You don’t win a Nobel prize by playing it safe. Indeed, physicists who win Nobel prizes often go on to gain additional notoriety for work that is very different from their prize-winning research. This video introduces the colourful careers of two such academics: Luis Walter Alvarez and Brian Josephson.

To discover the stories of other physics laureates take a look at the article ‘Life beyond the Nobel’, the cover story from the November issue of Physics World.