I have a ritual every October. While other people wait for Halloween or the change of seasons, I wait for something different: The Nobel Prize announcements. As someone who grew up in science, this ceremony feels almost a ritual to me. Sitting in front of the TV (popcorn included) and narrating the nomineès with my best sports commentator voice. I am so nerdy :P
This year, I took it one step further: I MADE A BINGO. I collected the clichés and everything that cannot be missing from a good Nobel ceremony, and I put them in small squares to tick off as the show unfolded. Alea iacta est.
Not even a row, I am not a good guesser for sure ;)
🪐 Between Two Universes
Imagine for a moment that there are two parallel universes separated by an impenetrable barrier. The first is ours; the solid, predictable universe. The world of rocks, planets, and laws we can trust. If you throw a ball, you know exactly where it will land. It is a world that feels real.
But on the other side of the barrier lies a ghostly universe: the quantum world, a place where particles behave like whispers, capable of being in two places at the same time. A realm where crossing walls is not just possible but constantly happening. For a century, physicists could only spy on that world through a tiny keyhole, believing its magic would never touch ours.
But what if I told you that three men did not settle for mere watching. They decided to build a bridge, a door that connects these two parallel universes. That is the true story behind their Nobel Prize. Not just an equation, not just an experiment. A crossing.
🕳️Brief explanation
"For the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit"
In our everyday universe, everything obeys a law we rarely question: if you throw a ball at a wall, it stops. That is classical physics. Predictable. Solid. Like planets orbiting or stones falling, there is no mystery in where things will land.
But in the quantum world, particles behave like waves. And a wave does not end at the wall. It leaks through it. There is a chance — small, but real — that the particle can appear on the other side, without breaking or climbing the barrier. It is neither magic nor teleportation; it is a consequence of probability itself.
Superconductivity is one of those rare states of matter where nature behaves almost too perfectly. When certain materials are cooled to extremely low temperatures, something remarkable happens: their electrical resistance drops to zero. Current can flow forever, without losing energy, without heating, and without friction. It is like turning off gravity for electricity.
In this frozen state, electrons do not move as individuals. They form what physicists call Cooper pairs — a single, unified wave. They stop behaving like particles and start acting like a collective entity that follows quantum rules on a macroscopic scale.
Now imagine taking this perfect supercurrent and interrupting it with a tiny gap. No wire. No bridge. Just a few nanometers of insulating material between two superconductors.
This gap is called a Josephson Junction. According to classical physics, it should stop everything. If electrons cannot pass through a wire, they should halt at the barrier.
And this is what makes the 2025 Nobel so powerful. The laureates did not observe tunnelling in atoms or radioactive decay. They caught it inside a visible circuit, built with human hands. A ghost from the quantum world, leaving a measurable signal in our own.
🎭 A Gala That Left Me Cold
If I had to define this year's gala in one word, it would be depressing. I know it is unfair to compare modern laureates with giants like Dirac, Feynman, or Schrödinger. Physics has changed. That world where solitary minds in remote laboratories uncovered hidden symmetries now exists only in our books. Today, discoveries are made by executives. Main chairs of laboratories with the budget of small nations. Places where imagination has been quietly replaced by publication metrics and institutional clickbait.
“We are fortunate to live in a world where there are still discoveries to be made” - Marie Curie
And since everyone has an opinion, here is mine. The gala was a disaster. Not only because some laureates did not attend, but also because it felt so lifeless. The jury looked aged and absent. The organisation lacked vitality. The only moment of light came from the laureate himself, Martinis. Despite visible nerves at the beginning, he delivered a masterful explanation of his work. Simple, but never trivial. You could feel a life dedicated to understanding.
The worst moment arrived with the questions. Basics, misplaced, almost uncomfortable. How is it possible that no one thought to put scientifically trained people in charge of interviewing a Nobel physicist? In a ceremony meant to honour science, ignorance took the microphone.
