Josephson effect discovery

Cautionary case for the "scientist solves problems that can be solved" thesis — Josephson, as a naïve graduate student, solved the harder problem his elders had been simplifying away, and discovered electron tunneling. Won Nobel Prize 1973. Tom met him in the early 1970s.

The example I was going to tell you is Brian Josephson. Anyone know who Brian Josephson is? You ever heard of the Josephson effect in superconductivity? Nobody's ever heard of it. Well, Brian Josephson was a graduate student at I think Cambridge rather than Oxford — anyway, a British university. He was a brand new graduate student, like 21 or 22 years old, and he went in to see his professor. His professor was sort of busy and said, here, go solve this problem. This was a problem on electron flow that people had written down the equations before and solved many times. It was just sort of an exercise to keep him busy and for the professor to see how well he could do on a graduate-school-type physics problem. Well, Brian was naive, Brian didn't know. He wrote down the terms in the differential equation for the forces on the electron as it's flowing through a material, and he wasn't smart enough to know that one of the terms is usually just thrown out and set to zero. You've done those solutions, right? You look at the differential equation and you say, oh, this term is insignificant, we'll drop it.

Used to illustrate that engineers sometimes solve harder problems by ignorance — Josephson kept a term his professor would have thrown out, and discovered electron tunneling through insulating layers. Nobel Prize at 24.

Does anybody know the story of Brian Josephson, the Josephson effect? Brian Josephson was a graduate student about 1962 at, I think, Cambridge — might have been Oxford, somewhere in England. He went to see his thesis advisor in physics, wanted to know what should I do my thesis on. His professor was busy, so he said, well, go solve this problem, and it had to do with electrons. Brian Josephson goes out and writes down the differential equation. Most people who had solved this problem in the past — it was sort of a standard problem in physics — knew that you threw out this one term because it was inconsequential. Brian Josephson, being young, not knowing much about the world, kept the term in, and went through the harder problem of solving it with that term, and he discovered the Josephson effect. The Josephson effect is basically tunneling of electrons through insulating layers. At age 24 or so, he won the Nobel Prize.