The Times today has an article on famous scientists who have nutty ideas, inspired by the James Watson kerfuffle of the last couple of weeks. Of course, they had to mention at least one kooky physicist, leading to this wonderful set of paragraphs:
Sometimes the wandering from one's home turf extends all the way to the paranormal. In 2001, when officials of the Royal Mail, the British postal service, issued a package of stamps commemorating the centenary of the Nobel Prize, they sought the counsel of Brian Josephson, who shared the prize for physics in 1973 for his superconductivity research. Physicists across Britain recoiled when an official pamphlet accompanying the stamps predicted that quantum mechanics might lead to an understanding of mental telepathy.
"Perhaps we should have checked that," a spokeswoman for the Royal Mail told Nature at the time. "But if he has won a Nobel Prize for his work, that should give him some credibility."
With science treading right to the bleeding edge of the knowable, maybe the Royal Mail can be forgiven for mistaking pseudoscience for the real thing. In an article in The Observer of London, David Deutsch, a quantum theorist at Oxford University, dismissed Dr. Josephson's speculations as "utter rubbish." Dr. Deutsch is known for proposing the existence of a multiplicity of parallel universes.
Well, yeah, but that's totally reasonable. I mean, everyone knows about that...
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Josephson has also spoken in support of homeopathy and cold fusion.
I'm sort of suprised that in the wake of the Watson comment, no-one has yet mentioned William Shockley, the physicist who shared the 1956 Nobel Prize with John Bardeen and for Walter Brattain for co-inventing the transistor, and whose views on race and eugenics actually went quite a bit further than Watson's.
Didn't Linus Pauling tell the world that the common cold could be cured by massive doses of Vitamin C?
And heart disease and AIDS ...
They got two that immediately came to mind, Kary Mullis and Fred Hoyle, but I would also add Lynn Margulis who has recently become an HIV denialist and a 911 Truther.