Carbon credits: Why levity only in Physics?

It is not often that scientists win the Nobel as well as the Ignoble prize, and therefore the feat of Prof Andre Geim is all the more commendable. He may have bagged this year’s Nobel Prize for physics along with Prof Konstantin Novoselov for the discovery of grapheme that will hugely benefit electronics and other industries that need light, yet tougher materials, but his feat of levitating a frog (that got him the Ignoble 10 years ago with Michael Berry of Bristol University) is no less worthwhile for it brought physics closer to the layman.

Funny physics can very easily be dismissed as an oxymoron, but if laughter can precede or illuminate a genuine ‘Aha!’ moment, it is all to the good. So the Ignobel’s raison d’être — to award “achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think” — is particularly crucial in a world that increasingly craves entertainment.

Sage science buffs described Geim’s Ignoble-winning prankish demonstration as an example of the phenomenon called diamagnetism (a tendency to become magnetised in a direction opposite to an applied magnetic field) and indeed it eventually it has led to a technique to perform low-gravity biological experiments that would otherwise have needed a trip into space. But it was Geim’s tongue-in-cheek revelation that he had been offered £1 million from a religious leader to levitate him in public that caught the public eye and maybe fired the imagination of a budding physicist or two.

A decade on, Geim has chosen to say that the pathbreaking discovery of the two-dimensional avatar of carbon that could become a scientist’s best friend, and not just bling, began as a “Friday afternoon experiment just for fun” . Geim underlining the importance of humour as a medium to communicate matters esoteric is a lesson that stalwarts in other fields would do well to internalise.