John Martinis: The Nobel Physicist Behind Macroscopic Quantum Tunneling - #566

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

00:00  The Nobel call that almost wasn't

01:01  How his wife found out before he did