Sad and happy day
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 UC Santa Barbara (formerly 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.
Follow
Comment #1 October 7th, 2025 at 1:48 pm
Thank you for the note about the Nobel. I join you in condemning celebration of violence of October 7 and in wishing for peace in that very complex world.
Comment #2 October 7th, 2025 at 2:22 pm
I collaborated with John Martinis before they became Google, which resulted in some articles on how to control superconducting qubits that can support high-fidelity two-qubit entangling gates. He has an incredible intuition for any theory you might develop. It was funny how he once coined the term “qubit speckle” to mean “random circuit sampling”!
Comment #3 October 7th, 2025 at 4:39 pm
Scott, what’s this about October 7 celebrations? Where? In the US? Abroad? I mean, there are 8 billion people in the world, so I’m sure some people are celebrating, just like there are some people doing any manner of things on a given day. Is there any reason to believe this is widespread enough to pay it any attention despite my not having heard the slightest thing about it?
Comment #4 October 7th, 2025 at 5:16 pm
Currently there is a lot of talk about Infleqtion, yet another quantum computing stock …
They have a road map claiming error correction with 4000 physical and 30 logical qubits for 2026 at infleqtion.com/quantum-computing/
I think it would be quite amazing if this could really be done just a year from now.
But does anybody know this company and how realistic their roadmap is ?
Comment #5 October 7th, 2025 at 7:54 pm
John #3: You clearly don’t spend enough time on social media! Yes, there were indeed celebratory events on Oct. 7 by the main Palestine organizations at university campuses and cities around the world; you can see some of the posters at the links. And why shouldn’t there have been? From their standpoint, it was heroic and inspiring resistance.
Comment #6 October 7th, 2025 at 10:11 pm
Scott #5: you’re right, I don’t spend much time on social media. One of the main reasons is that it gives those who do a completely warped perception of reality. I do spend a lot of time on college campuses (I live in a city which is home to several) and neither I nor my colleagues at those other campuses whom I’ve asked about this had any clue that any of this was supposedly going on. This leads me to believe that it’s not happening here, and that it is probably a very small phenomenon in general.
Comment #7 October 8th, 2025 at 6:22 am
Scott 5,
Thanks for the info, and that is indeed terrifying (although not surprising, based on my undergrad experience).
Any stories of heroism and courage on October 7 that have inspired you?
Comment #8 October 8th, 2025 at 6:58 am
Julian #7: Yes, of course.
This past week I went to an event in Austin (part of a traveling tour) that honored the many “heroes of October 7”: those who sacrificed their lives to save friends, loved ones, and strangers. I was especially moved, for example, by the story of the Israeli Arab who drove two Jewish children he found whose parents had been murdered to a police station. The police station had been taken over by Hamas, alas, who murdered the Israeli Arab, but not before he had hidden the children and saved them.
Comment #9 October 8th, 2025 at 11:38 am
I hadn’t seen reports of celebrations either, but it’s an easy choice to condemn them if they did occur. The online world is ‘fertile soil’ for fringe worldviews as discussed in this chapter on covid origins .
Ethan Siegel wrote a good summary article on this foundational research upon which qubits and other applications are based.
Comment #10 October 8th, 2025 at 11:47 am
Thanks, I wish I was in the States so I could see it.
Any first-hand accounts I should send to people minimizing the reality of Octber 7 (e.g., who say there were no rapes, “oh no muh beheaded babies,” it was “just a mass shooting, like happens in America all the time,” etc etc), or even just facts about the on-the-ground reality of that day? I would send them the chapters from Douglas Murray, but they would never read that.
One thing I like to tell them is that, proportionately, not only was October 7 worse than 9/11 in America, it was a dozen times worse (and, of course, the violence was more intimate and brutal).
Comment #11 October 8th, 2025 at 12:07 pm
Julian #10: Anyone who thinks 10/7 was inspiring resistance needs a complete worldview-ectomy; they’re not going to have their mind changed by a single link or photo or fact-check or rebuttal. So my first tip is just to give up. But yes, if they’ve actually agreed to read something, then my second tip is to order them a free copy of Douglas Murray’s book.
Comment #12 October 8th, 2025 at 4:35 pm
Hi Scott! I suspect a lot of people would be excited to hear your thoughts on the new “Peaked Quantum Advantage” result.
And as always, as an Israeli, I really appreciate your moral clarity.
Thanks for everything.
Comment #13 October 9th, 2025 at 9:22 am
Profoundly dissapointed by Bejamin Netanyahu. Profoundly disappointed. You do not negotiate with terrorists. You destroy them. Now the genocidal Nazis will continue to fester in Gaza. Fuck this. There is no alternative but the complete destruction of the enemy. I hope his cabinet blocks this. Israel will not be safe unless Hamas is annihilated, root and stem.
Comment #14 October 9th, 2025 at 10:15 am
Scott #5 and John #6
Social media is evil and I am more and more convinced that it’s exacerbating of all problems of today’s world and making them worse, by “educating ourselves to extremism” (as I described more in a comment to a previous blog post).
As another anecdotal evidence, in my (very leftist) university town, I haven’t heard of any such events. Doesn’t mean it isn’t happening, of course, but it’s not widespread known/advertized. Social media is the vehicle these fringe things which would get no traction otherwise, appear widespread and even increase their reach and supporters, sigh.
I am sure the vast majority of people of all walks of life (and certainly myself) do join you in wishing this barbaric invasion had never happened. I speculate many wish that Israel’s response would not have been what it has been. While I don’t follow this topic close enough to have a strong opinion on this latter part I can comment with the train-running-on-top-of-children metaphor which Scott wrote a few blog posts ago. Suppose that you won’t have the option to switch the train from your children to their children: what would you do? Even if you rationally know that you have no chances of success, you would try your options with all your forces: calling the conductor, putting boulders on the rails, cutting the rails, cutting the wires or short-circuit them (if it’s an electric train) etc. Now, in Scott’s example you have the option to let the train go to the other side, and of course you do it. But both from a moral imperative and from an optics perspective, you ought to try your options like if they were your children. Because if you don’t (besides the moral aspects which are important but within yourself only), the world will see you as if you are shrugging it off and the siblings of the dead children will see you as the perpetrator and will want to seek revenge, perpetuating the spiral of hate. In my (as I said superficial) view of the situation, unfortunately Israel appears like they are shrugging it off. For example, before invading, why they haven’t called Gaza people themselves to help find the hostages and perpetrators, offering the “renegades” protection (maybe even Israel citizenship, housing and a job as reward) if the information allowed to capture of some perpetrators and freeing some hostages? Maybe the answer is clear to the Israelis and it might be that it would not have worked so it was a moot point trying. But the optics of not even have tried less lethal (for the general population) options are really bad for casual observers (let alone for peaceful supporters of the Palestine cause — might sound like an oxymoron but I know there are some)
Anyway, enough of the sadness, and hope the world could find peace and prosperity everywhere for everybody. We have the means to do that with the technology we have and the new secrets we continue to discover from nature. Cheers to all the Nobel Laureates, and especially to the ones if Physics!!
Comment #15 October 9th, 2025 at 10:53 am
Julian #13: A long time ago, I adopted a rule — that yes, I’ll be openly Zionist, I’ll even risk my friendships and career to be Zionist, but I’ll never be more Zionist than the majority of Israelis who actually live there and risk their lives to defend Israel’s survival. The majority of Israelis strongly support the current ceasefire and hostage deal, so therefore I do as well — simple as that.
May we see better days.
Comment #16 October 9th, 2025 at 11:14 am
Do you have some actual polling you could show me to back this up?
I fear that most of your Israeli colleagues (academics and intellectuals) are politically left-wing, and thus, their views are not representative of Israeli voters in the average.
Comment #17 October 9th, 2025 at 11:17 am
DeI #14: As a point of information, Israel has offered money and many other things (including American citizenship, as a diplomatic favor from the US) to Gazans who have helped them. They’ve gotten a few takers, although those helpers then face a severe risk of abduction, brutal torture, and execution by Hamas. I’d like to see Israel do even more in this direction — making clear both in public and in private that its hand is extended to every Palestinian who wants to help Israel survive.
Comment #18 October 9th, 2025 at 11:53 am
Scott #16
That is great to hear. Unfortunately the news has not been broadly advertized as it should have and I reckon it may be one of the reasons that even some mildly reasonable people today do not support Israel. Perhaps you can do your little by mentioning this thing too in the next blog post you’ll write covering Israel.
But for now, let’s keep celebrating the Nobel prize winners, especially the ones who made quantum computing possible and are continuing to make it closer to its original promise.
Comment #19 October 9th, 2025 at 1:48 pm
Another congratulations to the winners! This is not my field, but reading about it is rekindling my curiosity :\)
I ought to join in the condemnations as well… I’m very sorry this is the state of the world.
But I also fear that the principle of reciprocal justice, an eye for an eye, is lost on me. I’m told it is a verse in the sacred texts. The US’s President’s favorite verse, says Wikipedia.
May we see better days indeed. May we see at all.
Comment #20 October 9th, 2025 at 2:22 pm
Pseudonymous Coward #19: I actually think there are excellent grounds for hope today. The reason I think so is that most ordinary Israelis and most ordinary Gazans are apparently celebrating the news of the ceasefire deal. The two camps not celebrating are (1) the Smotrich/Ben-Gvir far-right extremists, and (2) the Hamas/intifada people.
Comment #21 October 9th, 2025 at 6:57 pm
Congratulations to the Nobel Laureates! And congrats to the research institutions in the U.S. and elsewhere for all their hard work and dedication. (Scott’s exam that he gave to ChatGPT a couple of years ago asked whether a qubit had to be a subatomic particle; ChatGPT got the answer right and so did Nobel.)
This appears to be the second Nobel in the last three years for quantum computation, broadly defined. Even though the title of the prize is for “For the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunneling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit”, and the press releases themselves seem conservative about the connections to quantum computing, the prize committee appears to be getting more and more comfortable with quantum information.
Comment #22 October 9th, 2025 at 8:54 pm
Scott #17
Did Israel offer US citizenship to gazans that freed hostages? I read about Israel offering 5 million dollars and safe passage out of gaza, but not US citizenship. Neither google or ChatGPT can find any sources for citizenship offers. I also can’t find any evidence that anyone’s actually taken the offer.
Comment #23 October 9th, 2025 at 11:02 pm
Stephen #22: Let me present to you the incredible story of Mosab Hassan Yousef, the “Son of Hamas.” I wish Israel and the US were able to work together to do more of this, since surely many Gazans willing to defect against Hamas would rather live in the US than Israel.
Comment #24 October 10th, 2025 at 10:10 am
Julian #16,
It’s sad that you’re not able to share the joy of the Israelis dancing in the streets at the idea of the hostages’ return. Maybe you’re the one who needs to realize how much of a bubble of hate you’re in, and how much this hatred is a fertile ground for endless war.
Comment #25 October 10th, 2025 at 11:32 am
Scott #15
You may recall that the majority of Israeli society strongly supported the Gilad Shalit deal, up until a moment *after* it actually happened.
Comment #26 October 10th, 2025 at 3:28 pm
Advances in Probability.
Given that we all prefer speculation backed with some hard data, it is good to report that Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb has calculated the probability that interstellar object 3I/ATLAS is of “not fully natural origin”:
0.3 <= P_nfno <= 0.4,
and the IO might be a "black swan event akin to a Trojan Horse, where a technological object masquerades as a natural comet.”
Comment #27 October 10th, 2025 at 3:44 pm
Apparently Hamas was ready to sign an identical deal a year ago, but Israel didn’t want to (admittedly the guilt for that is on Biden’s administration, who didn’t pressure Israel to sign the peace deal the way Trump apparently did). If true, this changes the narrative quite a lot…
Comment #28 October 10th, 2025 at 4:13 pm
MK #27: The full truth might not be publicly known for some time. My understanding, however, is that Hamas did not agree a year ago to “technocratic” administration of Gaza—and that the biggest thing that changed was Qatar, which freaked out after Israel targeted Hamas there, and therefore finally pressured Hamas to relinquish power. If so, then the biggest mystery of the war for me is why Israel didn’t cross the red line of targeting Hamas leadership in Qatar much earlier, given that it was ultimately willing to and that this was such an obvious thing to do.
Comment #29 October 10th, 2025 at 7:28 pm
Scott #28
That is one way of interpreting it. An alternate view is that the attack on Qatar prompted Trump to answer Bill Clinton’s exasperated question about who’s the superpower . As Nahum Barnea noted, Netanyahu was dictated to and the optics of apologizing to the Qatar Sheikh were unmistakable. Perhaps a $400M jet is a small price to pay for what Qatar gets in return.
Comment #30 October 10th, 2025 at 7:58 pm
This is corroborated by NBC News also.
Comment #31 October 13th, 2025 at 11:30 am
I think I changed my mind about the ceasefire. I hadn’t realized that it stipulated governance of Gaza under Palestinian technocrats with international observers—not just “hand it back to Hamas.” There’s still many ways it could go wrong, and we should be careful in the months ahead to make sure that Hamas doesn’t keep full power.
How do you feel about Israeli Parliament and Israelis celebrating in the street chanting Trump’s name? And does he deserve any recognition for setting this up?
Comment #32 October 14th, 2025 at 3:38 am
Correction: Michel Devoret retired from Yale and is currently Professor of Physics at UC Santa Barbara: https://www.physics.ucsb.edu/people/michel-devoret
He and John will be giving the UCSB Physics colloquium today, Oct.14, 3:30 PM PST, livestreamed here: https://www.youtube.com/live/f1AMV6btaw4
Comment #33 October 14th, 2025 at 1:17 pm
Mark Srednicki #32: Sorry about that, fixed!
Comment #34 October 15th, 2025 at 4:46 pm
Off-topic: Ben Goertzel, a well-known pioneer in the AGI community who has been eclectically combining AI architectures for decades in pursuit of AGI, claimed a proof that P!=NP this week: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08814
It’s a proof by contradiction, resting on a kind of modified Kolmogorov complexity, and an algebra (a “weakness quantale”) describing how this complexity behaves under concatenation. The argument is that P=NP implies a universal upper bound on the complexity of solving problems in Unique SAT, but then Goertzel uses his complexity algebra to construct an ensemble of Unique SAT problems where there ought to be one that violates that upper bound.
Some part of this proof strategy seems to have been inspired by the “flip” in Mulmuley’s Geometric Complexity Theory, since there are references to an “AP-GCT” sign-flip (AP could be Algorithmic Probability) in the construction of ensemble.
The most exotic part of the proof is this motivating concept of “weakness”, which was introduced by another author (M.T. Bennett) in the context of an Occam’s-razor strategy for AI called “w-maxing”. All the other ingredients look pretty standard to me, which leads me to think that this proof could be understood and assessed by mainstream complexity theorists pretty quickly.
I share a short discussion with Claude that helped me to analyze the paper:
https://claude.ai/share/99f4befb-9f56-41aa-a49f-48a4914ae104
Comment #35 October 16th, 2025 at 7:26 am
Mitchell Porter #34: Thanks for the link. I now get claimed P≠NP proofs in my inbox almost daily (!), but this one is somewhat unusual — the abstract reads as though someone put a hundred theoretical computer science concepts into a blender with amphetamines! Of course my strong guess is that an error will be found—among many other reasons because this goes straight for the whole enchilada, without first proving any weaker result to explain the new ideas and build intuition. But I’m content to let others pick it apart if they like, and will look again if and only if experts tell me there’s something there, or if it gets enough attention that I have no choice.
Comment #36 October 21st, 2025 at 10:42 am
2028: Zohran Mamdani or Donald Trump Jr?
Comment #37 October 21st, 2025 at 1:33 pm
Have you seen Zohran Mamdani’s horrific recent comments at the debate with Cuomo and Sliwa the other day? Refusing to support the existence of Israel, etc.?
Comment #38 October 29th, 2025 at 3:09 am
#31 #28 : Not a year ago, but 10 months ago in Dec. 2024 there was this, before the Qatar events:
> In early December 2024, Hamas announced a major concession: It was prepared to cede future governance of Gaza to a unity Palestinian committee, working alongside its chief political rival, Fatah, to create the body.
https://theconversation.com/hamas-hemmed-in-and-isolated-finds-itself-with-few-options-for-the-day-after-the-gaza-war-245442
Comment #39 November 18th, 2025 at 9:07 am
Julian #31
I am sure no surprise to you that Hamas is pursuing implementation of “still many ways it could go wrong” and establishing the basis to consider international peacekeepers as enemy combatants.
My expectation is that the results of the peace plan (Mandate 2.0) will be the exact opposite of Noname’s comments in #24. More of the same will result in more of the same.
Dr Aaronson
I thought your later post, that you closed, was extremely good ex the usual asymmetry that I can never understand.
Comment #40 November 18th, 2025 at 11:21 am
Your observation of the failure of political systems that embrace anti-Semitism results from those systems having effectively a basis on one of the seven deadly sins-Envy. Envy is a formidable impediment to meritocracies. The belief that a person or group that excels based on merit must actually benefit from some unfair advantage (conspiracy) is common in some schools of ideological thought.