Nobel Laureate John Martinis to Discuss Quantum Computing in Perth

A free public lecture at The University of Western Australia on 10 November brings the 2025 Nobel laureate to Perth to describe how superconducting qubits began, and what still separates today’s processors from a quantum computer worth using.

By Professor Michael E. Tobar

Forty years ago, the idea that an electrical circuit could behave as a single quantum object was an intellectual curiosity. On Tuesday, 10 November 2026, the physicist who helped turn that curiosity into a technology will give a public lecture in Perth. Professor John Martinis, one of the three recipients of the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics, will speak at The University of Western Australia’s Octagon Theatre on a question that still has no settled answer: what will it actually take to build a useful quantum computer?

The talk, “From prehistoric qubits to building a useful quantum computer,” is free and open to the public, though registration is essential. Martinis is visiting Perth through the Forrest Research Foundation Distinguished Visiting Researcher program, and he will also deliver a plenary lecture at the 21st Patras Workshop on Axions, WIMPs and WISPs, which UWA hosts from 9 to 13 November.

From a thesis experiment to a Nobel Prize

Martinis will begin where his own career did. His doctoral work in the mid-1980s demonstrated macroscopic quantum tunnelling and quantised energy levels in a superconducting circuit, showing that an engineered device could display the kind of quantum behaviour previously associated with individual atoms. Those experiments, carried out with John Clarke and Michel Devoret, are the work recognised by the 2025 Nobel Prize, and they became part of the foundation on which superconducting quantum computing was later built.

From there, the lecture follows the development of the superconducting qubit through several of the experiments that advanced it. Martinis has worked on low-temperature device physics throughout his career and has focused on quantum computation since the late 1990s. He received the London Prize in low-temperature physics in 2014, and from 2014 to 2020 he led the Google effort to build a quantum computer, which reported its quantum supremacy experiment in 2019. He was awarded the John Stewart Bell Prize in 2021 and, in 2023, co-founded the startup Qolab to build a superconducting machine.

A candid account of what remains

What makes the talk worth attending is not the prize. It is the second half of the title. Martinis is candid that a full-stack, scalable quantum technology is still a work in progress, and that significant problems in hardware, fabrication, architecture and algorithms remain unsolved.

His proposed direction is specific. Rather than treating raw qubit count as the measure of progress, he argues that the path to scale runs through quality and manufacturability: adopting the semiconductor technology that already exists to build much higher-quality qubits, and applying systems-engineering approaches to the entire device, as opposed to optimising components in isolation. It is a sober message from someone who has spent four decades inside the problem, and a useful corrective to the louder claims the field sometimes attracts.

Why a quantum-computing lecture belongs at a dark-matter workshop

For those coming from the Patras community, Martinis’s visit is more than a guest appearance. The superconducting circuits, Josephson junctions, transmons and near-quantum-limited amplifiers that make up a quantum processor are increasingly the same devices used to search for physics beyond the Standard Model.

Several experiments discussed at the workshop use squeezed microwave states, travelling-wave parametric amplifiers and qubit-based single-photon counting to look for axions and other weakly interacting particles. The boundary between quantum-computing hardware and precision measurement is becoming difficult to draw, and the same physics that earned the last year’s Nobel Prize sits on both sides of it.

That overlap is one of the reasons we were glad to bring Martinis to UWA. The public lecture offers a rare chance to hear the history and the open questions of superconducting quantum computing directly from one of its architects, framed for anyone interested in quantum physics or the search for dark matter, with no specialist background assumed.

Registration for the free public talk is open now. Colleagues, students and anyone curious about where quantum technology is heading are warmly encouraged to attend, and to pass the invitation on.

Event details

Public lecture: “From prehistoric qubits to building a useful quantum computer”
Speaker: Professor John Martinis, 2025 Nobel Laureate in Physics
Date: Tuesday, 10 November 2026
Time: 6:30–8:00 pm
Venue: Octagon Theatre, The University of Western Australia
Admission: Free; registration essential
Registration: ticketswa.com

21st Patras Workshop on Axions, WIMPs and WISPs
The University of Western Australia, Crawley, Perth
Welcome reception: 8 November 2026
Workshop: 9–13 November 2026
Programme and information: indico.global