The recent quantum related Nobel prizes
Either Google has become unusually effective at fielding Nobel-caliber researchers, or something structurally significant is happening inside the company.
Sure, any Nobel coverage makes me think about the television show the Big Bang Theory which has raised my overall interest in reading more about the awards. That is an example of fiction raising my interest in non-fiction. This year the press release from the Nobel Prize team is dated October 7, 2025 and explains who won the Nobel Prize in Physics this year [1]. They noted the award was given, “for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantization in an electric circuit.” A closer look reveals that the breakthrough being recognized traces back to foundational research published in 1984 and 1985 from John Clarke, Michel Devoret, and John Martinis. Several publications from the three laureates are discussed in the Scientific Background to the Nobel Prize in Physics 2025 essay released alongside the press announcement [2]. You can read both those papers via the links below.
Martinis, J. M., Devoret, M. H., & Clarke, J. (1985). Energy-level quantization in the zero-voltage state of a current-biased Josephson junction. Physical Review Letters, 55(15), 1543-1546. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.55.1543
Martinis, J. M., Devoret, M. H ., Esteve, D., & Clarke, J. (1984). Resonant activation from the zero-voltage state of a current-biased Josephson junction. Physical Review Letters, 53(13), 1260-1263. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.53.1260
Either Google has become unusually effective at fielding Nobel-caliber researchers, or something intellectually significant is happening inside the company. They now have six Nobel laureates affiliated with their organization: “Today, Googler Michel Devoret and Google alumnus John Martinis were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, joining 2024 Nobel recipients Demis Hassabis, John Jumper and Geoff Hinton. The company now celebrates six Nobel laureates, including three prizes in the past two years” [3]. The announcement immediately points to the Google Quantum AI roadmap as the locus of ongoing work from these researchers [4]. Pulling a number of highly qualified contributors together could very well yield important breakthroughs and is something to keep an eye on going forward. For a general-audience summary of what happened, the coverage from The New York Times is the most accessible overview I ended up reading about this year’s award and its scientific context [5].
We continue to see a flood of press releases about breakthroughs in quantum computing. It is often difficult to reconcile the scale of the claims with the excitement they generate online. Still, the number of hardware efforts underway, combined with the fact that organizations such as Google and IBM publish and adhere to detailed public roadmaps, indicates that meaningful technological change is occurring. The central question is which of today’s announcements will age into historically significant contributions of the kind that ultimately led to this 2025 Nobel Prize, awarded for discoveries first formalized in 1984 and 1985. I’m curious about the recently released Quantum Echoes algorithm that Google shared which they called out for helping move toward real-world applications of quantum computing [6][7].
Footnotes:
[1] Nobel Prize Outreach. (2025, October 7). Press release: Nobel Prize in Physics 2025. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2025/press-release/
[2] Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. (2025, October 7). Scientific background to the Nobel Prize in Physics 2025: For the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit [PDF]. https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2025/10/advanced-physicsprize2025.pdf
[3] Google. (2025, October 7). Googler Michel Devoret awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. https://blog.google/inside-google/company-announcements/googler-michel-devoret-awarded-the-nobel-prize-in-physics/
[4] Google. (2025). Roadmap – Google Quantum AI. https://quantumai.google/roadmap
[5] Miller, K., & Watkins, A. (2025, October 7). Nobel Prize in physics is awarded for work in quantum mechanics. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/07/science/nobel-prize-physics.html
[6] Neven, H., & Smelyanskiy, V. (2025, October 22). Our Quantum Echoes algorithm is a big step toward real-world applications for quantum computing. Google Research Blog. https://blog.google/technology/research/quantum-echoes-willow-verifiable-quantum-advantage/
[7] Google Quantum AI & Collaborators. (2025). Observation of constructive interference at the edge of quantum ergodicity. Nature, 646(8086), 825–830. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09526-6