John Martinis: The Nobel Physicist Behind Macroscopic Quantum Tunneling

John Martinis won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics for proving macroscopic quantum tunneling is real. Less than a year later he’s telling why he left Google’s quantum computing team to start over. Subscribe if you want the physics and the politics of building the impossible.

Martinis is the co-founder of Colab and one of the physicists who proved ordinary quantum rules apply to macroscopic systems. He built his career on the same Josephson-junction hardware his Nobel is built on, then led Google’s superconducting-qubit effort, the same team behind Google’s 2019 quantum supremacy claim, before an internal reorg pushed him out.

We go into Anthony Leggett’s challenge to Schrödinger’s cat, what decoherence in quantum mechanics really means, and whether quantum computing is the first technology ever born from pure theory rather than experiment. We also cover the internal Google reorg that pushed Martinis out and what he learned about building something new inside a large institution.

• Whether quantum mechanics applies to the macroscopic world and what it took to prove it

• Why Martinis thinks quantum computing may be the first technology born from pure theory, not experiment

• What negative authority means and why it matters for anyone building something new inside a large institution

• Whether the US can win the quantum computing race against China

• How Martinis thinks about quantum mechanics interpretations after spending a career inside the math

“Always be on the lookout for the impossible, right?” John Martinis

CHAPTERS

The Nobel call that almost wasn't

How his wife found out before he did

Anthony Leggett's challenge to Schrödinger's cat

Why a Josephson junction, not a quantum dot or trapped ion

Quantized oscillations: the “smoking gun” and Balmer's ghost

Measuring the system: the resonance experiment

Systematic effects: what separates a good scientist from a lucky one

The Ed Ohm story: the man who found the CMB and doubted it

Wigner's “unreasonably effective” math and the weirdest thing about QM

The transistor myth: chewing gum, coat hangers, and germanium

Microwave engineering meets quantum mechanics

Decoherence: the friction you can't live without

The heretical claim: does theory ever precede technology?

The “paper qubit” problem

What quantum computers are actually good for

Should quantum computing be regulated like AI?

US vs. China: the quantum computing race

Collapse, Copenhagen, or many worlds? Martinis's answer

Leaving Google: “essentially demoted”

Why Colab exists and what “negative authority” means

The real bottleneck: funding, not physics

Final advice: always be on the lookout for the impossible

Qolab: qolab.ai

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