Category: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 (levitating a frog).

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.

• 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).