Brian Josephson

Josephson was born in Cardiff, Wales, to Jewish parents, Mimi (née Weisbard, 1911–1998) and Abraham Josephson.

He attended Cardiff High School, where he credits some of the school masters for having helped him, particularly the physics master, Emrys Jones, who introduced him to theoretical physics.

Brian David Josephson (born 4 January 1940) is a British theoretical physicist and professor emeritus of physics at the University of Cambridge.

Before Anderson and Rowell confirmed the calculations, the American physicist John Bardeen, who had shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics (and who shared it again in 1972), objected to Josephson's work.

In 1957, he went up to Cambridge, where he initially read mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge.

After completing Maths Part II in two years, and finding it somewhat sterile, he decided to switch to physics.

Josephson was known at Cambridge as a brilliant, but shy, student.

Physicist John Waldram recalled overhearing Nicholas Kurti, an examiner from Oxford, discuss Josephson's exam results with David Shoenberg, reader in physics at Cambridge, and asking: "Who is this chap Josephson? He seems to be going through the theory like a knife through butter."

While still an undergraduate, he published a paper on the Mössbauer effect, pointing out a crucial issue other researchers had overlooked.

According to one eminent physicist speaking to Physics World, Josephson wrote several papers important enough to assure him a place in the history of physics even without his discovery of the Josephson effect.

He graduated in 1960 and became a research student in the university's Mond Laboratory on the old Cavendish site, where he was supervised by Brian Pippard.

American physicist Philip Anderson, also a future Nobel Prize laureate, spent a year in Cambridge in 1961–1962, and recalled that having Josephson in a class was "a disconcerting experience for a lecturer, I can assure you, because everything had to be right or he would come up and explain it to me after class."

He has been a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge since 1962, and served as professor of physics from 1974 until 2007.

It was during this period, as a PhD student in 1962, that he carried out the research that led to his discovery of the Josephson effect; the Cavendish Laboratory unveiled a plaque on the Mond Building dedicated to the discovery in November 2012.

He was elected a fellow of Trinity College in 1962, and obtained his PhD in 1964 for a thesis entitled Non-linear conduction in superconductors.

Josephson was 22 years old when he did the work on quantum tunnelling that won him the Nobel Prize.

He discovered that a supercurrent could tunnel through a thin barrier, predicting, according to physicist Andrew Whitaker, that "at a junction of two superconductors, a current will flow even if there is no drop in voltage; that when there is a voltage drop, the current should oscillate at a frequency related to the drop in voltage; and that there is a dependence on any magnetic field."

This became known as the Josephson effect and the junction as a Josephson junction.

His calculations were published in Physics Letters (chosen by Pippard because it was a new journal) in a paper entitled "Possible new effects in superconductive tunnelling," received on 8 June 1962 and published on 1 July.

He submitted an article to Physical Review Letters on 25 July 1962, arguing that "there can be no such superfluid flow."

The disagreement led to a confrontation in September that year at Queen Mary College, London, at the Eighth International Conference on Low Temperature Physics.

When Bardeen (then one of the most eminent physicists in the world) began speaking, Josephson (still a student) stood up and interrupted him.

The men exchanged views, reportedly in a civil and soft-spoken manner.

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Whitaker writes that the discovery of the Josephson effect led to "much important physics," including the invention of SQUIDs (superconducting quantum interference devices), which are used in geology to make highly sensitive measurements, as well as in medicine and computing.

They were confirmed experimentally by Philip Anderson and John Rowell of Bell Labs in Princeton; this appeared in their paper, "Probable Observation of the Josephson Superconducting Tunneling Effect," submitted to Physical Review Letters in January 1963.

Josephson spent a postdoctoral year in the United States (1965–1966) as research assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.

After returning to Cambridge, he was made assistant director of research at the Cavendish Laboratory in 1967, where he remained a member of the Theory of Condensed Matter group, a theoretical physics group, for the rest of his career.

Josephson was awarded several important prizes for his discovery, including the 1969 Research Corporation Award for outstanding contributions to science, and the Hughes Medal and Holweck Prize in 1972.

In the early 1970s, Josephson took up transcendental meditation and turned his attention to issues outside the boundaries of mainstream science.

He set up the Mind–Matter Unification Project at the Cavendish to explore the idea of intelligence in nature, the relationship between quantum mechanics and consciousness, and the synthesis of science and Eastern mysticism, broadly known as quantum mysticism.

He has expressed support for topics such as parapsychology, water memory and cold fusion, which has made him a focus of criticism from fellow scientists.

Best known for his pioneering work on superconductivity and quantum tunnelling, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1973 for his prediction of the Josephson effect, made in 1962 when he was a 22-year-old PhD student at Cambridge University.

Josephson is the first Welshman to have won a Nobel Prize in Physics.

He shared the prize with physicists Leo Esaki and Ivar Giaever, who jointly received half the award for their own work on quantum tunnelling.

Josephson has spent his academic career as a member of the Theory of Condensed Matter group at Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory.

In 1973 he won the Nobel Prize in Physics, sharing the $122,000 award with two other scientists who had also worked on quantum tunnelling.

Josephson was awarded half the prize "for his theoretical predictions of the properties of a supercurrent through a tunnel barrier, in particular those phenomena which are generally known as the Josephson effects".

The other half of the award was shared equally by Japanese physicist Leo Esaki of the Thomas Watson Research Center in Yorktown, New York, and Norwegian-American physicist Ivar Giaever of General Electric in Schenectady, New York.

IBM used Josephson's work in 1980 to build a prototype of a computer that would be up to 100 times faster than the IBM 3033 mainframe.