the University of California, they built a superconducting electrical circuit that acted as a single giant particle. The experiment showed:
Quantum tunneling - the system was able to "pass through a wall" as if there were no obstacle
Energy quantization - the system absorbed and emitted energy only in specific doses
Why is this important
Before these experiments, quantum phenomena were observed only at the microscopic level. The Nobel laureates demonstrated that billions of particles can behave collectively as a single quantum system, which can be held in the hand.
Practical application
This discovery became the basis for the development of quantum computers. Martinis later used this quantization of energy to create quantum bits, the fundamental units of information in future quantum computers.
