Stop complaining that there have been no scientific breakthroughs all day. All the laureates of this year's Nobel Prizes are top-notch.

During the just - passed eight - day National Day and Mid - Autumn Festival holiday, in Stockholm, Sweden, on the other side of the Earth, the members of the Nobel Prize Selection Committee obviously didn't catch a good time.

They voted and announced the 2025 Nobel Prizes one after another during our National Day holiday.

Currently, all the awards have been announced except for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Interestingly, there hasn't been much online discussion about the awards themselves this year.

More people are concerned about news like Japan winning two Nobel Prizes at once this year and Google having another big win.

Because this is Japan's 22nd Nobel Prize in 25 years. At the beginning of the century, Japan proposed a plan to win 30 Nobel Prizes in 50 years. Now it seems that it's just a matter of how many years ahead of schedule the goal will be achieved.

On the other hand, Google has had 5 scientists win 3 Nobel Prizes in just two years. In human history, only Bell Labs and IBM seem to have exceeded this number...

Once again, Sundar Pichai showed off

So people are chatting about them.

Actually, these external discussions have nothing to do with the Nobel Prizes in essence. Most Nobel Prizes reflect the accumulation of past technological breakthroughs and may not necessarily be a true reflection of current scientific and technological strength and research capabilities.

So, Jiangjiang thinks that instead of engaging in useless arguments, it's better to listen to us talk about the stories behind these Nobel Prizes.

Let's first look at the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. American scientists Mary Brunko, Fred Ramsdell, and Japanese scientist Shigefumi Sakaguchi have just won it. They won the award for their pioneering discoveries in the mechanism of peripheral immune tolerance.

When you hear about immunity, does it feel like the memories of your "biology class" are coming back to haunt you?

That's right. Even in a junior high school classroom today, kids can tell you that the human body protects itself and resists the invasion of external viruses and bacteria through its own immune system.

The question is, how can the human body accurately identify foreign invaders to avoid attacking indiscriminately and causing more harm to itself than to the enemy?

As early as 1995, Shigefumi Sakaguchi from Kyoto University in Japan discovered through research on mice that the human immune system has a kind of supervisor later named "regulatory T cells". They will monitor other immune cells. Once they find that these immune cells accidentally attack their own cells, the regulatory T cells will take the initiative to eliminate the "traitors".

Later, Mary Brunko, Fred Ramsdell, and their teams found the master switch of regulatory T cells through a lot of work: the Foxp3 gene.

Don't underestimate this discovery. It has already been widely applied in medicine.

For example, many immunodeficiency syndromes can be treated by increasing the number and activity of regulatory T cells in the body. On the other hand, when treating cancer, doctors may need to control the regulatory T cells near the tumor when they want the immune system to attack cancer cells at all costs, even at the expense of some normal human cells.

After talking about this year's Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, let's talk about the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

The laureates in chemistry are Susumu Kitagawa from Kyoto University in Japan, Richard Robson from the University of Melbourne in Australia, and Omar Yaghi from the University of California, Berkeley in the United States. They won the award for developing metal - organic frameworks and pioneering a new type of molecular architecture.

The name "molecular architecture" sounds mysterious and may even make you think of construction work. But actually, metal - organic frameworks are really related to civil engineering.

Civil engineers build houses in the real world, while metal - organic frameworks build "houses" at the molecular scale.

As early as 1974, Richard Robson wondered if it was possible to use the attraction between molecules and ions to build structures like the mortise - and - tenon joint in construction.

It wasn't until more than 10 years later that he officially started relevant research and actually built a "house".

But the new structure created by Robson at that time was very fragile. Most scientists thought it was just for fun and had no practical value.

However, Susumu Kitagawa and Omar Yaghi didn't think so.

In 1997, Susumu Kitagawa developed a new structure called the "tongue - and - groove" structure, which can reversibly absorb and release methane, nitrogen, and oxygen at room temperature.

This function is remarkable, which means it has changed from pure scientific research to the production of commercial materials.

Almost at the same time, Omar Yaghi developed MOF - 5. This material is not only heat - resistant but also has an extremely large internal specific surface area (theoretically, the internal pore area of a few grams of MOF - 5 powder can be as large as a standard football field). Such performance has exceeded the gas - adsorption ability of most materials at that time.

Since then, many investors have been interested and have invested in the research and development of various new materials.

Now, these new materials are gradually being promoted and entering people's daily lives.

For example, Yaghi's team has developed a new material that can capture water vapor and turn it into drinking water, which can be used in arid desert areas to collect water using clean energy.

It can also directly capture carbon dioxide in the air, which effectively promotes the achievement of carbon neutrality.

Compared with the relatively "down - to - earth" research directions of the previous two award - winners, the laureates of the Nobel Prize in Physics, John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret, and John M. Martinis, are a bit more science - fiction. They won the award for their contributions to realizing macroscopic quantum tunneling and energy quantization in circuits.

Isn't there a popular saying on the Internet: "When in doubt, turn to quantum mechanics"?

But actually, previously, the seemingly strange effects of quantum mechanics were generally thought to only occur at very small scales.

This year's laureates in physics have overturned this perception.

There is a classic story about quantum mechanics. In our daily life, if you run into a wall, you'll probably get a bruised nose and swollen face, depending on how hard you hit it. If you throw a ball at the wall, it will bounce back.

But in the microscopic world, a single particle can directly pass through a "wall" (equivalent potential barrier) and appear on the other side. This phenomenon is called "tunneling".

From 1984 to 1985, John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret, and John M. Martinis proved through a series of delicate experiments that macroscopic systems can also experience tunneling under appropriate conditions (this experiment is quite difficult to understand. You can study it on your own if you're interested).

The occurrence of this quantum phenomenon made them firmly believe in their conjecture: macroscopic quantum phenomena really exist.

So, they continued their experiments and observations. To their surprise, the constructed system really had other characteristics of the quantum world.

That means that under appropriate conditions, macroscopic systems can also have the characteristics of quantum mechanics.

Imagine if one day you become a macroscopic quantum system, wouldn't you be like Dr. Manhattan in DC comics?

Of course, today's quantum technology hasn't reached that level yet, but it has already brought infinite imagination to people.

For example, John Martinis directly used superconducting circuits with quantized energy levels as information units, which are now commonly known as quantum bits. This has led to the development of quantum chips and quantum computers...

There may be more applications in quantum sensing, quantum computing, etc. in the future.

Maybe the saying "When in doubt, turn to quantum mechanics" is really true.

Well, that's basically all about the announced Nobel laureates this year. Oh, while writing this article, the laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature was also announced. The Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai, who has been highly anticipated in recent years, won the award. Regarding the Nobel Prize in Literature, Jiangjiang can only say that I'm reading up on it.

Finally, let's talk a bit more. Compared with last year when several awards were related to AI, this year's Nobel Prizes have fully returned to basic science. The 2025 Nobel Prizes seem to be more pure.

So, as onlookers, maybe we should have fewer arguments about "who wins and who loses" and have more respect for science itself.

The decades - long focus and perseverance of these scientists are undoubtedly the crystallization of the common wisdom of all mankind and will ultimately promote the progress of human society.

Perhaps this is the real core of the story that the Nobel Prizes want to convey to us year after year.

This article is from the WeChat official account "ChaPingX.PIN". Author: Bajie, Editor: Jiangjiang. Republished by 36Kr with permission.