Yoseph Imry, an Israeli physicist and then a regular visitor to Rolf Landauer's group at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, together with Markus Büttiker, published in 1983 'Josephson behavior in small normal one-dimensional rings', a short paper predicting something that seemed to contradict classical intuition about normal (non-superconducting) metals: a sufficiently small and pure metal ring, threaded by an external magnetic flux, should sustain an electric current circulating indefinitely without dissipating energy — a 'persistent current' — even without being a superconductor. The effect originates in the Aharonov-Bohm phenomenon: the wavefunction of electrons traveling around the ring acquires a phase depending on the enclosed magnetic flux, and if the ring's size is smaller than the electron's quantum coherence length (so that its wave does not lose the memory of its phase as it travels), that phase determines a minimum-energy state in which current flows permanently. The resulting behavior is formally analogous to the Josephson effect in superconductors, but with the flux quantum h/e instead of h/2e. The prediction arises within the context of a then-nascent field — mesoscopic physics, which Imry founds and develops over the following decades — dedicated to systems of a size intermediate between the atomic and the macroscopic, where quantum coherence is no longer negligible but the system still contains an enormous number of electrons. The 1983 prediction was met with initial skepticism, but is experimentally confirmed in 1990, when Lévy and collaborators observe persistent currents in small copper metal rings. The result establishes that quantum coherence can manifest in measurable electrical transport properties even in systems with vast numbers of electrons, and becomes one of the conceptual foundations of mesoscopic physics and quantum nanoelectronics.