Robert B. Laughlin, professor of physics and applied
physics and the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor in
the School of Humanities and Sciences, said he wants the
public to understand that nature is a wonderful thing
that has many surprises. He also wants people to know
that providing tax money to scientists to enable them to
make fundamental discoveries about nature is vital.

"I owe a debt of gratitude to the taxpayers in my
parents' generation," Laughlin told a roomful of
reporters and well-wishers, including his mother, wife
and son, at a news conference Oct. 13 in Tresidder Union.
"I accuse my generation of not living up to their
responsibility to support basic research for future
generations."

Laughlin shares the 1998 Nobel award with Horst L.
Störmer, a professor at Columbia University and Bell
Laboratories, and Daniel C. Tsui, a professor at
Princeton University. All three scientists worked
together at AT&T's Bell Laboratories in the early 1980s.

In a 1982 experiment, Störmer and Tsui discovered that
the electrons in a semiconductor could be forced to
behave like a liquid made of quasi-particles, with only
one-third of the electrical charge of individual
electrons. That was something no one had even dreamed was
possible.

Although it is unlikely the phenomenon,­ known as the
fractional quantum Hall effect,­ will ever have any
practical applications, Laughlin said it has important
cosmological implications.

Put all those cosmological implications in one hand, and
your morning defecation in the other, and see which one
fills up first.

When he was pressed to expand on its significance,
Laughlin turned on the professorial charm.

"You have ordinary particles, obeying ordinary quantum
mechanical laws, in ordinary conditions, that behave in
unprecedented ways," he said.