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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 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!
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).
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.
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'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.
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.