By PETER CALDER
The youngster stood to something resembling attention, plainly aware he was in the presence of greatness.
His words had escaped the septuagenarian ears at which they were aimed, but the lad was unabashed by the laughter that rippled through the audience, and he repeated the question in ringing tones.
"If
you were being honest," he said, "was there other work which was better than yours?"
The elderly man up the front barely paused before answering, and his smile was more thoughtful than indulgent. He knew, he confessed, no better answer than Sir Isaac Newton's: "We all stand on the shoulders of giants."
"In anything we do, we rely on those who have gone before us," he explained.
Only a small gold pin on the lapel of Professor Alan MacDiarmid marked him out as a Nobel laureate. Yesterday, in a lecture theatre at the University of Auckland, he was engaged in business far more important than the groundbreaking research that earned him science's highest honour.
The most eminent guest of the university's Bump into Science Day, he was telling an audience whose average age was barely in double figures about the joys of science - in a sense offering them his shoulders to stand on.
In December, Professor MacDiarmid became the third New Zealand-born Nobel prizewinner when, with an American and a Japanese colleague, he was honoured for his work developing conductive polymers, which have the potential to make silicon chips redundant.
Polymer chips have the capacity to make computers so small that they may be inserted into the human body. Such nano-technology, as it is called, could usher in what the good professor calls "a whole new era of electronics."
That may seem daunting to those of us who are still catching up with the last era. But Professor MacDiarmid's audience yesterday was undaunted.
Was he, wondered one, any good at science at school?
"Not really," he replied. "I was a B student but I worked my butt off."
The Americanism was the only audible trace in the informal lecture that betrayed the half-century Professor MacDiarmid has spent away from his country of birth.
The Masterton-born man, who is now based at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, has returned to New Zealand only briefly in that time.
And although he was happy to explain to an adult questioner yesterday what some of the applications of his research might be, he was keener still to communicate the joy of science for science's sake.
"When people ask me what use something might be," he said, "I always ask them: 'Of what use is a poem?' The creative scientist is as much an artist as a painter or a poet ... If it's useful, that's the icing on the cake."
Professor MacDiarmid will be presented with the Rutherford Medal, the highest honour conferred by the Royal Society of New Zealand, at Government House tomorrow.
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<i>Calder at large:</i> Bumping into a science giant
By PETER CALDER
The youngster stood to something resembling attention, plainly aware he was in the presence of greatness.
His words had escaped the septuagenarian ears at which they were aimed, but the lad was unabashed by the laughter that rippled through the audience, and he repeated the question in ringing tones.
"If
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