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/posts/2025-10-07_nobel/

It’s that time of the year again: the Nobel prizes in physics have been announced, and this year it’s not for AI! Before I talk about anything else, I would just like to congratulate John Clarke, Michel H. Deboret, and John M. Martinis—hey, there are two Johns this year—on winning the Nobel prize. Their work was excellent, and, in this physicist’s opinion, very much worth a Nobel prize.

I’m quite happy to see that, this year, my own discipline of condensed matter physics is getting the limelight, with quantum tunneling in Josephson junctions being the big thing this year. Of course, this comes around during the international year of quantum science and technology—something that the APS has absolutely drilled into my skull with every email I get from them. So, of course, it’s fitting that, with this year, that the Nobel prize should go to something that mixes fundamental and applied physics—macroscopic tunneling in Josephson junctions absolutely fits the bill.

Since it’s late and I need to wake up early tomorrow, I will leave all the science to Douglas Natelson’s nanoscale views blog—his blog is great, and the kind of thing I hope to match some day.

Now, me being me, I do feel the need to mention that this year’s Nobel prize really isn’t all that unique, per se. The 1973 Nobel prize in physics went to a very similar bit of physics, macro-scale quantum tunneling in semiconductors and superconductors—hell, the Josephson junction, the thing that was used in the experiments that lead to the 2025 prize were the subject of the 1973 prize. It’s cool to see how far physics has come in the past 52 years—similar to computing power, the abilities we have to fabricate extremely sensitive devices have increased greatly since the 1970s, allowing for a lot of wonderful things from MRI machines and quantum computers to better physics experiments.

When I first saw the announcement, I thought that the Nobel committee was just giving into trend-chasing, but then I remembered—while looking for the 1973 Nobel prize—the [1971 Nobel prize], which went to one guy, Dennis Gabor, for inventing—get this—holography. Please correct me if I’m wrong, but outside of some kinda pithy things, holography isn’t really all that important in our day to day lives, nor was it really a great leap forward in physics. Holography is cool, not doubt about it, but it just doesn’t have that much weight to it. Really, the Nobel has always been about trend chasing to some degree—holograms were a bit like AI back in the 1970s, in a sense.

It’s easy to be disappointed in the Nobel prize, and there are reasons to dislike the Nobel prize as an institutional thing, but it’s just a progress marker. What better way to mark our progress in about ten-bajillion different fields of physics than a really cool piece of quantum technology? (This feels like a weak conclusion, sorry. I’m tired.)

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