Brexit Is Quietly Strangling Science

For many years Andre Geim was best known for designing an experiment that looked more like a parlor trick than a serious piece of scientific research. One Friday evening, in a moment of boredom at his Dutch lab, the Soviet-born physicist casually poured a glass of water onto a super-electromagnet. When the water struck the magnet it didn’t spill to the floor, as Geim had expected, but instead began to float as a cluster of pristine liquid balls. Geim, with characteristic wit and flourish, published his findings in the April 1997 issue of Physics World alongside a picture he took of a live frog sitting pensively on the levitating droplets.

Shortly after Geim arrived at Manchester University in 2001, he began hosting Friday night sessions for students to conduct what he calls “curiosity-driven research”—a similar way to demonstrate the value of impromptu experimentation. In 2002, following one of these gatherings, Geim’s attention was drawn to a ball of used Scotch tape in a nearby wastepaper bin. On it was a grey residue, from where it had been stuck to a piece of graphite. Geim, who specializes in minutely thin materials, placed the tape under an atomic microscope and found the layers of residual carbon were thinner than any he’d seen before. Immediately he suspected he had found graphene, a one atom-thin material (a strand of human hair is between 100,000 and 300,000 atoms thick) that had, until this moment, been only a white whale of speculation among theoretical physicists.