Understanding 2025's Physics Nobel Prize Winner

The Nobel Prizes are one of, if not the most prestigious set of awards for professionals in STEM, Economics, Literature, and Humanities. The Nobel Prize was created in honor of Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, according to his last will. It is awarded each year. In 2025, it was awarded to John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret, and John M. Martinis for "demonstrating quantum mechanical behavior in electrical circuits". But what does that actually mean?

Quantum mechanics, or Quantum physics largely, is the study of matter and energy, the same things we study in General Physics, but at the smallest scale which is the subatomic level. Scales smaller than even our brains can feasibly imagine. If a hydrogen atom were the size of a Football, your hair would go more than half the distance to the moon. And quantum scales even smaller than atoms! In these small scales our normal physics, which you learned at school, no longer apply or work as we expect it to. Thus, the field of Quantum Physics is born, to explain the physics and the behavior of the Quantum world.

The experiment which won the 2025 Physics Nobel shows that some events of Quantum Physics, such as quantum tunneling, can also occur in much larger systems made from something called superconducting circuits. Quantum tunneling by the way, shows that there is a chance that small particles can just pass through seemingly impenetrable thin barriers. They just appear on the other side of a very thin wall!

These scientists used created circuits that behave like "artificial atoms", which helped them study quantum mechanics in controllable devices. This is a huge discovery not just for Physics, but for the Quantum Computing and Quantum Technology industry.

Their work shows how something so seemingly unrelated to real life, such as Quantum mechanics, can eventually lead to significant discoveries and powerful new technology.