Interview with the 2025 Nobel Prize laureate in physics Michel Devoret on 6 December 2025 during Nobel Week in Stockholm, Sweden.

Can you tell us about your childhood? 

Michel Devoret: I was born in 1953. My father was a biologist, and my mother was a schoolteacher. I grew up first in the city of Montreuil, east of Paris. In 1961, my parents moved to Orsay where there was a new university and a new research centre, and my father was working there. So my brother and I grew up in this city of Orsay where I went to elementary school, and then high school. 

When did you decide to pursue science? 

Michel Devoret: I got interested in science very early thanks to books that were given to me for Christmas and birthdays by family members. You have to think about that period, we were in the midst of the Sputnik era. The US created a lot of books for children. Some of them were translated into French, and they were excellent popularisation books about science. I loved reading them and in those books, there were stories about physics and physicists. Something that struck me was that, unlike the chemist, the physicists were never in lab coats. They were dressed in everyday clothes that seemed to me a good, old man. They seemed more free-spirited than the rest of the scientists. 

On the other hand, I liked to work with my hands to tinker with various subjects. The fact that physics was addressing the natural world with equations was also interesting to me. But I was not completely decided on physics until I went to graduate school. For me, it was a definite choice because at that time, when it was time to go to a graduate school, many people including physicists were recommending not to go into physics. There was a sort of dip, actually a huge dip, in funding and quite a dip in the morale of physicists. So as a student, I was welcome in physics labs with a lot of pessimism about the future of physics. Everyone was saying, “Oh, you should do biology. This is the science of the future.”  

Can you tell us about the mentors who inspired you? 

Michel Devoret: I actually did two PhDs, because in France at that time, you would do a small PhD for one or two years, and then a longer one for maybe six to eight years. During the first PhD which lasted one year, I worked under the supervision of John Eland, a physicist from Great Britain who was doing a visit in Orsay. This was in the laboratory of molecular photophysics, which was headed by Sydney Leach, another very important mentor and advisor. 

Then for my big PhD, I joined the laboratory of Anatole Abragam, a very well-known figure in nuclear magnetic resonance and a great physicist. That was also a great advisor. For my postdoc, I went and worked with professor John Clarke. I owe him quite a lot. That was a very important example and mentor. 

How was your co-laureate, John Clarke, as an advisor? 

Michel Devoret: Oh, he was wonderful. He had a way of visiting us, John Martinis and I, in the lab. He would come every day for half an hour, an hour, and ask, “Well, what’s new today?” He was really giving excellent advice, because he was coming every day and asking if something was new. If we would find two new things one day, we would keep one and telling about only one thing and keep the other one for the next day, just in case we wouldn’t have anything great to say the next day. 

Why is collaboration so important in science? 

Michel Devoret: When you think about a team like ours of three people, you shouldn’t think of these teams as an addition of rules or competence. You have to think more about multiplication. Research is not the sort of a simple addition of different skills. People stimulate each other. That’s extremely important. We couldn’t really achieve what we achieved without this stimulation. It would be like imagining a tennis play with only one player. People stimulate each other, and people have different personalities that are complimentary. They might see the world in different ways, and it’s very important to bring this diversity together in research. 

Can you share a memory of collaborating with your co-laureates? 

Michel Devoret: I like to talk about that when you are young, you don’t distinguish always what’s very important – what is crucial – from what is a detail. At some point with John Martinis, we got in love with one particular idea about the experiment, something we should spend more time on. John Clarke came and listened to what we had to say, and he said, “Maybe that’s an interesting aspect of the experiment, but I think here you are not paying enough attention to the monster under your bed.” It means that we were not addressing some very basic difficulty in the experiment. 

We were escaping, trying to fix a detail that was important but not crucial to the success of the project, instead of concentrating on the aspect that would actually, if we would not fix it, mean the death of the project. We was sort of frolicking on something that was pleasing to us, but not necessarily essential for the project. So this idea of being aware that you may have a monster under your bed and you should know your priorities to really look if there was not such monster, that struck me. 

Can you tell us about making your Nobel Prize discovery? 

Michel Devoret: In the lab, in physics, you often see a very interesting phenomenon, but most of the time there are artifacts. What we were proud of in this experiment is that we did a lot of control experiments, so that what we would observe would be true, would be controlled, by all the preparatory work. This is what we were proud of in the experiment. We were able to compare. What we were seeing as experimental results, our observations, could be backed. The experimental results were in agreement with theory, but with all the parameters of the theory measured in situ. So it was not just a hypothesis that we would verify. We would actually make sure the experiment was completely intact. This was important because we were trying to see deviations of the theory, and basically any deviations that we would have found, would have to be checked very thoroughly. No one would have believed us if we wouldn’t have come with a very, very strong evidence. So that was the experiment, to find all the possible loopholes and fix them. 

Is it fundamental for science to be an international discipline? 

Michel Devoret: Oh, absolutely. Science, I think, is without boundaries. If you take modern physics, even in the last hundred years, it has always functioned as an international discipline. The amount of collaboration that exists between countries is always very, very important. In our particular experiments, this is the collaboration between someone from Great Britain, someone from France, and someone from the United States. But this is very frequent. In our career, we have all very often – most of the time – worked with people that were not from our own countries. Most of my graduate students and most of the people that I have trained, are from other countries than either France or the US. 

What’s your opinion of a researcher’s responsibility to society? 

Michel Devoret: The first responsibility is to do correct science, try to always get to the truth. That’s in my opinion, the first responsibility of the use of the resources. That, in some sense, the published results are as professional and as exact as possible. This is the first responsibility. The other responsibility is to train students, to really propagate the knowledge to the new generation of scientists. Then there’s also a third responsibility. It’s some effort to popularising the work so that it can be transmitted to the public at large. It can be done through articles or public conferences. Essentially trying to explain in the simplest possible terms, the research. I think that maybe we should ask ourselves the question of whether what we find is good or bad for society. You should at least think about it once in a while. There are some dangerous discoveries. I don’t think I have worked on things that appear so dangerous, but you have to ask yourself this question. Of course, it was very important for people who worked on nuclear power and nuclear energy. 

How do you cope with failures and unexpected problems? 

Michel Devoret: Failures and expected problems is your daily life. This is what you are confronted with most of the time. The life of a researcher is very close to schizophrenia, because you have to be very enthusiastic and believe that in some sense you are doing something great, to cope with all these difficulties, but at the same time, you have to be very critical about your results. So you have to be able both to be enthusiastic about them, but also very sceptical of as to whether they are correct or not. You are really operating on some reason edge here. 

Do you have advice for young researchers? 

Michel Devoret: You cannot teach someone how to make good discoveries. What you can teach is how to make sure that you will avoid making any discoveries. So, what I mean is that you can teach about all the possible mistakes you can do in science, and you can hope that by applying this principle that will surely guide you to failure. If you can avoid failures by luck and by random burning motion, maybe you can hit a big discovery one day.  

What are the qualities of a successful scientist? 

Michel Devoret: There are two qualities which are essential. First of all, you have to be resistant to failures. You should not get discouraged when failure happens, and you have to be able to learn from your mistakes. Doing mistakes is important, and you have to not be discouraged by them. You have to learn as much as possible from them. 

What are some differences between working in academia and industry? 

Michel Devoret: When you work in academia, you enjoy a lot of freedom. When something doesn’t work, you can change the question that you are dealing with and go to another question. In industry, you are much more focused. The goal is much shorter term. You really have to build something that works, and you have to build something that works in a finite amount of time. You cannot leave the success of the project open-ended. It has more constraints, but there’s a lot of similarities.  

How do you maintain a work-life balance?  

Michel Devoret: I don’t think I maintain a work-life balance. This has never been a worry. It’s too bad. When I was younger, I was playing music – I was playing an instrument – but at some point, I had to choose whether I was going to do physics seriously or not. I think it’s very, very hard to maintain a life-work balance if you are doing research at the forefront of knowledge. There’s an intense competition, and you also have a lot of things to do. 

Do you have a hobby that makes you a better scientist? 

Michel Devoret: Something that I enjoy very much is cinema movies. I have actually had the great fortune of teaching a course with a friend of mine who is a professor of cinema. We taught physics and cinema together. The name of the course was Cinema and Physics. It resulted from a contest in my university where the dean of arts and sciences wanted to bring together people in the humanities and science. So she started this contest where two professors – one from the humanities and one from science – had to a team together to create a course. My friend and I proposed a cinema and physics, and we won the contest. Then we had to teach this course and it was very enjoyable. 

What environment best encourages creative thinking? 

Michel Devoret: Personally, the kind of environment that has always stimulated my creativity was geographical change. When I go somewhere else, when I break the routine of going to work every day in the same place, and I visit a new geographical place. I have actually moved several times in my life and went to different labs, collaborated with new people. I have found this extremely stimulating. 

Watch the interview

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