In his 1996 Nobel lecture on the discovery of fullerenes, Richard Smalley made a prescient remark: “We are still in the process of discovering all the other consequences of the genius that is wired into carbon atoms.” This year the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has recognized a new chapter in carbon research by awarding the Nobel Prize in Physics to a pair of Russian-born scientists—Andre Geim, director of the Centre for Mesoscience and Nanotechnology at the University of Manchester in the UK, and his former PhD student and postdoc Konstantin Novoselov, now a professor also at the University of Manchester—“for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene.” The two colleagues will split the prize of about $1.4 million.
The pair’s first experiments were published six years ago. Four years earlier, while Geim was at the Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands and Novoselov was a graduate student there, Geim...
