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Research projects worth reading alongside this work

A running list of research the founder is reading and following, published in the open. Each entry summarizes what the source itself reports — no added claims, no added status, no interpretation supplied from outside the source.

How entries are kept

Every entry states its source, its publication date, and what it actually says. Where the source makes a finding, the entry reports it as the source makes it. Where the source is narrative or explanatory rather than a finding, the entry says so. Entries are added as they are read, in the order they are added — not ranked.

Quantum in the Palm of Your Hand: The Evolution of Superconducting Qubits

U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science — published 28 July 2026

A public explanation, by the Office of Science, of how federal support for basic research in 1985 set the foundation for today's quantum technology. It is narrative and explanatory, not a research finding, and it is written for a general reader.

What the article reports, in its own terms:

  • In 1985, at the University of California, Berkeley, a team of three scientists — John Clarke, Michel Devoret, and John Martinis — demonstrated quantization and quantum tunneling in an electrical circuit large enough to observe directly, which the article calls a system "big enough to get one's grubby fingers on."
  • The work was supported by the Department of Energy's Office of Basic Energy Research, the precursor of the Office of Science. Four decades later, the three were awarded the Nobel Prize for that research.
  • The article traces the longer line: superconductivity and Cooper pairs; Brian Josephson's 1962 proposal that Cooper pairs could tunnel across an insulating barrier between superconductors; the first Josephson junction built a year later; and the 1980s hunt to show quantum tunneling at a scale larger than single particles.
  • It explains quantization — energy arriving in discrete chunks rather than a continuous range — and quantum tunneling — particles passing barriers that classical physics forbids — in plain language, using ordinary objects as counterexamples.
  • It reports that Princeton scientists developed a superconducting quantum computing chip with qubits that last more than 1 millisecond — nearly fifteen times longer than industry standard processors.
  • Interviewed researchers include Irfan Siddiqi of the University of California, Berkeley; Yao Lu of the Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and the Superconducting Quantum Materials and Systems Center; and Alicia Kollár of the University of Maryland.

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