Brian Josephson

Origins and early life

Brian David Josephson was born in Cardiff, Wales, on 4 January 1940, the only child of Jewish parents, Abraham Josephson, a teacher at Howardian High School, and Mimi Weisbard, born in Swansea. All four of his grandparents had come to Britain from Russia, and he grew up in Pen-y-lan, where Emrys Jones, the physics master at Cardiff High School, introduced him to theoretical physics.

Work and career

At fifteen he won a mathematics scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, which he entered in 1957, and after two years of mathematics he switched to physics, graduating in 1960. He was a twenty-two-year-old research student under Brian Pippard when he predicted, in a paper published in Physics Letters in July 1962, that a current can flow between two superconductors separated by a thin insulating layer even with no voltage across it.

He also predicted that a steady voltage would make that current oscillate at a frequency set by the voltage, and Philip Anderson and John Rowell of Bell Labs reported observing the effect in a paper submitted in January 1963. The Josephson effect led to SQUIDs, superconducting quantum interference devices that measure extremely small changes in magnetic fields and are used in geology, medicine and computing. A fellow of Trinity College from 1962 and of the Royal Society from 1970, he made his career at the Cavendish Laboratory, where he was professor of physics from 1974 until 2007.

Recognition

In 1973 he received half of the Nobel Prize in Physics 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 going to Leo Esaki and Ivar Giaever. Having taken up Transcendental Meditation in 1971, he later set up at the Cavendish the Mind–Matter Unification Project, devoted to the relationship between quantum mechanics and consciousness.