Brian Josephson · CC BY 3.0

Predicted, as a 22-year-old graduate student at Cambridge, that electric current could tunnel between two superconductors separated by a thin insulating barrier — the Josephson effect, which won him the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physics and now underlies precision voltage standards and superconducting quantum computers. He spent the rest of his career at the Cavendish Laboratory, but shifted his research toward parapsychology, water memory, and what he calls the unification of mind and matter, drawing sustained criticism from other physicists who consider the work pseudoscience.