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

In this interview, Jason speaks with John Martinis, the 2025 Nobel Prize winner in Physics, about his journey into physics, starting from his childhood in San Pedro, California, to his groundbreaking work on quantum mechanics at a macroscopic scale. Martinis explains his early fascination with science, influenced by his father's hands-on approach to building things, and how he fell in love with physics due to its mathematical foundation. The conversation delves into his graduate work at UC Berkeley, inspired by a question posed by Nobel laureate Anthony Leggett about whether macroscopic objects behave quantum mechanically. Martinis discusses his experiments with Josephson junctions, demonstrating quantum mechanics at a larger scale, and his later work at Google, achieving quantum supremacy with a 53-qubit computer. He also shares his insights on the current state of quantum computing, the challenges of scaling up and reducing noise, and the competition between the U.S. and China in this field.