Brian Josephson predicted the Josephson effect at 22, while still a Ph.D. student at Trinity College, Cambridge, describing how electrical current could tunnel through a thin insulating barrier between two superconductors without any voltage applied. The prediction was so counterintuitive that several senior physicists, including John Bardeen, who had won two Nobel Prizes, publicly dismissed it. Philip Anderson at Bell Labs supported Josephson's theory, and experimental confirmation came within a year. The effect turned out to have enormous practical applications. Josephson junctions became the basis for SQUIDs (Superconducting Quantum Interference Devices), the most sensitive magnetometers ever built. Hospitals use them to map brain activity. Geologists use them to detect mineral deposits. Physicists use them to define the international standard for voltage. He shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physics with Leo Esaki and Ivar Giaever for tunneling work in solids and superconductors. He was 33. Born in Cardiff, Wales on January 4, 1940, Josephson was a child prodigy who taught himself calculus before entering university. After winning the Nobel, he took a sharp and permanent turn into studying consciousness and parapsychology, arguing that quantum mechanics might explain phenomena like telepathy and remote viewing. He organized conferences on the subject at Cambridge and published papers that most physicists considered embarrassing. The scientific establishment largely distanced itself from him. He didn't waver. He spent decades at Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory pursuing ideas his colleagues viewed as pseudoscience, a Nobel laureate who traded mainstream respectability for questions nobody else in physics would touch. His early work remains embedded in the infrastructure of modern electronics; his later work remains controversial.