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Nobel Prize in Physics For Discovery of Graphene
bugsbunnyak writes "The 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded for the discovery of graphene to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov. Graphene is a novel one-atom-thick lattice state of carbon which has demonstrated unique quantum mechanical properties. These properties derive in part from the 2-dimensional nature of the material: quantum interactions are constrained to the effectively planar dimension of the lattice. Graphene holds promise for physical applications including touch screens, light cells, and potentially solar panels. Geim becomes the first scientist to achieve a Nobel prize despite earlier winning the highly-coveted Ig Nobel in 2000 for his studies of diamagnetic levitation — also known as The Flying Frog." Slashdot originally mentioned the frog almost exactly 10 years ago.
I actually remember the frog story... I wonder how many digits my UID would be had I registered back then.
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Not to take anything away from the graphene story, but the floating frog story is really interesting.
It posits that there is a magnetic field surrounding all matter. The positive and negative particles produce a tiny force that can be measured with even crude instruments like a compass. Strangely, these fields become stronger and weaker depending on many variables, including emotional state, vitality, and stress levels.
I'm not saying this is what psychics "see" when they "read someone's aura", but there seems to be more to their woo-woo than many skeptics are willing to accept. If there is a measurable energy field around all things, then there might be something to things like Reiki and other eastern traditional medicines.
At the University of Maryland they have levitated graphene flakes. Although this was not diamagnetic levitation. The story was discussed in an earlier /. post.
HOPG (Highly Ordered Pyrolytic Graphite), a form of highly crystalline graphite, from which graphene is obtained in the lab, can also be diamagnetically levitated :)
As far as Nobel prizes in Physics go, this one is for a very recent result. The experimental apparatus itself was very simple (some graphite and scotch tape!), but the result is very interesting.
I don't get it. How could they get the Nobel prize for this? Graphene is made out of carbon, and last I checked, carbon isn't one of the Nobel elements.
Be relentless!
I have mod points but don't know whether to mod you insightful, funny or troll for making me groan out loud and make my coworkers check on me.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Actually, sorry, the ultimate test for that is that Randi still has a 1 million dollars prize for whoever can demonstrate any paranormal abilities in a controlled setting. Aura reading does explicitly qualify, and has been tested ad nauseam before, only to turn out bunk every time.
So if you think a psychic can read such things at all, just send them here: Challenge Application
Hey, you could be doing them a favour. Humanity too. Think of how many people they could treat or how many other psychics they could train with that money.
But until one actually does win the prize, I hope you'll understand why I'm less than impressed if yet another gullible mark handwaves some vague "we don't know" as a reason to believe in bullshit woowoo. Not knowing something is false is not a reason to believe there's something to it. What you illustrate there is just the mainstream form of the . The question isn't what skeptics are willing to accept, but what can be supported by evidence. That's all.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I was talking with an individual who talked about this when talking about some type of "energy measurement device" that was used on him once during some type of therapy. He ended up identifying himself as a Scientologist. Now beyond knowing about Tom Cruise being a member, and about the science fiction writer who started the "religion", I know very little about Scientology.
By chance are you a Scientologist?
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
The human nervous system is electrochemical. All of its activities include the movement of charged particles, and hence detectable changes in the magnetic field such particles produce.
"Changes in emotional state" are activities of the nervous system. Hence, we would expect that they would impact the field generated by that nervous system. It's that simple.
Humans aren't equipped with a means to directly sense these electromagnetic changes. Psychics are not seeing them. Psychics just read body language, tone of voice, and use simple linguistic techniques to feed that information back to you and make you feel like they know something you don't. Any skilled psychologist can perform just as well as a psychic.
Hmmm, wasn't Montgolfier the first?
If those awarding the Ig Nobels are themselves Nobel Prize Winners, if he wins another can he present the prize to himself? (Answers c/o Schrodinger's cat, P.O. Box 666.)
Seriously, graphene was a fascinating discovery - doubly so given the simplicity of its discovery. Anyone could have used pencil lead and sellotape, the way these guys did, to create graphene - and may well have done. The only real difference is these guys wondered what they had and took a look. (There have been many discoveries over time like that. I'm beginning to realize just how much genius depends on asking questions others could have - perhaps should have - asked but didn't.)
Problems with the best-known alternative to silicon (gallium arsenide) include that it's expensive, extremely toxic to make, result in much smaller wafers and have a much lower yield if you even get that far. It's also not very good at CMOS-style logic. However, silicon is already pushing the limits of what it can do so if you want faster computers, you have to have a good alternative lined up. Graphene may be a good option here, once it matures. Carbon is plentiful, there's no reason to believe the production of graphene will turn out to be hazardous, graphene transistors can be made to be faster than silicon ones and the IBM successfully used silicon fab tech to made it. What is not known is how to make anything complex or how it'll perform under such conditions.
One area that GaAs is major is the aerospace industry. GaAs is much more radiation-resistant than silicon, which means you don't have to do mind-boggling contortions in the circuitry or add in lead shielding (both techniques are used, although the shielding seems to only be used by a handful of companies, the rest opt for circuits from hell). I can find no information on how radiation-resistant graphene would be, but at a glance I would imagine it to be at least as good as silicon, maybe slightly better. It may displace silicon in the aerospace markets, then, but probably not GaAs unless it's a lot better than I'm thinking.
Since graphene has other properties that may be valuable (unusual strength for something one atom thick, interesting optical properties, weird magnetic properties, etc), it would not surprise me if it ends up being used in other industries for things that have no bearing on its semiconductor nature. It might be fun to speculate who can really exploit graphene in any practical way first.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Poehali. ./ grobit moyu kirilliku, i eto v takoy den!
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
What happened to the good old days when the Nobel prize were awarded to geriatric fogies who did their work half a century ago?
Except, again, for the fact that none of them seem able to actually do what they claim to do.
Finding (pseudo) sciencey-sounding explanation before even knowing if there's a phenomenon to explain in the first place, has a name. It's called Tooth Fairy Science.
Sure, one can handwave a whole theory about what might be the physics behind the tooth fairy, and the market value of different kinds of teeth, and whatever. But if you don't actually have a phenomenon to explain there, it's just a pointless waste of time.
Ditto here. Trying to explain how aura reading might work before anyone proved they can actually read an aura (again: anyone can win a million dollars if they just prove they can) is exactly tooth fairy science.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Bullshit. If you bothered reading the rules, it just needs to be unexplained at the time you enter the contest. It's one of the things he explicitly addresses.
But, yes, that one has to be the #1 excuse of gullible marks who still want to believe in fairy tales. It's bullshit, but, hey, I guess when one wants to believe in fairy tales against all evidence, the choices for good rationalizations must be fairly limited.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
What's it gonna be?
Sig?
ROFLMAO. That's a backscatter X-Ray photo from an airport scanner, lemming. It has nothing to do with body energy fields or anything.
Jesus Haploid Christ, I've seen hoaxes and mis-interpretations in support of woowoo, but this is one of the few things that truly take the cake. There is nothing mysterious or magnetic or aura about it. There is no aura there. It's some photons bouncing off matter. You know, elementary physics stuff. There is _no_ aura emitted there at all. It's only the bouncing photons. You turn those off, it ceases.
And the only way a psychic could see _that_ kind of "aura" is if their eyes could produce such radiation. Which is trivial to measure with a geiger counter, if they want to make such a claim.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Geim is now probably the only Nobel prize winner to have co-authored a paper with a hamster.
The rules clarify exactly the opposite of your claim. And since testing is pretty public it's also verifiable that nobody failed in the way you claim.
Repeating the same lie one more time won't make it true, you know. We're not in The Hunting Of The Snark.
So are you a liar or just have genuine comprehension problems?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
These properties derive in part from the 2-dimensional nature of the material
Now, granted, I'm not a physicist, but since when have real-world objects been able to be two-dimensional? Even if you draw a line on a piece of paper, the graphite or ink that compose the line will have three dimensions. Is there any such thing in the physical universe as a two-dimensional object?
Well, hey, I never said I believed in "lie detector" woowoo either.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Geim's original paper on the subject ( http://arxiv.org/ftp/cond-mat/papers/0410/0410550.pdf ) was a real fascination because it was so simple and yet enabled many people to do real research. The original paper uses scotch tape to peel off monolayers of different bulk materials, but only graphene showed anything interesting (in particular, the so-called "field-effect" which is the principle behind CMOS transistors. To be sure, the quality of graphene produced from this method is complete crap compared to more advanced methods used by groups today (chemical vapor deposition of various organic molecules, carbon gettering from metals, epitaxial growth by silicon sublimation from SiC), but an impressive amount of exotic physical phenomena (e.g., quantum hall effect) was seen in what was essentially crap.
No doubt, Geim has probably indirectly gotten thousands of researchers perhaps a billion dollars in funding in less than a decade, but I don't think Geim's contribution was as much physics as it was successfully marketing his research (outsiders like to think of science as being purely meritocratic, but it scientists are still people, and people are susceptible to hype). In my opinion, there are many better physics researchers in the field than Geim himself, but none of them are nearly as good at communication and generating buzz.
In any case, congratulations to him for winning it so soon.
In the words of Carl Sagan: "They laughed at Galileo. They laughed at Newton. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."
To put it simply "but they once laughed at X too" or "but they once believed Z to be false too" doesn't really prove anything and is not logical evidence. It's simply a piece of bogus sophistry that proves nothing.
You know what made us accept the physics behind that scanner photo? Actual evidence. You know what psychic woowoo _doesn't_ have? Actual evidence.
That's all it really needs. Wake me up when it has any. It's that simple.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
ugh, it's a sad day when rationality is modded as flamebait.
But it's hardly unreasonable that with all the radiation that humans emit that some of it would be in terms of IR close enough to the visible spectrum that some people would be able to see it.
I guess that's not unreasonable, except for the part where any such emission would also be detected by recordable sensors. Oh look. They haven't. So what you're claiming is that your eyeball can sense thing which no other device can. To which, I call bullshit.
You only think Randi is an asshole because he shows how full of shit you are.
I would like to know if 2D graphene sheets are flammable, and if they will start standard charcoal briquettes without having to also use lighter fluid.
It was discovered in 1947, they got the Nobel prize for testing the properties of it.
using exclusively Nobel (tm) branded dynamite products?
I'm sure that's a secret condition of the Nobel prizes somewhere.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
I have seen some other articles about the pseudo-magnetic properties when stretched. So does it attract metal when stretched. Could it be used in electric motors and generators that would be more efficient? Is there a better explanation about these properties?