This year, Physics Nobel prize reflects a broader transformation in the field

The 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics tells a remarkable story about bridging two seemingly incompatible worlds. When the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that John Clarke, Michel H Devoret, and John M Martinis would share this year’s prize “for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit,” they honoured work that transformed quantum mechanics from a microscopic curiosity into a tangible, engineered reality.

For most of the 20th century, quantum mechanics was the domain of the impossibly small — individual atoms, electrons, and photons dancing to rules that defied everyday intuition. Particles could exist in multiple states simultaneously. They could tunnel through barriers as if passing through walls. Energy came in discr