Montreal Gazette - Groundwork for physics honour was laid in wartime Montreal

On Tuesday, Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov won the 2010 Nobel Prize for Physics for their work on graphene… For Michael Hilke, a physics professor at McGill University now producing and experimenting with graphene - he organized a symposium at McGill this summer where Geim was a speaker - the back story is pretty interesting, too…

It was 1942, and the Second World War was in full swing when Philip Wallace, a 27-year-old Canadian theoretical physicist was summoned home from MIT to work on fledgling experiments into nuclear fission…

At the time, Wallace considered his task - studying how graphite would be affected by constant neutron bombardment -"donkey work." Today, his findings, published after the war as the "band theory of graphite," remain the basis for scientific understanding of the structure and properties of graphite.

"He was a very inspiring teacher, and lots of fun to be around," recalls John Crawford, an emeritus professor of physics at McGill. "He was a cheerful, upbeat person who could talk about anything from nuclear weapons to the meaning of peace and war."

Crawford recalls a visit Wallace paid to the department a few years before he died [in 2006], when he would have been in his mid-80s. "He was still bubbling with ideas."…

"This material called "graphene" was long just a physicist's dream, since it was thought to be unstable, as it is only one atom thick," said Hilke, marvelling at how Geim and Novoselov used scotch tape to drop graphene, a single layer of graphite, on a piece of silicon. Hilke likes to think Wallace would be smiling if he knew how it all turned out, with a Nobel Prize.