Among the prestigious Nobel Prizes eagerly followed every year, this year’s winners of the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics have been announced.
According to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the prize was awarded for outstanding research on “the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit” to three eminent scientists: John Clarke of the UK, who works in California, USA; Michel Devoret of France; and John Martinis of the USA.
The statement said that by studying how quantum phenomena appear in electric circuits at scales larger than atoms, the three physicists paved the way for new quantum technologies, including quantum computing. Last year (2024), the Nobel Prize in Physics went to John Hopfield of the US and British-born Canadian scientist Geoffrey Hinton for foundational research on artificial neural networks and machine learning.
🏅 About the Nobel Prizes
The Nobel Prizes were established under the will of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite, after his death, with the founding of the Nobel Foundation on 9 June 1900. They are awarded to people who have made outstanding contributions to humanity and are among the world’s most prestigious scientific and cultural awards. Each year prizes are awarded in five main fields — physics, chemistry, literature, peace and medicine — by bodies such as the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Swedish Academy, the Karolinska Institute and the Norwegian Nobel Committee.
In 1968 Sweden’s central bank decided to establish a prize in economics in memory of Alfred Nobel, which was added to the official list from 1969. The award ceremony is held every year on 10 December, the anniversary of Nobel’s death. In the prizes’ history, the ceremony has been cancelled 49 times in total, mostly during the two world wars. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, ceremonies were also not held in 2020 and 2021.
