Hey guys, I learned electronics from a nobel laureate!

Throughout my physics career including PhD, analog electronics was the most difficult but probably also the most rewarding class to me. I fondly remember staying until 2am in broida at ucsb trying to get a filter to work, getting a few hours sleep, then being back in the lab before sunrise. Of course, this was mostly the result of procrastination, but damn were those good times.

One thing that really bothered me then was the idea of a current source. I was perfectly happy with a voltage source, perhaps naively(1). But a current source seemed magical. I was asking Martinis about this and he seemed dumbfounded that I didn't understand. Of course, the answer is feedback. And, of course, good voltage sources also require feedback. But he was so familiar with feedback control he didn't even consider saying that's whats happening, while I never even heard of controls.

Long story short, sometime later I asked to join his lab as an undergrad researcher. He said no, and to this day I think it's because I didn't understand current sources. Or maybe I was too late, or maybe the A- (see the aforementioned procrastination). That led me to asking a biophysicist, and therefore I became a biophysicist instead of condensed matter/QI/QC. In hindsight, I think this was fortunate. I would've never considered biophysics, which has been one of the loves of my life since then. Who knows, maybe I would've been just as happy with quantum stuff. I'm working through Mike and ike now and find it fascinating.

Funny enough, after my PhD, I co-founded a startup in industrial control & automation. Now I understand feedback quite while, and thus current sources, albeit many years too late.

(1) Of course, good voltage sources vary their resistance just like good current sources vary their voltage. My best guess as to the reason I was more bothered by the current sources is that I was so familiar with voltage sources with confidently claimed constant voltages (batteries). Not a very good reason, I should've questioned it more. In practice, it's much easier to make a near ideal voltage source (very high resistance) than a near ideal current source (0 resistance).

Fred Ramsdell was among those honored Monday with a 2025 Nobel Prize in Medicine, but he's currently "living his best life" on an "off the grid" hiking foray https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20251006-unreachable-n...

More than deserved!

Both Devoret and Martinis are also highly involved in pushing quantum engineering to new levels - Devoret at Google Quantum AI and Martinis (formerly at Google) with his company, Qolab.

Coincidentally, I have a close friend doing his PhD with Devoret and know someone working with Martinis. I am curious to see if they will ever see their respective supervisors again, given that the Nobel Prize attention will likely garner them countless invitations for talks and keynotes...

John Clarke is the father of Liz, one of my close friends from college. Liz and I were physics undergrads at Berkeley and her father was a professor there. Thanks to HN I had the pleasure of being the first one to tell her that her dad had just won the Nobel Prize (I saw the news before she woke up, due to time zone differences). I wish I could post photos here, she sent me a beautiful picture of him filled with joy as he received a free parking pass from Berkeley with the expiration date "NEVER" later that afternoon :-D

It is worth noting that the research that Martinis is being awarded the Nobel prize was largely performed while at NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology), part of the Dept of Commerce.

I spent time in UCSB’s physics department and Prof. Martinis was one of those experimental physicists who knew more about electronics and measurements than the typical electrical engineer. He used to have a wiki page containing documentation, cad files, etc of circuits that his group developed for his measurements and he also had open source software for controlling electronics. Very cool prize and happy to see UCSB getting one more Nobel prize!

Dumb question:

"We know that the ball will bounce back every time it is thrown at a wall. A single particle, however, will sometimes pass straight through an equivalent barrier in its microscopic world and appear on the other side. This quantum mechanical phenomenon is called tunnelling."

Is the particle just failing to collide with the wall since objects are mostly empty space? Or is something more spooky or interesting happening?

For those looking for a good pop-sci introduction to these sort of quantum effects and why demonstrating macroscopic quantum effects is a big deal for the foundations of the field I recommend “Through Two Doors at Once” by Anil Ananthaswany.

Great to see the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Cambridge, UK continuing to add to their already outstanding number of Nobel laureate alumni.

The Paris-Sud University was a new name to me. Apparently, this will be the 4th Nobel laureate associated with the university.

I read the NY Times article about this earlier this morning. I thought it was not very good. I came to HN to see if it had something better. It did. The linked article is also at something like a high school level, but it gave me (retired PhD Physics) a good idea of the experiment and the theory. Thanks.

I remember being introduced to this research when reading a weird paper on the unexpected efficiency of photosynthesis, but now I can't find that paper. Anyone got any hints?

"Quantum properties on a human scale" the news and the new age mystics will have a field day with this one

Always exciting to see what groundbreaking discoveries the Nobel Physics Prize will honor this year. Can't wait to learn about the latest advancements!

So is ball lightning a quantum phenomenon?

Very exciting.

Devoret was my co-authors phd advisor (and who is also my advisor now on some of my work).

We sorely need more open quantum systems built/designed with open source tooling. The IBM's, Ionq's, Quantinuum's and Googles, will be happy if we all remain serfs to their multimillion dollar machines and hardware direction.

This award involved some clever engineering to set up quantum effects in a macroscopic system, but was there any new physics involved here?

(Still better than last year's award which wasn't really physics at all!)

Michel H. Devoret, Chief Scientist at Google Quantum AI, and in April 2020 John M. Martinis resigned from Google after being reassigned to an advisory role. [0]

Sounds like there was some politics shenanigans between them where Martinis was moved into a useless role and took the hint at the height of covid lockdown.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Devoret