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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.