Andre Geim Quotes

The concept of graphene came along in 1947, but nobody paid much attention to it. I was fascinated because it had a linear E versus K while everything else that people were working on at that time had a quadratic dispersion relationship. I wondered why this was and what was so special about it. That was my fascination.

In 1974/75, I spent a sabbatical year with Professor Vince Jaccarino and Dr. Alan King at the University of California in Santa Barbara to get a taste of nuclear magnetic resonance. We solved a specific problem on the bicritical point of MnF2, their home-base material. We traded experience, NMR, and critical phenomena.

Graphene is a single plane of graphite that has to be pulled out of bulk graphite to show its amazing properties.

A factory that can turn carbon nanotubes into a sheet a yard wide and long enough to stretch one-fourth of the way to the moon is not something you'll find at your local industrial park. That's the show-stopper for the space elevator. The ribbon.

Graphene is dead; long live graphene.

I was very much taken with carbon fibers because they seemed like the perfect medium to explore transport studies in carbon-based systems.

No one undertakes research in physics with the intention of winning a prize. It is the joy of discovering something no one knew before.

I vowed to myself that when I grew up and became a theoretical physicist, in addition to doing research, I would write books that I would have liked to have read as a child. So whenever I write, I imagine myself, as a youth, reading my books, being thrilled by the incredible advances being made in physics and science.

I would say in one sentence my goal is to at least be part of the journey to find the unified theory that Einstein himself was really the first to look for.

In the late '30's when I was in college, physics - and in particular, nuclear physics - was the most exciting field in the world.

With the discovery of the Higgs boson, one of the questions has been ticked off the list, but there are many others. We hope that we can find answers or hints for answers to at least some of them. But of course, this is in the hands of nature.

It would be better for the true physics if there were no mathematicians on earth.

On April 8, 1982, I was alone in the electron microscope room when I discovered the Icosahedral Phase that opened the field of quasi-periodic crystals.

A carbon nanotube is just a graphene sheet that's rolled up seamlessly, and this happens in nature; carbon nanotubes are found in mineral deposits around the planet.

I think it's science and physics are just starting to learn from all these experiments. These experiments have been carried out hundreds and hundreds of times in all sorts of ways that no physicist really questions the end point. I think that these experiments are very clearly telling us that consciousness is limitless and the ultimate reality.

It was at Bell Labs that I first made direct contact with real semiconductor experts and thus began to fully understand what amazing materials they were and what they could do.

The science of semiconducting and metallic polymers is inherently interdisciplinary; it falls at the intersection of chemistry and physics.

Once we understand how molecules are formed, we can manipulate them. If you can manipulate molecules, you can manipulate genes and matter, you can synthesize new material - the implications are just unbelievable.

Ernest Rutherford's 1908 Nobel Prize in Chemistry wasn't given for the nuclear power station - he wouldn't have survived that long - it was given for showing how interesting atomic physics could be.

Bose and Einstein had triggered low-temperature experiments that have led to the discovery of new matter. I owe my work and my Nobel to them.

My own work in spin glass and its consequences has formed some of the intellectual basis for these interests.

I would say in one sentence my goal is to at least be part of the journey to find the unified theory that Einstein himself was really the first to look for. He didn't find it, but we think we're hot on the trail.

The events leading to the discovery of tunnelling supercurrents took place while I was working as a research student at the Royal Society Mond Laboratory, Cambridge, under the supervision of Professor Brian Pippard.

I had the idea that it would be wonderful to be a physicist or a mathematician maybe 500 years ago around the time of Newton when there were really fundamental things just lying around to be discovered.

I was interested in nuclei originally with my deuteron photo work because that was one of the fundamental forces, and the measurement was basic to new science.