Andre Geim might have won the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics (along with Konstantin Novoselov) “for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material grapheme,” a cheap, near-invulnerable substance with applicability in thousands of real-life functions, but he has become something of a youth and geek god because of a decade-old recognition of scientific lunacy beyond the call of duty: he had won the 2000 Ig Nobel Prize—which spoofs the po-faced Nobel by recognising loopy research—for levitating a frog with a magnet. Beyond the absurdity was serious research, which appeared in the European Journal of Physics in 1997 under the vaguely Fantasy/Science Fiction title ‘Of Flying Frogs and Levitrons.’ As is expected, Geim doesn’t take himself or his vocation seriously.
