Huldiging Nobelprijswinnaars Andre Geim en Konstantin Novoselov

Toespraak | 24-11-2010

·        Nobel Prize winners form a small, very elite club. People you do not encounter every day. Yet today I have the distinct privilege of meeting two such winners: André Geim and Konstantin Novoselov. It is a great honour for all of us to have you in our midst here today.

·        André Geim is the 19th Dutch citizen to win a Nobel Prize. Although you have Russian roots, a significant part of your pioneering work was done right here in the Netherlands. As a Distinguished Professor in Nijmegen, you are still closely involved with the field of science in our country.

·        I would like to congratulate you and your colleague, Konstantin Novoselov, on winning the highest award that can be given in the field of science. I would also like the Foundation for Fundamental Research on Matter and Radboud University Nijmegen to share in today’s tributes.

·        My Dear Andre Geim, I would also like to congratulate you on being the only person in the world to win not only the Nobel Prize, but also the Ig Nobel Prize for the now famous  levitating frog. The short film clip on this ‘levitating frog’ is a big hit on Youtube. Its viewer hits are unheard of for a scientific experiment. That was back in 2000 and you won this prize together with Michael Berry.

·        At the time, you received angry reactions from the scientific world for being awarded that Ig Nobel Prize. There was a considerable volume of, shall we say, croaking, if I may recall the image of your frog. In certain circles, the award was viewed as the typical joke of immature students. But you simply shrugged your shoulders and commented that science sometimes took itself too seriously.  You even went so far as to make your hamster a co-author of one of your scientific articles due to his – or her? – contribution to your experiments.

·        In scientific terms, you straddle different traditions. You were educated in Russia, you conducted considerable scientific work in the Netherlands, and you now work in Manchester, together with Konstantin Novoselov. You are living proof that science is an international field. In your career in science, you have moved around just as quickly as the electrons in graphene.

·        As a Dutch citizen, you follow the tradition of Dutch Nobel Prize winners that began in 1901. It is noteworthy that we have had many winners in physics. This just goes to show where a small country can be great: not only in commerce, not only in football, but also in science.

·        With a citation impact score of 1.33, we rank among the top 5 in the world. That is 30% higher than the international average, and higher than the UK, Germany, Sweden, Finland and France. Our country also has a high degree of scientific productivity. So there is a lot to be proud of.

·        The revolutionary scientific breakthroughs that have led to Nobel Prizes would, of course, not have been possible without academic freedom. Scientists must be given the freedom to come up with radical and unorthodox ideas. And we must accept the fact that research sometimes fails. Scientists must also be given the freedom to follow research to a dead end.

·        Your own development proves how important this freedom is. When you earned your doctorate in what you yourself said was an ‘obscure’ branch of solid-state physics, you said: “never again”. And then you switched fields. And you decided to reserve a part of the research budget for ‘side research’. And that soon led to the ‘side-kicks’ that became the main focus: gecko-tape and graphene.

·        Which brings me to the subject for which both of you were awarded the Nobel Prize: graphene. Here too you defied the commonly held notions in physics. Because there were hard objections in physics to graphene: “you cannot make a two-dimensional substance”, that was simply a fact for everyone.

·        But you proved that it could be done by simply peeling off a single layer of a three-dimensional crystal. When you say it that way, it sounds so simple… The result is a material that has extraordinary characteristics. It is now the thinnest, most rigid, strongest and most elastic crystal known. A remarkable achievement if you consider that the material originally was simply carbon. The stuff pencils are made of, whose graphite points easily break when you drop them.

·        The material conducts a million times better than copper, and it can obstruct gases with only a single layer of atoms. And this is where the Dutch spirit of enterprise comes in: such a unique material calls for magnificent applications. And they have been found, in part because you successfully produced the material in larger amounts. But when I say ‘larger amounts’, we must think about a single square centimetre, I am told.

·        Concrete applications could include things such as LCD screens, conductive ink and touch screens for telephones. And because you excel not only in fundamental research, but also in application-oriented research, applications like these can also become reality.

·        Mr Novoselov, may I also congratulate you. You are the youngest Nobel Prize winner in physics since Brian Josephson in 1973, which gives your award an extra bright sheen.

·        It seems as though you have found a ‘soul mate’ in your colleague, André Geim. Whereas he says that scientists should not take themselves too seriously, you say that science should be ‘fun’. I even understand that your ideas on graphene came out of a so-called ‘Friday evening experiment’.

·        Let me say it again: our country is extremely proud of you. And we would like to express this pride in a very special manner. May I therefore ask both of you to come up to the podium?

·        It is with enormous pleasure that I have the honour of informing you that Her Majesty, the Queen is pleased to bestow a Royal Honour on both of you and to induct you both as a Commander in the Order of the Netherlands Lion. Allow me now to grace your persons with the Order’s insignia.