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Winner of 2010 Nobel Physics prize also won the spoof Ig Nobel
( By The Way, both of them are from my Moscow Physical- Tehnical Institute MIPT)
Yoshita Singh
Boston, Oct 8 (PTI) Russian-born scientist Andre Geim, the 2010 winner of the Nobel Prize for physics, also has the distinction of winning a different kind of Nobel award – the Ig Nobel – an American parody of the prestigious prizes, for making a frog float in the air using magnets.Geim had won the Ig Nobel in 2000 from the Cambridge-based magazine Annals of Improbable Research for making a frog levitate by using a magnetic toy.
The Ig Nobels, which are Harvard”s humourous take on the more famous and serious Nobel awards, honour achievements that “first make people laugh, and then make them think”.
A physicist at the University of Manchester in England, Geim is the first scientist to win both the Nobel and the Ig Nobel prizes.
Geim said he is “actually quite proud of his Ig Nobel Prize,” according to his interview with Improbable Research.
He, however, added that he was not sure if he would display both the awards together in his office since “the Ig Nobel Prize is not really something… visually attractive”.
“Essentially, Ig Nobel Prize is given for something which forces people to smile. And, that was always the idea behind the flying frog. And… with Nobel Prize, it is quite obvious that, if you are offered, I am not aware about anyone who rejected an offer of Nobel Prize,” Improbable Research quoted him as saying on its website.
At the 2000 Ig Nobel award ceremony, Geim had told the audience that levitating a frog had led to lots of requests, including one from the leader of a small religious group in England, “who offered us a million pounds if we could levitate him in front of his congregation to improve his public relations, apparently”.
The real point behind the frog experiment was to demonstrate a phenomenon called diamagnetism.
Diamagnetic materials like water are pushed away by magnetic fields, so a really powerful magnetic field can hold up a frog, which is mostly water.
Geim had shared his Ig Nobel award with Sir Michael Berry.
He shared the 2010 Nobel Prize for physics with fellow scientist Konstantin Novoselov for experiments with a super-thin carbon matter Graphene.
Annals of Improbable Research has awarded the annual Ig Nobel prizes since 1991 “to celebrate the unusual, honour the imaginative � and spur people”s interest in science, medicine, and technology.” .
http://news.in.msn.com/international/article.aspx?cp-documentid=4446465
But to return to Geim and Novoselovs Nobel-winning achievement: What does graphene mean to the average person? Not a whole lot, at the moment. This is largely owing to the recent nature of the discovery the scientists first published their findings in 2004. (Its the shortest gap between the original research and winning a Nobel since Johannes George Bednorz and Karl Alexander Müller won the physics prize in 1987, only 18 months after they published their discovery of high-temperature super-conductivity.) Compare this with Robert Edwards, who won the Nobel prize for medicine on Monday for developing in-vitro fertilisation. He first succeeded in fertilising a human egg in a laboratory as far back as 1968, and his research bore practical results when the first test-tube baby, Louise Brown, was born 10 years later 32 years ago.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1vyB-O5i6E&feature=player_embedded
with my favourite Tom-Cat SHMURZIK as a co-author on a research paper.
http://shishkovsergei.narod.ru/
I have submited my yin-yang to Ig Nobel but my site has suddenly dissapeared when i tried to edit it((( I dont know what to do now. Some text was saved in
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