Nobel Prize in Physics Winner: John Martinis on the State of Quantum

**David Friedberg** (0:00)
Welcome today. I'm very excited for this AllIn interview with this week's Nobel Laureate, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2025, John Martinis. John, welcome to the AllIn interview.

**John Martinis** (0:14)
Yeah. Thanks for inviting me. I'm quite excited about this talk, and I love to explain to people about what this prize is all about.

**David Friedberg** (0:25)
Alright, besties, I think that was another epic discussion. People love the interviews. I could hear him talk for hours.

**John Martinis** (0:31)
Absolutely. We crushed your questions in a minute.

**David Friedberg** (0:37)
What did you guys say? That was fun.
Well, the Nobel Prize is the most prestigious honor and particularly in physics that I think can be awarded. You're in the record books. It's going to be an incredible ceremony coming up for you. Maybe we could go back to the beginning in your history. I'd love to hear a little bit about where you grow up and how you get started with your interest in physics.

**John Martinis** (1:04)
Well, I grew up in San Pedro, California and grew up there my whole time. My father is a fireman and my mom stayed at home, took care of us. And through the years, I was always interested in science, technology. I'm going to say one of the things is my dad, you know, actually didn't have a high school education, but very smart person. He was always building things in the garage, various projects. So I grew up kind of knowing how to build things, which also kind of tells you how things work, you know, kind of empirical view, you know, tactical view of how physics works. So when I took physics in high school, I actually loved it because there was actually some math behind it and concepts and, you know, it really made sense to me and, you know, I just really, you know, fell in love with the subject and then went to UC Berkeley and did pretty well there and enjoyed it, enjoyed it a lot. And then in my senior year at UC Berkeley, I had a class from John Clark, who was my advisor and found out what he was doing. He was just starting to look at these quantum mechanics and electrical devices stuff. And it sounded really interesting for me. I guess I have, you know, I guess I could see maybe when something maybe would take off. So I started to do the graduate school work with him.

**David Friedberg** (2:34)
You went to Berkeley for graduate school, right?

**John Martinis** (2:36)
I went to Gertrude for graduate school, which you're not supposed to do.

**David Friedberg** (2:39)
I was originally a physics and math undergrad at Cal.

**John Martinis** (2:42)
Okay.

**David Friedberg** (2:43)
I changed my major later and actually got my degree in astrophysics. There was some upper division math class that really turned me off to math as a major. There was just so many proofs, it drove me nuts.

**John Martinis** (2:54)
Right, right.

**David Friedberg** (2:55)
And then physics was always exciting, but I liked working in the astrolab and I worked actually at Lawrence Berkeley Lab.

**John Martinis** (3:02)
Oh, okay, yeah.

**David Friedberg** (3:03)
But then you stayed at Berkeley and went to grad school, right?

**John Martinis** (3:06)
Yeah, I stayed at Berkeley, went to grad school. We started this project a couple of years into grad school, I forget exact date. And what was interesting is this was a question that was actually posed by Professor Anthony Leggett, who won the Nobel Prize for Helium-3 Physics in I think 2003

**David Friedberg** (3:28)
Was that superfluid work?

**John Martinis** (3:29)
Superfluid Helium-3, yeah, that's right.

**David Friedberg** (3:32)
So he showed like if you put Helium-3 cold enough, it kind of almost has this new sort of characteristics with the physics and how it moves and how it works, right?

**John Martinis** (3:40)
Well, it has this superfluid behavior, but it has a very complicated behavior because of the more complicated nuclei of the Helium-3. This had been discovered and people worked for a while to figure that out, and he helped develop the theory for that. So he was quite well-known, very, very smart person. And although he won the Nobel Prize for that, okay, there's not much Helium-3 physics going on, but for the question that led to our experiment, okay, there's a huge field. And the question was, do macroscopic objects behave quantum mechanically? Okay, and this is a macroscopic object, might be a small ball, in our case, it's an electrical circuit with billions of electrons in it, billions of atom, and is the collected motion of, say, the ball, quantum mechanical. Now, if you think about throwing a ball against the wall, it's going to bounce off. But if you make the wall thin enough and the ball light enough, it'll then every once in a while, tunnel through because of the laws of quantum mechanics. So-