Loading ...Util Andre Geim, a physics professor at the University of Manchester, discovered an unusual new material called graphene, he was best known for an experiment in which he used electromagnets to levitate a frog. Geim, born in 1958 in the Soviet Union, is a brilliant academic—as a high-school student, he won a competition by memorizing a thousand-page chemistry dictionary—but he also has a streak of unorthodox humor. He published the frog experiment in the European Journal of Physics, under the title “Of Flying Frogs and Levitrons,” and in 2000 it won the Ig Nobel Prize, an annual award for the silliest experiment. Colleagues urged Geim to turn the honor down, but he refused. He saw the frog levitation as an integral part of his style, an acceptance of lateral thinking that could lead to important discoveries. Soon afterward, he began hosting “Friday sessions” for his students: free-form, end-of-the-week experiments, sometimes fuelled by a few beers. “The Friday sessions refer to something that you’re not paid for and not supposed to do during your professional life,” Geim told me recently. “Curiosity-driven research. Something random, simple, maybe a bit weird—even ridiculous.” He added, “Without it, there are no discoveries.”
On one such evening, in the fall of 2002, Geim was thinking about carbon. He specializes in microscopically thin materials, and he wondered how very thin layers of carbon might behave under certain experimental conditions. Read More