The 2010 Nobel prizes: Physics

By G.C.

REGULAR readers of The Economist's science and technology coverage will know that we often question the purpose of the Nobel prize for chemistry. In 1895, when Alfred Nobel drew up his will, chemistry was one of the most exciting sciences around. With completion of the periodic table, though, and with modern understanding of chemical bonds as quantum phenomena caused by the pairing of electrons of opposite spins, chemistry as an intellectual discipline looks, to the outsider at least, to have been largely solved. Our complaint is not that chemistry-prize winners in recent years are unworthy of their laurels. Rather, it is that the intellectual side of their discoveries often seems more to do with the fields of physics or physiology. The advancement of chemistry as a subject in its own right often seems secondary.

It is ironic, then, that Sweden's Royal Academy of Science has used this year's physics prize to reward what looks like a shoo-in for the chemistry prize: graphene. Precedent, in the form of the 1996 prize for the discovery of buckminsterfullerene (a football-shaped arrangement of 60 carbon atoms), suggests that new forms of carbon crystal fall within the purview of chemistry. Graphene is such. It is a crystal a single atomic layer thick. Yet it is the physics prize that its discoverers, Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov (right and left, respectively, in the picture above), who work at the University of Manchester, in England, have been awarded. Academically, both are, indeed, physicists. And the blurring of the two disciplines can be seen in the fact that Dr Geim is head of an institute called the Manchester Centre for Mesoscience & Nanotechnology. Rebranding chemistry departments with the magic word “nanotechnology” has been all the rage for a decade (though, to be fair to Manchester, it still has a thriving school of traditional chemistry as well).

As to the discovery itself, it was made in a beautifully simple way, by peeling layers of atoms off a crystal of graphite (the cheap, black form of carbon, as opposed to the expensive transparent form known as diamond) using sticky tape. As buckminsterfullerene was in its day, graphene is now hailed, metaphorically, as the most exciting thing since sliced bread. It is electrically conductive, strong and transparent. It is thus being touted for applications that range from lightweight materials for aircraft to touch-screens for computers. And it does, in truth, look a more plausible candidate for commercialisation than buckminsterfullerene.

A worthy winner, then. But it will be interesting to see what discovery in chemistry trumps it. That will be announced on Wednesday.

PS Here is what Babbage thinks of this year's medicine prize, for in vitro fertilisation.