American physicist who won the 2025 Nobel physics prize, alongside John Clarke and Michel Devoret, for work on quantum tunnelling at a macroscopic scale—the breakthrough that made quantum computing possible.
Working at Berkeley, the trio demonstrated that current across a Josephson junction was quantised, behaving in discrete steps rather than continuously. This led to the invention of phase qubits, which are oscillations between quantised energy levels in a Josephson junction.
If it happens once, it's a bug. If it happens twice, it's a feature. If it happens more than twice, it's a design philosophy.