John Martinis

And then, you know, that was the basic question.

And it turns out that there's a very natural system to look at looking at an electrical system and look seeing for quantum mechanics and electrical system where the currents and voltages of essentially electrical oscillator, does it behave like a classical physics or does it behave with this quantum mechanical nature to it?

And that was the question.

Now, it turns out that when you think about quantum mechanics and thinking about, well, there's the quantum behavior, but then at some point you have to measure it, which then turns it into a probability.

There's something called the Schrodinger cat paradox, where in the paradox you have a radioactive decay and then you...

You let it happen for, let's say, half of the radioactive decay time.

And then you say, and then you have a radioactive decay, a detector, and then a bottle of cyanide, which will kill a cat.

And then do you say, you know, after some amount of time, is the cat in the dead and alive state?

Okay.

And, you know, physicists, you know, and this is a good question.

Einstein brought it up, Schrodinger brought it up.

A lot of people discussed it.

But Leggett pointed out that the reason this is a paradox is you can believe that a macroscopic object like a cat could be in a quantum superposition state.

And in fact, there was no experimental evidence that this could happen.

And that was his point.

So he said, well, you know, people should be testing this and let's see if it's true.

And as a young graduate student who just, you know, learned about quantum mechanics, it's like, oh, that's a really great, great question.

That's something that we should try to do.

And we should try to do an experiment, you know, on the suggested system to look for quantum mechanics.

And the original proposal was looking for the tunneling.