Brian Josephson

Brian David Josephson (born 4 January 1940 in Cardiff, Wales) is a British theoretical physicist. As a 22-year-old graduate student at the University of Cambridge in 1962, he predicted what became known as the Josephson effect: that a supercurrent can tunnel across a thin insulating barrier between two superconductors, with characteristic direct- and alternating-current behaviour.

The prediction was soon confirmed experimentally and underpins technologies such as SQUID magnetometers, and in 1973 Josephson shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Leo Esaki and Ivar Giaever. Josephson belongs in the mind-power lineage because of his later, openly contested work.

In the early 1970s he took up Transcendental Meditation and turned his attention to questions outside mainstream science, establishing the Mind-Matter Unification Project at Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory to explore intelligence in nature, the relationship between quantum mechanics and consciousness, and possible links between physics and Eastern mysticism.

He has publicly defended the scientific seriousness of parapsychology and psi phenomena, positions most physicists reject and which have drawn sustained criticism. He is presented here as a sincere experimenter: a Nobel laureate who chose to investigate, rather than dismiss, the possibility that consciousness is woven into the physical order, while acknowledging that these later claims remain disputed within the scientific community.