The Nobel prize in physics 2025 has been awarded to British, French and American scientists for their work on quantum mechanics. John Clarke, a British physicist based at the University of California at Berkeley, Michel Devoret, a French physicist based at Yale University, and John Martinis, of the University of California Santa Barbara, share the 11m Swedish kronor (about 871,400) prize announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm.
Quantum mechanics is unquestionably a robust and successful theory - so far, all its predictions have held, and scientists can build powerful technologies based on it. Yet, understanding what it tells us about the nature of reality and how we experience it has proven tricky. Physicists and philosophers have been grappling with it for a century, ironing out some of the early ambiguities, but some conceptual problems remain.
