The Physics Behind the Quantum Computer: A Conversation With 2025 Nobel Laureate Dr. John Martinis

What does it take to prove that quantum mechanics applies not just to atoms and electrons—but to objects you can actually see and build?

In this episode of Bay Area Innovators, host Steve Ispas sits down with Dr. John Martinis, 2025 Nobel Prize winner in Physics and professor at UC Santa Barbara, whose graduate school experiment in the mid-1980s became one of the foundational discoveries behind today's quantum computer.

Martinis walks through the basics of quantum mechanics—superposition, energy quantization, and entanglement—in a way that makes one of the most complex fields in science genuinely accessible. He explains what a qubit actually is, how it differs from a classical bit, and why certain problems that would take a classical computer 10,000 years to solve could one day be cracked by a quantum computer in minutes.

The conversation also covers the Schrödinger's cat paradox, Einstein's "spooky action at a distance," the tunneling experiment that earned Martinis the Nobel Prize alongside John Clarke and Michel Devoret, and the moment a young Richard Feynman lecture on quantum computing changed the direction of his career.

Watch the full episode for one of the most accessible and fascinating conversations about quantum physics you will find anywhere.