First reactions | John Clarke, Nobel Prize in Physics 2025 | Telephone interview

Hello, Professor Clark, this is Adam Smith. I'm sorry to catch you immediately after you've just been through the press conference at the KVA. Yes, I think it will be a very busy day, yes. Well, thank you very much indeed and many congratulations on the award. And how do you feel about the award of the prize today, fresh as it is? What can I say? I'm still stunned. I'm so happy and so pleased, of course, that John Martinez and Michel Devoree have shared the prize with me. I could not imagine accepting the prize without the two of them. I mean, that would just be totally out of the question. And obviously, the Nobel Prize Committee was completely aware of this. This award takes us back 40 years to a time in your lab in Berkeley when Michel Devoree was a postdoc and John Martinez was a PhD student. That's right. What are your recollections of that time and those experiments? Well, first of all, I would like to say that I always felt very privileged to be able to work with such brilliant people. And as you said, Michel was a postdoc and John Martinez was a graduate student. And what can I say that they understood so many things. And we had many, many, many discussions. I mean, many, not many hours, but many, many days of discussions about all of this. And it took us, I don't remember offhand how long now, but it took us a very long time to sort of get all this worked out. Sometimes it's just like that, isn't it? There's a sort of constellation of people that just gels and works. Exactly. Exactly right. Yes. I mean, I would like to say that none of this work would ever have happened without the two of them. And, you know, we're just brilliant people. Well, it's obviously a magical combination of the three of you. And in the press conference with KVA, you referred to the kind of collegiality of all of this, the other laureates, Brian Josephson, Tony Leggett. Part of science is just finding people who can spark ideas off each other, I suppose. Yes, I would like to say that I was a graduate student along with Brian Josephson. He was two years ahead of me as a graduate student. And when he sort of started to work on all of this, and he and I actually got to know each other extremely well. He is, he always lived in Cambridge in England, and he still does. And Tony Leggett, I got to know very well, but it was Brian Josephson who had enormous impact on me. After this discovery, then we were both supervised by Brian Pippard, later Sir Brian Pippard. And I think that Brian Pippard's impact on my career was also enormous. And he was also a very, very kind man. And I got to know him very well. Yes. Brian Josephson continues to challenge people and make them think to this day. Yes, yes. When you did the work, at the time of those experiments, were you aware of the significance of having demonstrated macroscopic quantum tunnelling? I think to some extent we were. And I remember that we got invited to various conferences to give talks on this work. So it was clear to us that people appreciated what we had done. I think that the sort of ongoing significance for the following 40 years, I think we didn't have the remotest idea that that would happen. Well, that's lovely. It's been an enormous pleasure speaking to you. Thank you very much indeed. Well, thank you so much. It was a pleasure to talk with you too. Good luck for the rest of your rather busy day ahead. Okay. It was a pleasure to talk with you and thank you again. You just heard a special episode of Nobel Prize Conversations. For more listening, we think you'll enjoy our brand new bonus episode, where Adam reveals what really gets our laureates celebrating. You can hear it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.