Physics - Where Progress and Politics Collide

Nobel Prize laureate and Professor Brian Josephson commenting on the way his department tried to block a project involving the self-assembly of agent groups to make a functional system. The clip is taken from his lecture 'Biological Aspects of Fundamental Reality', given at Freiburg University's Institute for Advanced Studies in October 2009, included in the lecture collection at http://sms.cam.ac.uk/collection/664697. The student project that he refers to - terminated prematurely by the powers that be at the physics department of Cambridge University - can be seen at http://cogprints.org/4888/.

Josephson is director of the Mind-Matter Unification Project of the Theory of Condensed Matter Group at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, a project concerned primarily with a theoretical physicist's perspective on what may be characterized as intelligent processes in nature, associated with brain function or with some other natural process.