At least three different reporters on Tuesday asked John Clarke, one of this year’s Nobel Prize in physics laureates, how exactly we ended up with technology like the cellphone today from his obscure discovery of "macroscopic quantum tunneling and energy quantization” 40 years ago. He never did give a straight answer. Perhaps because there isn’t one, no easy throughline to draw from the lab to our everyday lives. Often that line is a culmination of expertise that outweighs the contributions of