Nobel Prize in Quackpottery: Physics

The Nobel Prize in Quackpottery honours the surprisingly unscientific ideas of Nobel prizewinning scientists
Nobel Prize: chemistry, literature, physics, and physiology or medicine, obverse side.

To continue my undergrad science dream prize, today I am announcing my selection for the Nobel Prize in Quackpottery for Physics. As I mentioned yesterday, similar to the Nobel Prize, this award is limited to still-living scientists who have won the Nobel Prize and who openly embrace some form of anti-scientific or pseudoscientific quackery. The award itself consists of a gold-plated duck penis and the presentation of this award is accompanied by 42 quacks from an outraged duck.

The winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics Quackpottery is Brian Josephson, FRS. Josephson is the Welsh physicist who was awarded the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his theoretical predictions of the properties of a supercurrent through a tunnel barrier, in particular those phenomena that are generally known as the Josephson effects" along with Leo Esaki and Ivar Giaever "for their experimental discoveries regarding tunneling phenomena in semiconductors and superconductors, respectively".

As with yesterday's awardee, Luc Montagnier, I selected Josephson for this award in recognition of his lifelong dedication to damaging his own scientific credibility – a course of devoted devastation that has spanned more than four decades.

Josephson's Nobel Prize winning work was in quantum dynamics, which perhaps motivated him to look for weird effects outside the lab. As physicist Neils Bohr once said: "Anyone not shocked by quantum mechanics has not yet understood it."

Having primed himself to be shocked by the world, Josephson began flirting with pseudoscientific quackpottery even before his Nobel Prize award. According to Josephson, whilst attending a conference in Toronto in 1974, he had the mind-bending experience of witnessing self-proclaimed psychic healer and poltergeist chaser, Matthew Manning, demonstrate paranormal spoon bending. In these crucial moments, Josephson's scientific career trajectory changed forever, so much so that it came to look something like this (see picture, right).

"I began to sense that conventional science is inadequate for situations where the mind is involved, and the task of clarification became a major concern of mine," recalls Josephson.

Shortly after winning the Nobel Prize, Josephson was named the director of the Mind-Matter Unification Project at Cambridge University. The Mind-Matter Unification Project is concerned primarily with "the attempt to understand, from the viewpoint of the theoretical physicist, what may loosely be characterised as intelligent processes in nature."

In other words, Josephson began openly espousing parapsychology – a field of quantum kookiness that encompasses a wide array of anti-scientific and pseudoscientific hocus-pocus attributed to powerful brain waves. It would seem that human brains are considered to be very condensed matter in the minds of some physicists.

But Josephson's torpid background in physics struggled to reanimate itself. He became an outspoken supporter of cold fusion, that faith-based idea that is often referred to as "pathological science" by his scientific colleagues. Undeterred by this peer-review, Josephson argues: "[I]n my work I have come across many cases of what I call Pathological Disbelief, for example with Low Energy Nuclear Reactions (cold fusion), where there is a complete disconnect between what is generally believed ('fiasco of the century') and the facts, namely that there is abundant experimental confirmation of the phenomenon."

As we saw, yesterday's Nobel Quackpot winner, Luc Montagnier, is a biologist drawn out of his field of expertise towards physics, with his fantastical claims that DNA can send "electromagnetic imprints" of itself into distant cells and fluids, and that virus particles emit radiowaves. Likewise, today's Nobel Prize in Quackpottery is awarded to a physicist who has moved in the opposite direction. Yet both men have ended up in the same place: they have abandoned rationality and the scientific method to advocate boneheaded fantasies. I can only wonder what might happen if these two Quackpot winners were locked in the same room whilst Josephson was suffering from a common cold virus!


CORRECTION: [12 October 2012 14:15] this piece originally stated that Josephson attended the Toronto conference in the mid-1960s. According to Josephson, he attended this conference in 1974, so this piece was corrected to reflect that.


