Nobel Prize in Physics goes to early research that led to today’s quantum computers

On Thursday, three physicists received the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on quantum mechanics in the 1980s. Researchers John Clarke, Michel Devoret, and John Martinis created a circuit with no electrical resistance to demonstrate a phenomenon known as quantum tunneling, or how atoms and subatomic particles can move through a barrier material they shouldn’t be able to cross.

It was all theory before Clarke, Devoret, and Martinis created the circuit. But their experiments demonstrated tunneling is possible in a physical circuit, which later led to modern transistors and the nascent quantum computing industry.

“I’m speaking on my cell phone and I suspect that you are too, and one of the underlying reasons that the cell phone works is because of all this work,” Clarke said in a