Time to Market

I made a bad decision on Monday 12^th September.

I was flying to Edinburgh to attend a workshop on the new Impact assessments that are now part of a University’s research appraisal. As regular readers will know, I’m a fan of “impact” but there are pitfalls. To make sense of it all and to achieve valid results will need us all to change behaviour and to pay more attention to the processes by which science appears on the high street and in all our lives.

Back to my mistake; Hurricane Katia was blowing itself out over Ireland and Scotland that day. I switched the Edinburgh to London leg of my trip from plane to high speed train. What a mistake! The power lines were blown down and 125mph machines crawled along at 30mph at best, only to stop dead in Newcastle. However, it’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good and the interminable waiting did allow me to catch up on my collection of “Material World” podcasts from the BBC, including one on the latest super-material to come out of physics, Graphene. Knowledge of this material dates only from 2004 in a paper by Andre Geim, a native of Russia but a Professor of Physics at the University of Manchester, at the time of the discovery.

Graphene is a form of carbon only one layer of atoms thick but with such amazing strength that one layer is enough for many every day purposes, if only one could make sheets of the stuff. So much I knew from the many references to Geim in our learned society, where he earned the Mott prize of the IOP in 2007, before going on to receive the Nobel Prize (among many others) in 2010. What I learned from my “ill wind” was that already the “tweezers and microscope” form of investigation used by Geim, has given way already to full industrialisation in companies such as Samsung.  Indeed such is the rate of advance that your next smart phone touch screen might be covered in Graphene. Likewise the next generation of electric or hybrid car might well be using Graphene-based batteries to save weight.

I can just see the “impact” writers of Manchester chalking up an easy 4*. So they should but that is far from the whole story.

The extra I learned from Quentin Cooper and adding my own knowledge, is that many steps were able to be taken so quickly because of all the work that had been done over the past fifty years. The process used by Samsung seems to be an adaptation of one invented in the UK and taken to market by several UK companies. Other elements of the physics were uncovered only because of a long term study set in motion by my old boss, Abe Yoffe, in Cambridge. His curiosity was so aroused by the new high temperature lubricants used in WWII based on graphite and similar but more exotic layer compounds, that he eschewed the general wisdom of physics and life (keep it simple, stupid) and set off to understand these complex materials, spawning discovery after discovery all over the world but without the single “impact” of Graphene.

All contributions to an “impact” are allowed in this new assessment but you can only claim them if you know. I believe the biggest benefit of “impact” will come only if it creates behaviours in researchers and users alike, to follow actively the random walk of science to invention, including the effects of the odd “ill wind”.