‘Simple solutions are often the best’ is a refrain one often hears, but it takes on greater authority when a Nobel Laureate advocates it.
Indeed, Professor Sir Andre Geim, Nobel Laureate and recently appointed Chair Professor in the Department of Physics in the HKU Faculty of Science, goes so far as to suggest that the most disruptive technological revolutions often begin with ‘the courage to be simple’.
Professor Geim’s inaugural lecture at HKU, titled ‘Random Walk to Graphene’, was an opportunity to hear him elaborate on this idea. Held at the Grand Hall of the Lee Shau Kee Lecture Centre on June 9, the lecture delved into how simple curiosity, and a willingness to embrace the unexpected, led to one of the most groundbreaking discoveries of our time. The event drew an audience of about 800 participants, spanning academic, policy, practitioner and student communities.
Welcoming the acclaimed physicist to the stage, HKU President and Vice-Chancellor Professor Xiang Zhang said, “Professor Geim’s experience demonstrates to us the power of basic research. Without basic research, there will not be knowledge translation, not to mention entrepreneurships and disruptive technologies that the world now emphasises. As educators, we really hope that having Professor Geim with us will inspire our next generations to think how to redefine our future.”
Taking the podium, Professor Geim offered a refreshingly candid look behind the scenes of high-level scientific discovery. “When someone wins a Nobel Prize, people naturally want to know how and why it happened”, he said. “In this talk, I wanted to recount my rather unpredictable path in academia – a story marked by curiosity, wrong turns, and a few strokes of good fortune.”
Graphene was once dismissed by theorists as an impossible dream – an unstable ‘wonder material’ that could not exist independently in our three-dimensional world. The consensus in theoretical physics was that two-dimensional materials, those just one atom thick, could not exist because thermal vibrations would inevitably shake their crystal lattices apart. The history of graphite dates back to 500 years ago. Yet Professor Geim looked at the mundane trace of a regular, everyday pencil and saw a frontier that had been hiding in plain sight for half a millennium.
In 2004, Professor Geim and his collaborators turned theory into reality by successfully isolating the world’s first stable, single-atom-thin sheets of carbon using ‘sticky tape’.
What seemed especially remarkable was that it was not a multi-billion-dollar particle accelerator that isolated the world’s first stable 2D material, but a piece of humble adhesive tape used to peel layers from a block of graphite, the same material found in a standard pencil. “Beauty is in simplicity, and in this case, we use a simple sticky tape,” he reflects.
Specifically, Professor Geim and his colleagues revealed a material that defied every expectation by thinning out the ‘chicken wire’ hexagonal lattice of carbon atoms. Graphene proved to be stronger than diamond, more conductive than copper, and the thinnest material ever discovered. This paradigm-shifting achievement earned them the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Despite the global fame his discovery brought, Professor Geim resists being pigeonholed as solely the ‘Father of Graphene’. He has long since moved past that initial breakthrough into what he terms ‘Graphene 3.0’. If graphene was the first tool, Geim’s work now focusses on building the entire toolbox.
“We know that graphene is not alone, that it has many sisters and brothers,” he explains. By demonstrating that atomically thin layers of various materials could be isolated and then stacked back together like atomic Lego bricks, he and his team have unlocked an entirely new realm of materials science and are creating ‘designer’ materials with properties that do not exist in nature.
At HKU, Professor Geim intends to continue this role as an ‘atomic architect’. He believes humans are on the cusp of a fundamental technological shift comparable to humanity’s transition from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age.
Professor Geim’s appointment at HKU underscores the University’s commitment to bridging fundamental, curiosity-led science with real-world applications. By bringing world-leading minds to campus, HKU continues to champion its vision of becoming a world-leading university transforming humanity’s future.
Many attending the inaugural lecture, particularly young aspiring scientists, were thrilled at the prospect of picking up some insights from the Nobel Laureate. “On the one hand, he is really optimistic about his own research. He loves what he’s doing!” noted HKU student Timothy Sung, from the Science Master Class programme majoring in chemistry. “But he’s also cautious about his own research, how he uses his methodologies in an ethical way, and I think this is a mindset we all as scientists should learn from.”
For Professor Geim, the lesson for HKU’s aspiring researchers is clear: the most profound discoveries are not always buried in complexity, they are often right in front of us. “Science still has many surprises for us, if you ask the right questions, and if you drive curiosity yourself,” he says.
