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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.
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 :)
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!
Here's a link that talks about the energy field surrounding matter.
http://www.ru.nl/hfml/research/levitation/diamagnetic/
Incidentally, it's the same URL as the one in the summary.
Currents are only induced by time-changing magnetic fields, not by a constant gradient. The field strength they used for the frog was 16 T, I think. That's on the order of field strength they use for MRI. When MRIs use rapidly-changing fields, there are noticeable, but not particularly painful, neural effects. I've personally been near 5+ T static fields, and it's entirely uninteresting.
Magnetic fields don't induce a current, a changing field (or moving through a field) does... if the magnetic field is a fixed one (I assume so but could easily be wrong) the minor movements of it floating around I'd imagine is unlikely to do much in a way that would trigger currents through nerves. Electric currents tend not to discriminate much as far as nerve types go, so if it was doing something, it would be fairly visible as it would play havock with froggies muscles. For an example of what I mean, jump to 1:11 of this hehe
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
I'm not saying this is what psychics "see" when they "read someone's aura"
Yes you are - that is exactly what you are saying. It is just that you don't want to stand by what you are saying; not that I blame you for that.
Although graphene was observed in various experiments in the 70s, these guys have realized its true potential. Furthermore, the discovery came in just the right moment in (scientific) history, where we have the sophisticated tools to study this material. No use inventing the spaceship in the middle ages (if you pardon the crude analogy).
Yes. When aligned by the other magnetic field. I cannot simply take a compass and hold it next to a frog for results.
And none of that seems to point towards emotional state affecting any of it, which is the part specifically that the AC quoted.
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.
Oh -- I definitely agree that the prise is well deserved. It's just notable that a well-deserved prize is given 6 years after publication and not 36 years after publication. It's also notable that you don't always need very expensive equipment to do ground-breaking work in condensed matter physics -- it's still possible to do top-notch research with everyday tools.
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)
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.
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.
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.
Although real-world objects cannot actually span only two dimensions (if you ignore possible theories about strings), the interaction of certain particles can be constrained to 2 spatial degrees of freedom (well plus the time dimension, but ignoring that for now). Two degrees of freedom can be basically lay-man-transliterated as 2-dimensional nature since many people don't really understand 2 degrees of freedom, but they can relate to 2 dimensions (like a sheet of paper to use your analogy).
In this case, the electrons that "move" in the (2d grid-like) lattice of carbon atoms are effectively constrained to 2 spatial degrees of freedom (can represent the position as x & y of the 2d grid of atoms) and will exhibit similar properties as being constrain to a 2 dimensional object even though the lattice of carbon atoms occupies 3 spatial dimensions since the electrons (of a certain energy) only have 2 actual degrees of freedom.
FWIW Quantum physics is usually weird and non-intuitive when you chop down the number of degrees of freedom of an object, although it can be sometimes be understood by using an analogy about reducing the number of dimensions.
It is a macro-scale (more or less) object that exhibits quantum properties in two dimensions, because the atoms are bound to their neighbors in a flat sheet. When the distances are less than the wavelength of the particles you're studying, they act in some ways as if that direction doesn't exist - i.e. it is not a "degree of freedom" in the system, a typical physics definition of a dimension.
Okay, so the two dimensions referred to are the dimensions the electrons can travel, rather than the way we usually think of spatial dimensions? I think I understand that.
It was discovered in 1947, they got the Nobel prize for testing the properties of it.