In high school he developed an interest in the natural sciences, focusing on chemistry, which he could learn in a hands-on manner through experiments.

However, he soon felt lost in the large body of students, and opt to switch to the much less popular subject of crystallography, a subfield of mineralogy at the interface of chemistry and physics.

In 1972, his teachers Wolfgang Hoffmann and Horst Böhm arranged for him to spend the summer at the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory as a visiting student.

The experience here would shape his further career: not only did he meet his later collaborator K. Alex Müller, the head of the physics department, but he also experienced the atmosphere of creativity and freedom cultivated at the IBM lab, which he credits as a strong influence on his way of conducting science.

In 1987, Bednorz and Müller were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics "for their important break-through in the discovery of superconductivity in ceramic materials".