A Nobel Prize for levitating a frog
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.010033
Not quite. Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov of the University of Manchester in the UK won this year’s physics Nobel for discovering a way to make graphene, a form of carbon that consists of a honeycomb lattice one atom thick.
The graphene discovery happened in 2004. Four years earlier, when Geim was at the Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands and Novoselov was his graduate student, the pair and their collaborators used a 10-tesla superconducting electromagnet to levitate a frog by means of diamagnetism (see video ).
Unlike the graphene discovery, frog levitation hasn’t begotten a vast worldwide research effort whose fruits include thousands of research papers and scores of patents. Nevertheless, as Novoselov recounted in an interview with ScienceWatch , the two projects have something in common:
The style of Geim’s lab (which I’m keeping and supporting up to now) is that we devote ten percent of our time to so-called “Friday evening” experiments. I just do all kinds of crazy things that probably won’t pan out at all, but if they do, it would be really surprising. Geim did frog levitation as one of these experiments, and then we did gecko tape together. There are many more that were unsuccessful and never went anywhere (though I still had a good time thinking about and doing those experiments, so I love them no less than the successful ones).
This graphene business started as that kind of Friday evening experiment. We weren’t hoping for much, and when I gave it to a student, it initially failed. Then we had what you could call a stream of coincidences that basically brought us some very remarkable results quite quickly —within a week or so. Then we decided to continue on a more serious basis.
At first glance, 10% of anyone’s time doesn’t seem like a lot, but it amounts to one day per fortnight. In the four years between 2000, when they levitated the frog, and 2004, when they discovered graphene, Geim and Novoselov had only one other success, the gecko tape of 2003.
Like everyone else, physicists are increasingly busy. Time is precious. But, as Geim and Novoselov’s Friday evening experiments demonstrate, the rewards of spending even a small fraction of your time on long-shot ideas can be huge.
