With a Nobel prize under your belt and unshackled by the need to “prove” yourself, it must be tempting to set off in new directions – to try your hand at topics beyond the area in which you originally made your name. One Nobel-prize-winning physicist who has perhaps veered off the conventional path more than any other is Brian Josephson, who leads the self-styled Mind-Matter Unification Project at the University of Cambridge in the UK. It aims to understand “from the viewpoint of the theoretical physicist, what may loosely be characterized as intelligent processes in nature, associated with brain function or with some other natural process”.
In other words, Josephson, 81, spends his days thinking about how the brain works, investigating topics such as language and consciousness, and pondering the fundamental connections between music and the mind. Most controversially, as far as physicists are concerned, he also carries out speculative research on paranormal phenomena, a field known as parapsychology. Josephson’s interests even touch on homeopathy and cold fusion – two areas in which few physicists would dare to dabble.
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