Brian David Josephson (born 1940 in Cardiff, Wales) is probably the youngest Nobel laureate in physics in history: at the age of 22, as a doctoral student at Trinity College Cambridge, he predicted what is today known worldwide as the Josephson effect – a quantum tunneling phenomenon between two superconductors, which forms the technological basis of SQUID magnetometers, quantum computer components and numerous high-precision measurement devices. In 1973, aged 33, he received the Nobel Prize in Physics for this. What is almost always missing from the popular image of science: from the 1970s onwards Josephson became publicly one of the most important academic defenders of parapsychological and consciousness research. He is – as far as one can tell – the only living Nobel laureate in physics who publicly takes this position. And he has never backed down.
Who is Brian Josephson?
Josephson was born in 1940 in Cardiff to a Welsh middle-class couple. He attended Cardiff High School, went on a scholarship to Trinity College Cambridge, completed the Mathematical Tripos with top honours, switched to the Physics Tripos and began his doctorate in 1960 at the Cavendish Laboratory – the institute already familiar from our portraits of Lord Rayleigh and J. J. Thomson.
From 1962 he was a Fellow of Trinity College, from 1974 Reader, from 1974 Professor of Physics at Cambridge. Today he is Emeritus Professor, still based at the Cavendish, still a Fellow of Trinity. He has not been knighted – unusual for a British Nobel laureate, possibly a consequence of his more controversial later activities.
The Josephson effect (1962)
In the spring of 1962, when Josephson was 22 and in his second year of doctoral work, he theoretically predicted a previously unknown quantum tunneling phenomenon: between two superconductors separated by a very thin non-superconducting layer (typically a few nanometers of insulator), under certain conditions a supercurrent flows without an applied voltage – solely through the quantum-mechanical phase coherence of the two superconductors. Under an applied DC voltage, a high-frequency AC current appears, whose frequency is fixed exactly by elementary constants.
The prediction appeared in 1962 in Physics Letters, the experimental confirmation followed already in 1963 by Philip Anderson and John Rowell at Bell Labs. The applications are fundamental today:
- SQUIDs (Superconducting Quantum Interference Devices) – the most sensitive magnetometers in existence, standard in magnetoencephalography (MEG) in brain research.
- Voltage standards – since 1990 the volt has been defined internationally via the AC Josephson effect.
- Quantum computers – most superconducting qubits (IBM, Google) are based on Josephson junctions.
In 1973 Josephson was awarded the Nobel Prize together with Leo Esaki and Ivar Giaever. He was 33 at the time – one of the youngest Nobel laureates in physics in history.
The turn: consciousness research and meditation (from 1971)
Even before the Nobel Prize, Josephson had begun to engage with consciousness research. From 1971 he practised Transcendental Meditation, attended several-week meditation retreats and became publicly involved in the TM movement around Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. He gave for this not a religious but an explicitly scientific reason: meditation opens up empirically accessible states of consciousness not mapped in conventional neuroscience.
In parallel he began to take an interest in experimental parapsychology – the line we treat extensively on this site via J. B. Rhine at Duke and the PEAR program at Princeton. Josephson saw in this line a serious field of research that had been unjustly pushed out of the academic mainstream.
The "Mind-Matter Unification Project" at the Cavendish
In the mid-1990s Josephson established the Mind-Matter Unification Project at the Cavendish Laboratory. It is not a classical experimental research programme with staff and external funding, but rather a theoretical initiative – Josephson himself as principal investigator, occasional collaborations, an own page on the Cavendish server. The stated aim: to develop a theoretical framework in which matter and consciousness are not two separate domains but aspects of a single, uniformly describable phenomenon.
Methodologically Josephson draws on biosemiotics (the concept that biological systems are fundamentally sign-processing systems), on quantum information theory and on nonlinear dynamics. In substance his position is consistent: if consciousness is a fundamental, not merely emergent property of reality, then psi phenomena like telepathy or precognition are not "supernatural" but still-unknown aspects of the same physics we already know in part. This position fits structurally into the line we have already observed in Pauli (quantum non-locality, unus mundus), Einstein ("an extended physics is needed") and Lodge (the aether as common medium).
2001: The Royal Mail incident
For the centenary of the Nobel Prize, the British Royal Mail issued in October 2001 a series of commemorative stamps, each with an accompanying booklet in which British Nobel laureates briefly wrote from their field. Josephson, who accompanied the physics stamp, wrote in substance: quantum information theory could lead to an explanation of phenomena which conventional science does not yet understand – "such as telepathy".
The reaction was fierce. The Oxford quantum physicist David Deutsch publicly called the contribution in The Observer "utter rubbish". Several prominent physicists demanded that the Royal Mail distance itself. Josephson himself responded calmly in several interviews: he had not asserted that telepathy was proven, but had merely pointed to a theoretical possibility that today's quantum information theory leaves open. He has not retracted the statement.
Further controversies: cold fusion, water memory
Over the years Josephson has held several positions uncomfortable for mainstream physics: sympathy for cold fusion research (Fleischmann/Pons 1989 and successors), public support for Jacques Benveniste's "water memory" concept, involvement with the Society for Scientific Exploration. The mainstream reaction was in each case critical to polemic. What is notable, however, is that Josephson remains a Trinity Fellow, Cambridge Emeritus and Nobel laureate – his Nobel work remains uncontested. The separation between his unchallenged junior work (1962) and his contested senior positions has never been convincingly made.
"Today's quantum information theory indicates that there can be phenomena not previously described in conventional physics – including phenomena like telepathy. It is the task of science to investigate this, not to exclude it on ideological grounds."
— Paraphrase of Brian Josephson's position from the 2001 Royal Mail booklet and subsequent interviews
The mainstream physics reaction
Josephson's position is a minority one in the academic physics establishment. It is not ignored – his scientific reputation is too great for that – but it is sharply criticised. The usual line of the critics (Deutsch, Stenger, later also public sceptic groups) is: Josephson is a victim of "Nobel disease", the phenomenon that ageing Nobel laureates occasionally advocate adventurous theories outside their field. Examples like Linus Pauling (vitamin C) or Kary Mullis (HIV-AIDS scepticism) are invoked.
This reading is polemically useful but factually weak. First, Josephson's interest in consciousness topics existed already before the Nobel Prize. Second, his position is theoretically detailed, not sweeping. Third, he explicitly does not place himself outside physics but invokes established concepts like quantum information theory and non-locality. The discussion is thus less a scientific than a sociological one – a question of what is sayable in the academic discourse and what is not.
What remains
- Maximum reputation, contemporary voice. Unlike the other figures in our series (Kepler to Pauli), Josephson is alive, active, and embedded in the academic apparatus (Trinity, Cavendish). Anyone who hears the argument "science has long since refuted this" can point to Josephson as a living counter-example.
- A clear theoretical line. Mind-matter unification via quantum information theory and biosemiotics – methodologically connectable to Pauli, Einstein and the PEAR experiments with quantum noise.
- Steadfastness across decades. From the TM engagement of the 1970s through the Mind-Matter Project of the 1990s to the Royal Mail incident of 2001 and the later controversies, Josephson has withdrawn none of his contested positions. This perseverance is unusual in today's scientific establishment.
- A lesson in academic tolerance. The fact that Cambridge and Trinity College have kept Josephson as Emeritus and Fellow shows that even in the 21st century top institutions do not exclude a top researcher for his contested positions, as long as his principal work is solid. This tolerance is not everywhere taken for granted.
Josephson belongs in the historical line we are tracing on this site: Kepler, Crookes, the Curies, Lodge, Rayleigh, J. J. Thomson, Jung, Pauli, Einstein, Rhine, PEAR. He is the only one among them who is alive today. As long as he is, the claim that "serious physics" and psi research are mutually exclusive is refuted by his mere existence.
Sources
- B. D. Josephson: Possible new effects in superconductive tunnelling. Physics Letters, Vol. 1 (1962), pp. 251–253 – the original prediction of the Josephson effect.
- B. D. Josephson: The Discovery of Tunnelling Supercurrents. Nobel Lecture, Stockholm 1973 (Reviews of Modern Physics, Vol. 46, 1974).
- Mind-Matter Unification Project, Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge – project page and publication list online (tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/~bdj10).
- Royal Mail Nobel Centenary Booklet: Britain's Nobel Laureates – Physics. London 2001 – with Josephson's contribution.
- Robert Matthews: Royal Mail's Nobel Guru in Telepathy Row. The Observer, 30 September 2001 – with David Deutsch's reaction.
- Brian Josephson & Fotini Pallikari-Viras: Biological Utilisation of Quantum NonLocality. Foundations of Physics, Vol. 21 (1991), pp. 197–207.
- Wikipedia/Encyclopædia Britannica: Brian David Josephson – for the standard biographical data.