Levitating Frogs and Two-Dimensional Crystals
image credit: AntiMartina | www.istockphoto.com/portfolio/AntiMartina?sort=best
There are two pieces of information you’ll need to have before this story can progress.
The first: what is a Nobel Prize? You’ve probably heard of it before, but I’ll explain, just in case. The Nobel Prize is actually a set of five awards given out each year by Swedish and Norwegian groups. Additionally, there’s a sixth prize given out by a different group for Economics, but it’s still considered to be official. So there are actually six awards.
Each Nobel Prize comes with a medal, a diploma personally signed and awarded by the King of Sweden, and roughly $850,000 in prize money. Some notable winners in the Physics category, specifically:
Marie Curie (for research on radiation)
Albert Einstein (for his work in theoretical physics)
Niels Bohr (for investigating the structure of atoms)
Any scientist would be honored to be included in this list of greats. Now, let’s talk about a slightly…less prestigious award.
What is an Ig Nobel Prize? You probably haven’t heard of this one. The Ig Nobel Prize is actually a set of ten awards given out each year to celebrate useless contributions to science. The name is a play on the word ignoble (meaning not honorable in character of purpose).
The prizes are presented, coincidentally, by Nobel laureates, and you’d be lucky to have your name in the paper the day after, much less meet the King of Sweden. Notable winners in this Physics category include:
Dominique M.R. Georget, R. Parker, and Andrew C. Smith (for “rigorous analysis of soggy breakfast cereal”)
Dr. Len Fisher (for calculating the best way to dunk a cookie in milk)
Katherine K. Whitcome, Daniel E Lieberman, and Liza J. Shapiro (for analytically determining why pregnant women do not tip over)
Now that you have that information, I hope you’ll be able to more fully process this next sentence. There is a person who has won both a Nobel Prize and an Ig Nobel Prize. He is the only person to ever do it.
Meet Andre Geim.
Royal Society - royalsociety.org/people/andre-geim-11484/
In 2010, Andre here won himself a Nobel Prize in Physics. He worked with another scientist, Konstantin Novoselov, on the properties of a material called graphene. Graphene is a form of carbon laid out in a grid-like pattern. Here’s an up-close picture to help you imagine how it looks.
AlexanderAlUS - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Graphen.jpg
What makes graphene special are its interesting chemical and physical properties. First, it is the strongest material we currently know of. According to Columbia Engineering Professor James Hone: “it would take an elephant, balanced on a pencil, to break through a sheet of graphene the thickness of Saran Wrap.”
Secondly: graphene conducts both heat and electricity extremely well. Potential applications for it include touchscreen sensors, solar cells, and LEDs. High demand also means that the material costs roughly $100 per gram.
Finally, graphene is nearly transparent. This doesn’t have much to do with science, but it’s interesting that a grid of carbon could be nearly as transparent as glass while still being so strong.
After much research, then, Andre Geim won his Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering many new properties of graphene and advancing scientific knowledge on the material.
Now for the fun stuff. Ten years earlier, in 2000. Geim also won an Ig Nobel Prize. Specifically, he and fellow scientist Michael Berry were honored for their research on the magnetic levitation of frogs. Using water’s diamagnetic properties, they successfully held many objects in equilibrium, one of which happened to be a living frog.
This isn’t a video of Geim’s experiment, but watch this to get a better idea of what’s going on here:
The Ig Nobel Committee just couldn’t get enough of this, and decided to award them the prize in Physics: a useless, but well-researched and professional contribution to science.
On winning both the Nobel and Ig Nobel, Andre said this:
"Frankly, I value both my Ig Nobel Prize and Nobel Prize at the same level, and for me the Ig Nobel Prize was the manifestation that I can take jokes. A little bit of self-deprecation always helps."
The moral of this story? Don’t take yourself too seriously. Winning the Nobel Prize is nice and all, but take a moment to slow down, enjoy life, and levitate a frog or two.
Thanks, Andre.
