(born 1940). British physicist Brian D. Josephson discovered the Josephson effect, which describes the flow of electric current between two pieces of superconducting material separated by a thin layer of insulating material. (Superconductors are materials that lose all electrical resistance when cooled below a certain temperature near absolute zero.) For his research, Josephson, who was a 22-year-old graduate student at the time, won a share (with Leo Esaki and Ivar Giaever) of the 1973 Nobel Prize for Physics.
Brian David Josephson was born on January 4, 1940, in Cardiff, Glamorgan, Wales. He attended Trinity College at Cambridge, England, where he studied physics. He earned a bachelor’s degree in 1960 and a master’s degree and Ph.D. in 1964. Josephson was elected a fellow of Trinity College in 1962.
While still an undergraduate, Josephson became interested in superconductivity, and he began to explore the properties of a junction between two superconductors that later came to be known as a Josephson junction. Josephson extended earlier work in tunneling—the phenomenon by which electrons functioning as radiated waves can penetrate solids—done by Esaki and Giaever. Josephson showed theoretically that tunneling between two superconductors could have special characteristics—for example, electric current flows across an insulating layer without the application of a voltage; if a voltage is applied, the current stops flowing and oscillates at high frequency. This was the Josephson effect.
Experimentation confirmed the Josephson effect, and its confirmation in turn reinforced the earlier BCS theory of superconductor behavior put forth by John Bardeen, Leon N. Cooper, and John Robert Schrieffer. Applying Josephson’s discoveries with superconductors, researchers at International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) had assembled by 1980 an experimental computer switch structure. This structure would permit switching speeds from 10 to 100 times faster than those possible with conventional silicon-based chips, increasing data processing capabilities by a vast amount.
Josephson went to the United States to be a research professor at the University of Illinois in 1965–66 and in 1967 returned to Cambridge University in England as assistant director of research. He was appointed reader in physics in 1972 and professor of physics in 1974. Josephson was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1970.
A few years before receiving the Nobel award, Josephson grew interested in the possible relevance of Eastern mysticism to scientific understanding. In 1980 he and Indian neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran published their edited proceedings of a 1978 interdisciplinary symposium on consciousness at Cambridge under the title Consciousness and the Physical World. Josephson became a controversial figure for his support of research into parapsychology, cold fusion, and homeopathy. He retired from his professorship in 2007.