Today, of course, is the second anniversary of the genocidal Oct. 7 invasion of Israel—the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust, and the event that launched the current wars that have been reshaping the Middle East for better and/or worse. Regardless of whether their primary concern is for Israelis, Palestinians, or both, I’d hope all readers of this blog could at least join me in wishing this barbaric invasion had never happened, and in condemning the celebrations of it taking place around the world.

Now for the happy part: today is also the day when the Nobel Prize in Physics is announced. I was delighted to wake up to the news that this year, the prize goes to John Clarke of Berkeley, John Martinis of UC Santa Barbara, and Michel Devoret of Yale, for their experiments in the 1980s that demonstrated the reality of macroscopic quantum tunneling in superconducting circuits. Among other things, this work laid the foundation for the current effort by Google, IBM, and many others to build quantum computers with superconducting qubits. To clarify, though, today’s prize is not for quantum computing per se, but for the earlier work.

While I don’t know John Clarke, and know Michel Devoret only a little, I’ve been proud to count John Martinis as a good friend for the past decade—indeed, his name has often appeared on this blog. When Google hired John in 2014 to build the first programmable quantum computer capable of demonstrating quantum supremacy, it was clear that we’d need to talk about the theory, so we did. Through many email exchanges, calls, and visits to Google’s Santa Barbara Lab, I came to admire John for his iconoclasm, his bluntness, and his determination to make sampling-based quantum supremacy happen. After Google’s success in 2019, I sometimes wondered whether John might eventually be part of a Nobel Prize in Physics for his experimental work in quantum computing. That may have become less likely today, now that he’s won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work before quantum computing, but I’m guessing he doesn’t mind! Anyway, huge congratulations to all three of the winners.