The 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics - Milo Sundquist '28
The 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics
INTRODUCTION: THE NOBEL PRIZE. Alfred Nobel was a scientist, inventor, and businessman, a brilliant thinker and an extremely rich, upper-class, white man of the 1800s. Curiously, he was not hailed for his science, his business, or his chemistry, but for his creation of dynamite. This fame must have brought him guilt, for in the years that followed his invention, explosives like his would be widely used for violence and bloodshed. Perhaps in guilt for the destruction caused, he devoted his enormous fortune to what would become the Nobel Prize. His mission was to award those for the greatest benefit to humankind, a principle that would carry on to today. Every year, a prize is given out in Peace, Literature, Medicine, Chemistry, and Physics. This year, just weeks ago, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Michel Deveret, John Clarke, and John M. Martinis, who carried a century of research on their backs and brought it to the real world to create what is known as a quantum computer.
CONTEXT: QUANTUM PHYSICS. An electron is a small particle that is found in every atom. In cartoon diagrams, it is depicted as a small blue ball that orbits the nucleus in a circle. Except this isn’t accurate. When scientists measure an electron, it exists at a single point in space, like in this cartoon depiction. But when it is not measured directly, its position isn’t defined. So scientists found it more accurate to describe an electron’s location as a Probability Cloud –a range of possible positions rather than a single point. Furthermore, due to the nucleus’s magnetic pull, electrons are tugged towards it; thus, they have a higher chance of being closer to the center than farther away. This distribution can be graphed as a wave, peaking at where an electron is likely to be (closer to the nucleus) and dipping where it is less likely (farther away). This is how an electron behaves at its lowest energy state, or ground state. On the other hand, when an atom gains energy, certain changes occur. The probability cloud changes from a simple sphere around the nucleus to a more complicated shape depending on the energy level. The higher the energy level, the more drastic the change, and when the shape changes, so does the wave graph. The wave graph is a representation of how far away the particle is from the nucleus. As a rule of thumb, the higher the atom’s energy, the more likely it is to find an electron far away from the nucleus. The curious thing is that the wave graph never dips to zero, so it's possible the electron isn’t where it’s supposed to be. You can think of an electron as living in between two brick walls or barriers in an atom, barriers where it is not supposed to escape, and yet it can. This phenomenon is known as “Quantum Tunelling” and is needed to understand this Nobel Prize-winning discovery.
THE DISCOVERY: LAYMAN'S TERMS. These ideas that have been described, probability clouds and quantum tunneling, all exist only on the microscopic level. When zooming out and looking at the world meter by meter, it turns out you cannot throw a ball at a wall and have it travel through like an electron through a barrier. Except what if you could? What if Quantum Tunneling wasn’t quantum? What if it was a natural state of the world? In the 1980s, three scientists looked at a superconducting circuit (an electrical circuit made with special materials that increase electrical efficiency). Inside this circuit, there exist billions of electrons that, curiously, act as one. And if a single electron can tunnel, and they all act as a single electron, shouldn’t they be able to tunnel? The answer, thanks to Michel Deveret, John Clarke, and John M. Martinis, is yes.
THE DISCOVERY: THE SPECIFICS. To test this theory, the three scientists relied on an invention in computing called the Josephson Junction. This is a small material that doesn’t conduct electricity (an insulator) stuck between two materials that conduct it at a very high rate (Superconducters). The theory is that electricity will pass through, and it does. But why it does is what’s important. It all starts when you cool the circuit down to -459 degrees Fahrenheit, and something special happens. In a solid, atoms are ordered, but at very low temperatures, atoms begin to lose their energy, so they start to move towards particles with heat. So when an electron moves through, the atoms compress slightly around it. Traditionally, electrons repel each other, but under this compression, two electrons form a bond. This bond is called a Cooper pair and happens to every electron in our superconductor. Single electrons all behave a little differently, but Cooper pairs all behave the same, so instead of having billions of tiny electrons that act differently, we have one large collection of Cooper Pairs that act the same. They are also more powerful than single electrons, so while electrons can’t tunnel through a Josephson Junction individually, Cooper pairs can. Also, since they possess quantum properties (they can tunnel), it means something interesting when looking back at our circuit. In a normal computer, bits store information through 0’s and 1’s. When an electrical current passes through a bit, it says 1; when there’s no current, it says 0. In a quantum computer, where instead of electrons there are Cooper pairs, there exists a qubit, a quantum bit. One of the rules of quantum physics is that, if two outcomes can exist, then so can their combination. So instead of Cooper Pairs just telling it to say 0 or 1, it can also tell it to say both at the same time. This means it can store information in more complicated ways than a regular computer, allowing it to do more complex tasks.
CONCLUSION, WHY DOES IT MATTER? This discovery proves that quantum physics isn’t just quantum. It opens up a whole new world of research and discovery. Before, quantum physics was looked at as an outlier in science: quantum tunneling seemed unnatural and contrary to the rest of the physical world. But now, as Quantum Physics has been used in computers, people have started to take it more seriously. Perhaps it is even more fundamental to science than previously believed. Also, it made the quantum computer possible—an invention that will forever change the world. With it, significant advances in medicine, AI, weather forecasting, and cybersecurity have already taken place, and many more likely will in the future. The discovery represents how science moves the world forward: it is not just a theoretical space for thought but a vessel for change. Macro-level quantum tunneling won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics, for it not only advances the scientific world, but society as well.
References:
Miller, K., & Watkins, A. (2025). Nobel Prize in Physics Is Awarded for Work in Quantum Mechanics . nytimes. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/07/science/nobel-prize-physics.html
Swedish Academy of Sciences, R. (2025). Nobel prize in physics 2025. NobelPrize.org. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2025/press-release/
Shenoy , M. (2025). The Impossible Physics Behind the 2025 Nobel Prize. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyVlldYiVbk
-Science, E. (2025). Nobel Winners PROVED “The Universe Is Quantum” Nobel Physics Prize 2025 Explained. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKKSC9V2ETI
Nave, R. (2025). Cooper pairs. Cooper Pairs and the BCS Theory of Superconductivity. http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Solids/coop.html