[3] Best known for his pioneering work on superconductivity and quantum tunnelling, he shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physics with Leo Esaki and Ivar Giaever for his discovery of the Josephson effect, made in 1962 when he was a 22 year-old PhD student at Cambridge.

[18][19] 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.

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

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.

[32] Josephson became interested in philosophy of mind in the late sixties and, in particular, in the mind–body problem, and is one of the few scientists to argue that parapsychological phenomena (telepathy, psychokinesis and other paranormal themes) may be real.

[34] Winning the Nobel Prize in 1973 gave him the freedom to work in less orthodox areas, and he became increasingly involved – including during science conferences, to the irritation of fellow scientists – in talking about meditation, telepathy and higher states of consciousness.

[35] In 1974, he angered scientists during a colloquium of molecular and cellular biologists in Versailles by inviting them to read the Bhagavad Gita (5th – 2nd century BCE) and the work of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the founder of the TM movement, and by arguing about special states of consciousness achieved through meditation.

[41] He continued to explore the idea that there is intelligence in nature, particularly after reading Fritjof Capra's The Tao of Physics (1975),[42] and in 1979 took up a more advanced form of TM, known as the TM-Sidhi program.

They had organized themselves loosely into the Fundamental Fysiks Group, and had effectively become the Stanford Research Institute's (SRI) "house theorists," according to historian of science David Kaiser.

Core members in the group were Elizabeth Rauscher, George Weissmann, John Clauser, Jack Sarfatti, Saul-Paul Sirag, Nick Herbert, Fred Alan Wolf, Fritjof Capra, Henry Stapp, Philippe Eberhard and Gary Zukav.

A conference on "Science and Consciousness" followed a year later in Cordoba, Spain, attended by physicists and Jungian psychoanalysts, and addressed by Josephson, Fritjof Capra and David Bohm (1917–1992).

[58] Several physicists complained in 2001 when, in a Royal Mail booklet celebrating the Nobel Prize's centenary, Josephson wrote that Britain was at the forefront of research into telepathy.

[60][61] In 2004, Josephson criticized an experiment by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry to test claims by Russian schoolgirl Natasha Demkina that she could see inside people's bodies using a special kind of vision.

One of the researchers, Richard Wiseman, professor of psychology at the University of Hertfordshire, responded by highlighting that the conditions of the experiment had been agreed to before it started, and the potential significance of her claims warranted a higher than normal bar.

[63] Keith Rennolis, professor of applied statistics at the University of Greenwich, supported Josephson's position, asserting that the experiment was "woefully inadequate" to determine any effect.

[64] Josephson's reputation for promoting unorthodox causes was cemented by his support for the ideas of water memory and cold fusion, both of which are rejected by mainstream scientists.

Water memory is purported to provide a possible explanation for homeopathy; it is dismissed by a majority of scientists as pseudoscience, although Josephson has expressed support for it since attending a conference at which French immunologist Jacques Benveniste first proposed it.

[66] Antony Valentini of Imperial College London withdrew Josephson's invitation to a 2010 conference on the de Broglie-Bohm theory because of his work on the paranormal, although it was reinstated after complaints.