Nobel Prize for Physics 2025

Physics gest super weird at the extremes. Whether it’s the speed of light and the expansion of the Universe or atomic and subatomic particles and their behaviours it just doesn’t make intuitive sense. If you throw a ball at a wall it bounces back but this isn’t always true for particles at the atomic and subatomic level. They can sometimes pass right through a barrier without any change to them or the barrier. This is called quantum tunneling and it relates to subatomic particles acting like probability distributions instead of what you would think of when you think of a particle - I did say it gets weird!

Quantum tunneling was thought to be something that only occurred at the subatomic level, but Drs John Clarke (UK), Michel Devoret (France) and John Martini (USA) were able to show that quantum tunneling can occur in an electric circuit at the macroscopic level - something that you can hold in your hand if you were inclined. In experiments they conducted in 1984/85 using superconducting materials they created an electrical circuit that showed quantum tunneling. Once you have a an electrical circuit you can do all sorts of things. We now are developing quantum computers that are able to solve problems much more quickly than standard computers and quantum cryptology (incredibly fast code breaking) and quantum sensors.

Here’s a video on quantum computers - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3U1NDUiwSA

Here’s a video on quantum cryptology - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvTqbM5Dq4Q