True or false? It’s possible to make a sheet of carbon that is a single atom thick. If you’d asked that question before 2004, most scientists would have laughed you out of the room. It seemed as fanciful as the story of Flatland – a two-dimensional world vividly imagined by satirist Edwin Abbott in 1884.
2004 was the year maverick scientist Andre Geim and his student Kostya Novoselov introduced graphene to the world. Two-dimensional carbon is not only possible, it is promising to usher in a new industrial age. Two hundred times stronger than steel, a thousand times more conductive than copper, tougher than diamond, flexible, stretchable and see-through as well – its list of properties sounds even more remarkable than what is portrayed in Flatland. Many are forecasting a coming graphene age that will succeed that of steam, steel and silicon. Unbreakable, foldable touchscreens are just the beginning.
But perhaps graphene’s most extraordinary quality is that after a decade of intensive investigation it continues to startle the world. Last November two seemingly contradictory properties were added to the list. A paper in Science revealed that graphene was twice as bullet-proof as Kevlar. And in the same week a Nature paper showed the impenetrable barrier was actually porous to hydrogen ions, a trick that might be exploited to draw hydrogen, a potential fuel, right out of the air, says Geim.
Geim has come up with crazier ideas. In truth, graphene is the child of many crazy scientists – modern-day alchemists who spent decades bending and twisting carbon to create weird and wonderful new forms. It turns out this element doesn’t only supply the backbone of life’s chemistry; it forms the foundation of much of the non-living world as well.
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