Brian Josephson

Brian Josephson was a Ph.D. student at Cambridge in 1962 when he discovered the effect that now bears his name: a prediction about electron behavior in superconductors that earned him a share of the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physics alongside Leo Esaki and Ivar Giaever. He stayed at Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory for his entire career, becoming a Fellow of Trinity College that same year and serving as Professor of Physics from 1974 to 2007. In the early 1970s he took up Transcendental Meditation and pivoted toward the margins: he founded the Mind-Matter Unification Project to investigate intelligence in nature, quantum mechanics and consciousness, and the overlap of science with Eastern mysticism. His public support for parapsychology, water memory, and cold fusion made him a recurring target of criticism from other scientists.