How to win a Nobel prize using a pencil and some adhesive tape

2010 Nobel prize for physics

Quotes I found to be funny from the article:

"I didn't expect the Nobel Prize this year," Interesting note: What year did he expect to win it?

I was questioning the reason why this in particular was a very noteworthy. Perhaps the motives were:

"At the Nobel announcement, physicist Per Delsing of the Chalmers University of Technology in Göteborg, Sweden, explained that a hypothetical one-square-meter hammock made out of graphene would be strong enough to support a four-kilogram cat. "

Last amusing connection: What does it mean when a winner of an Ig Nobel prize wins the Nobel prize?

That said, I don't mean to belittle anyone, regardless of the size of their achievement, I still think it is funny.

Yes, I think the feline hammock applications were what made this work stand out from the field.

While the recipients have a pleasant combination of humility and genius, I think the offhand quote from the phone call when Geim was told of his award gave away the fact that he realised the work might win a Nobel prize at some time. The reason for his statement is probably that there is normally a very long delay between the work and the award.

As for Geim's unique place as a holder of a Nobel and an Ig Nobel, this shows that truth can not only be stranger than fiction, it can sometimes be funnier as well.

This could be my 20-20 hindsight and a bit of overconfidence, but I'm fairly certain that this is really intuitive and given a basic chemistry/physics background this could be shown.  Why NOW?  Not to downsize the discovery, but I feel like this should have been discovered a long long time ago... (in a galaxy far away)

It is slightly surprising, considering how buckeyballs and carbon nanotubes (differing from graphene only in their topology) were discovered earlier (1985 and 1991 respectively), and the structure of graphite as stacks of graphene layers has been known for much, much longer. It seems very few people thought a single layer of graphene would be stable - in graphite there is a pool of electrons between each two layers - and no-one thought of a way to make them before Novolselov and Geim.

There's a video of the whole process on the Technology Review website now. It seems to really be that simple to produce a layer 1 atom thick!