.. figure:: featured.jpg
:width: 100%
:alt: Stars Over Mountains - Photo by Casey Horner on Unsplash
:align: left
Photo by Casey Horner on Unsplash
.. _the-friday-night-experiments:
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The Friday Night Experiments
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.. index:: Friday Night Experiments
:bdg-ref-primary:`the-friday-night-experiments`
Friday Night Experiments are those experiments and off hand projects
which actually involve doing something but that are tangential to my
‘real’ work; or experiments I just expect to fail badly.
The term comes from Andre Geim and Kostya Novoselov who frequently held
what they termed ‘Friday night experiments’ - sessions where they would
try out experimental science that wasn’t necessarily linked to their day
jobs.
Indeed their Nobel winning work on graphene started out as a Friday
night experiment – the phrase used in the Geim lab to describe
investigations that were considered slightly crazy. The reference is to
the time of week Geim first tried the experiment that led to his 2000
`Ig Nobel Prize `__
(`levetating a
frog `__).
.. important::
2000 - PHYSICS: Andre Geim of the University of Nijmegen (the Netherlands) and Sir Michael Berry of Bristol University (UK), for using magnets to levitate a frog.
[REFERENCE: “Of Flying Frogs and Levitrons” by M.V. Berry and A.K. Geim, European Journal of Physics, v. 18, 1997, p. 307-13.]
[REFERENCE: VIDEO] NOTE: Ten years later, in 2010, Andre Geim won a Nobel Prize in physics (for research on another subject).
One Friday, the two scientists removed some flakes from a lump of bulk
graphite with sticky tape. They noticed some flakes were thinner than
others. By separating the graphite fragments repeatedly, they managed to
create flakes that were just one atom thick. Their experiment had led to
graphene being isolated for the very first time.
This playful approach is fundamental to how both Andre and Kostya work.
It is seen as both a useful way of maintaining interest as well as a
means of generating new ideas.
.. toctree::
:maxdepth: 1
:caption: In this Section...
:titlesonly:
beelife/index
audits/index
.. note:: Version e973224ab3bcb50cae5e0e2d5f0468f700bf09a0 created on 22/12/2022 @ 15:34. This page is licensed under a `Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License `__.