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
03:32 Anthony Leggett's challenge to Schrödinger's cat
05:53 Why a Josephson junction, not a quantum dot or trapped ion
07:45 Quantized oscillations: the “smoking gun” and Balmer's ghost
08:18 Measuring the system: the resonance experiment
11:21 Systematic effects: what separates a good scientist from a lucky one
13:42 The Ed Ohm story: the man who found the CMB and doubted it
15:01 Wigner's “unreasonably effective” math and the weirdest thing about QM
16:54 The transistor myth: chewing gum, coat hangers, and germanium
17:34 Microwave engineering meets quantum mechanics
19:26 Decoherence: the friction you can't live without
24:06 The heretical claim: does theory ever precede technology?
28:22 The “paper qubit” problem
29:34 What quantum computers are actually good for
32:27 Should quantum computing be regulated like AI?
33:35 US vs. China: the quantum computing race
35:44 Collapse, Copenhagen, or many worlds? Martinis's answer
37:43 Leaving Google: “essentially demoted”
40:48 Why Colab exists and what “negative authority” means
42:50 The real bottleneck: funding, not physics
43:31 Final advice: always be on the lookout for the impossible
Qolab: https://qolab.ai/
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