My title comes from the last line of a recent press release issued by Britain’s Royal Society of Chemistry. The RSC noted that filming began on the first James Bond movie, Dr. No, 50 years ago. In the movie Bond kills the eponymous villain by forcing him into the cooling tank of a nuclear reactor. That scene and the movie’s anniversary prompted the press release, which speculated on the negative impact of Bond on the public’s perception of nuclear power.

Blaming Bond is a tough sell. Even taking into account the artistic license that moviemakers grant themselves to put entertainment above accuracy, Dr. No doesn’t exaggerate the perils of nuclear power, nor does it downplay nuclear power’s benefits.

Dr. No plans to disrupt Project Mercury, NASA’s first manned space program, by interfering with the navigation system of its rocket launchers. To do so from his lair on the Caribbean island of Crab Key, he needs a powerful radio transmitter. Nuclear power—movie watchers are left to presume—gives him a means of generating electricity that doesn’t require large, attention-attracting shipments of fossil fuel.

When Bond and his companion Honey Rider are captured and brought to Dr. No’s lair (shown here), they are scrupulously checked for radiation and scrubbed until a henchman wielding a Geiger counter declares them clean.

Granted, Dr. No’s nuclear reactor and its cooling tank are implausibly accessible. Nevertheless, to sabotage the reactor and prevent the transmitter from fatally diverting the Mercury mission, Bond had to disguise himself as a powerplant worker. Then, facing determined, physical opposition, he had to seize the reactor’s controls.

Nuclear weapons, but not nuclear reactors, appear as plot elements in five of the 21 Bond movies that followed Dr No. In Goldfinger (1964), the eponymous villain plans to detonate a Chinese nuclear device inside the US gold depository at Fort Knox, Kentucky. His goal is not necessarily to destroy the gold, but to contaminate it, thereby raising the value of his own gold holdings.

Thunderball (1965) hinges on the theft of an RAF bomber and its two nuclear bombs, one of which the villain, Emilio Largo, threatens to detonate in Miami unless he receives a massive ransom. In The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), the megalomaniacal shipping magnate Karl Stromberg hijacks three nuclear-armed submarines, one British, one Soviet, and one American. By targeting their missiles at New York and Moscow, he aims to provoke a nuclear war that will destroy the superpowers and leave him free to lead and establish a new underwater civilization. Octopussy (1983) also involves a stolen nuclear weapon, as does The World Is Not Enough (1999).

However fanciful the plots of the five nuclear-armed Bond movies are, the recurrence of stolen weapons as a plot element reflects a real and widespread fear. We might be able to convince ourselves—barely—that an established nuclear power won’t use its weapons unless severely provoked. Nuclear-armed terrorists are far scarier because they want to attack, kill, and destroy their perceived opponents.

Nuclear power is also scary, as the disaster last March at Fukushima Daiichi demonstrated. Saying yes or no to nuclear power entails acknowledging and examining our fears, not ignoring them.

Earlier this month the John Templeton Foundation announced the recipient of its annual $1.6 million prize: astrophysicist and cosmologist Martin Rees. The news surprised me at first. Rees’s views on science and its role in society are profound, wide-ranging, and humane—qualities that I presume the Templeton Foundation upholds—but Rees, I knew, does not believe in God.

Why did the prize, whose avowed aim is to honor “a living person who has made an exceptional contribution to affirming life’s spiritual dimension,” go to an atheist?

I can’t answer for the Templeton Foundation, but I suspect that the members of its prize committee found Rees’s quiet atheism palatable. Unlike Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, Rees is not an anti-God polemicist.

Rees is, however, actively engaged in explaining science and its value to the general public. Since 1995, he has occupied the ceremonial but prominent position of Britain’s Astronomer Royal. From 2005 to 2010, he served as the president of the Royal Society.

Most physicists and astronomers of Rees’s eminence are either atheists or agnostics. In 1998, Edward Larson and Larry Witham published the results of a survey of the religious beliefs of the members of the US National Academy of Sciences. Only 7.5% of NAS physicists and astronomers believe in God.

As an atheist myself, I admire the forthright stance on religion of Steven Weinberg, whose quoted remarks include “I’m in favor of a dialog between science and religion—just not a constructive one.” But I also admire atheists who recognize, either implicitly or explicitly, that engaging the public about science entails accepting and respecting religious beliefs.

Charles Day

Did you know that palladium is named after the asteroid Pallas? William Hyde Wollaston, who discovered the element in 1803, picked the name to honor the asteroid’s discovery a year earlier.

I acquired that piece of periodic table trivia this morning when I was struggling to understand the science behind this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Richard Heck, Ei-ichi Negishi, and Akira Suzuki shared the prize “for palladium-catalyzed cross couplings in organic synthesis,” as the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences put it.

Not knowing what “cross couplings” are and hoping for enlightenment, I turned to the 13-page Scientific Background that the academy posted on the Nobel website. The document described and explained the reactions that Heck, Negishi, and Suzuki developed. It also explained why those reactions are important. But it failed to satisfy my curiosity about what struck me as a key question: Why is palladium such an effective catalyst?

After some digging around on the internet, I found a partial answer. Palladium’s electronic configuration is

1s² 2s²p⁶ 3s²p⁶d¹⁰ 4s²p⁶d¹⁰

My apologies if you’re not familiar with notation. Anyway, the odd thing here is that it looks as though all palladium’s s, p, and d orbitals are full of electrons. Given that such repletion usually reduces, rather than enhances, an element’s chemical options, I had to dig further.

Palladium’s empty 5s orbital is lower in energy than its full 4d orbital. Presumably, when palladium reacts with other atoms, the ensuing exchange of electrons involves both the 5s and 4d orbitals. But that’s my presumption. If you know the electronic origin of palladium’s catalytic power, please tell me!

Despite my not attaining complete palladium enlightenment, I did discover another piece of trivia in the element’s Wikipedia entry:

In the run up to 2000, Russian supply of palladium to the global market was repeatedly delayed and disrupted because the export quota was not granted on time, for political reasons. The ensuing market panic drove the palladium price to an all-time high of $1100 per troy ounce in January 2001. Around this time, the Ford Motor Company, fearing auto vehicle production disruption due to a possible palladium shortage, stockpiled large amounts of the metal purchased near the price high. When prices fell in early 2001, Ford lost nearly US$1 billion.

The palladium ingot in the photo is about the size of two packs of playing cards. At today’s prices it would cost about $60 000.

Charles Day

Not quite. Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov of the University of Manchester in the UK won this year’s physics Nobel for discovering a way to make graphene, a form of carbon that consists of a honeycomb lattice one atom thick.

The graphene discovery happened in 2004. Four years earlier, when Geim was at the Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands and Novoselov was his graduate student, the pair and their collaborators used a 10-tesla superconducting electromagnet to levitate a frog by means of diamagnetism.

Unlike the graphene discovery, frog levitation hasn’t begotten a vast worldwide research effort whose fruits include thousands of research papers and scores of patents. Nevertheless, as Novoselov recounted in an interview with ScienceWatch, the two projects have something in common:

The style of Geim’s lab (which I’m keeping and supporting up to now) is that we devote ten percent of our time to so-called “Friday evening” experiments. I just do all kinds of crazy things that probably won’t pan out at all, but if they do, it would be really surprising. Geim did frog levitation as one of these experiments, and then we did gecko tape together. There are many more that were unsuccessful and never went anywhere (though I still had a good time thinking about and doing those experiments, so I love them no less than the successful ones).

This graphene business started as that kind of Friday evening experiment. We weren’t hoping for much, and when I gave it to a student, it initially failed. Then we had what you could call a stream of coincidences that basically brought us some very remarkable results quite quickly —within a week or so. Then we decided to continue on a more serious basis.

At first glance, 10% of anyone’s time doesn’t seem like a lot, but it amounts to one day per fortnight. In the four years between 2000, when they levitated the frog, and 2004, when they discovered graphene, Geim and Novoselov had only one other success, the gecko tape of 2003.

Like everyone else, physicists are increasingly busy. Time is precious. But, as Geim and Novoselov’s Friday evening experiments demonstrate, the rewards of spending even a small fraction of your time on long-shot ideas can be huge.

Charles Day

The timing of the Nobel Prize announcements is awkward for a monthly like Physics Today. In that first week of October, the magazine’s editors are finishing their stories for the November issue. If you want to read Physics Today‘s coverage of the prizes, you’ll have to wait for the December issue.

But Physics Today‘s website faces no such awkwardness. By 5:30am on Monday, 4 October, I’ll have breakfasted and I’ll be ready to respond to the medicine prize. If the prize goes to, say, functional MRI, positron emission tomography, or radiation therapy, I’ll start reporting and writing.

As it happens, I don’t think the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, to use its full, official name, will go to medical physics. My hunch is that 2010 will be the year of the drug. My pick to win is Akira Endo of Daiichi-Sankyo Co, a Japanese pharmaceutical company. In the 1970s Endo discovered the class of cholesterol-lowering drugs called statins. According to one estimate, statins have cut the death rate from heart disease by 42%.

Physics is the next prize to be announced, on Tuesday, 5 October. This year, I hope Alain Aspect wins for his 1982 experiment that demonstrated that what Einstein called spooky action at a distance is a natural feature of the universe. At that time, I was an undergraduate at Imperial College. I can’t remember if the lecturers incorporated Aspect’s experiment into their presentations. They did, however, stress that quantum mechanics had passed all its tests, despite the counterintuitive manifestations of its mathematical underpinnings.

Wednesday is chemistry’s turn. Predicting the winners is hard because the Swedish Academy of Sciences’ selectors evaluate contributions to the vast field of molecular biology, as well as to chemistry’s traditional divisions of inorganic, organic, and physical. I like the chances this year of Sumio Iijima, Andre Geim, and Kostya Novoselov. In 1991 Iijima discovered how to make one-dimensional carbon (carbon nanotubes); in 2004 Geim and Novoselov discovered how to make two-dimensional carbon (graphene). In my view, both carbon nanotubes and graphene have proven to be more interesting and more useful than carbon’s zero-dimensional variant, the buckyball.

The date for the announcement of the literature prize hasn’t been scheduled, but if it took place on Thursday, it would not have to share the media spotlight with another prize. Given that Joseph Conrad, Franz Kafka, Henrik Ibsen, Marcel Proust, Leo Tolstoy, Henry James, and James Joyce could have won, but didn’t, while Selma Lagerlˆf, Rudolf Christoph Eucken, and Elfriede Jelinek did win, the Swedish Academy’s selection criteria are mystifying. Still, I’d like to see Mario Vargas Llosa win. His 1969 magnum opus Conversation in the Cathedral covers Peruvian society and politics in the 1950s. The novel’s narrative moves back and forth across time in an initially challenging but ultimately natural structure. The novel is skillful, thought-provoking, and moving.

The peace prize is announced on Friday. My nomination: President Ma Ying-jeou of Taiwan for improving relations between Taiwan and China. The body of water that separates the two countries is only 140 km wide, yet until Ma took office, direct flights between Taipei and the mainland were not allowed. Other significant and symbolic rapprochements have taken place under Ma’s government, although China’s Taiwan-facing missile banks remain deployed. Whether you want the two Chinas to reunify or remain separate, the warming of their relations constitutes a major boost to world peace.

We have to wait until Monday, 11 October, to learn who has won the economic sciences Nobel. This year could be the turn of economic geography—that is, the study of how location influences prosperity and other manifestations of economic activity. I set myself a deadline of today—a week before the physics prize is announced—to write this entry. In that time, I haven’t identified a must-win economic geographer, but Brian Berry seems deserving.

Charles Day