John Martinis

But, you know, we showed that quantum mechanics worked and quantum mechanics worked on the macro scale, which was nice.

But one could still, you know, argue, well, what is it good for?

What are you going to do?

And in fact, the secret of an important scientific breakthrough is

is does it lead to other experiments and other papers and other inventions and the like?

And that kind of took many decades to happen because it was so new and people had to do that.

So I would say it was noteworthy at the time, but not necessarily something for a Nobel Prize because it was just kind of weird and went off and what are you going to do with it?

But what happened at the time was very interesting.

And at the end of my thesis time, there was a conference in UC Santa Barbara where I came here for the first time.

And they were talking about this experiment.

But the very last day, the last talk was by Richard Feynman, very well-known physicist.

The greatest, yeah.

I kind of idolized him and read his books and whatever and he was talking about using

quantum mechanics for computation, which is building a quantum computer.

So he gave a talk that was really kind of amazing.

I'm going to be honest, as a student, I didn't quite catch everything.

And Michelle Devereux, my dear friend, said, yeah, maybe some of the things wasn't quite figured out at the time.

But afterwards, he was absolutely mobbed by people asking him questions because it's so interesting to think about taking this, you know, basic law and actually doing computation with it.

Right.

And I was a graduate student, so I was kind of at the outside ring, you know, you have the professors in close and whatever.