Brian Josephson

Brian Josephson married Carol Anne Olivier in 1976. The couple has a daughter.

He is a practitioner of transcendental meditation since early 1970s and believes that meditation could lead to mystical and scientific insights.

Brian Josephson was born on January 4, 1940, in Cardiff, Wales. His father’s name was Abraham Josephson and his mother’s name was Mimi née Weisbard Josephson. They were Jewish by faith.

He had his schooling at Cardiff High School. During his school years, he was highly influenced by his physics master Emrys Jones, who introduced young Brain to theoretical physics.

When he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1957, he took mathematics as his major. Later he found it rather boring and changed his subject. Ultimately, he graduated with physics in 1960 and enrolled at the same university for his master’s degree. He obtained his MS in 1962.

During his college days, Josephson became known for his intelligence and precision. One of his professors was Nobel Laureate Philip Anderson. He would later say that having Josephson in the class was a ‘disconcerting experience’ because if there was any mistake he would meet him after the class and rectify it politely.

Sometime now, Josephson published a paper on Mössbauer effect, a physical phenomena discovered by Rudolf Mössbauer in 1958. In it, he pointed out certain crucial factors, which other researchers had neglected.

Straight after graduation, he joined Cavendish Laboratory at the Cambridge University as a research scholar. While still an undergraduate student, he had developed an interest in superconductivity. He soon started exploring the properties of a junction between two conductors.

His experimentation led to the discovery of ‘Josephson Effect’. Later the junction between the two conductors became known as ‘Josephson Junction’. His calculations were published in ‘Physics Letters’ on July 1, 1962 under the title of ‘Possible new effects in superconductive tunnelling’.

Josephson received his PhD in 1964. His doctoral thesis was on ‘Non-linear conduction in superconductors’. He then joined University of Illinois, in 1965, as research assistant professor and remained there till 1966.

He returned to Cambridge at the end of 1966. The following year, he was made assistant director of research at the Cavendish Laboratory. Subsequently, he became a member of the Theory of Condensed Matter group of the university and retained the membership till the end of his career.

In 1972, he was made a Reader in Physics. Next in 1974, he was promoted to the post of a full professor, a position he retained until the end of his career.

Brian Josephson’s research on quantum tunneling, which resulted in the discovery of ‘Josephson’s effect’ is the most significant of all his works. According to his theory, current could tunnel through a thin insulating barrier between two weakly coupled superconductors even when no voltage is applied, while application of voltage results in oscillation at high frequency.

Known as ‘Josephson’s Effect’, the discovery was later proven experimentally at Bell Laboratory by Philip Anderson and John Rowell. It also led to many new inventions in the fields of computing and medicine.

Superconducting Quantum Interference Device, used in geology for making highly sensitive measurements and prototype of a faster computer built by IBM in 1980 was developed on the basis of Josephson’s theory of quantum tunneling.