No, not on the football field, silly.

(The original Rice seal, to the right, dates from 1911, and carries its own story, including Confederate gray "warmed into life by a tinge of lavender.")

I'm talking about the laboratory, where Rice is successfully managing the transition from Dr. Richard Smalley's "Buckyball foundation" generation with new research into the link between optics and electronics.

Professor Peter Nordlander has announced "a universal relationship between the behavior of light and electrons" which "can be exploited to create nanoscale antennae that convert light into broadband electrical signals capable of carrying approximately 1 million times more data than existing interconnects."

This is big. In many ways it's as big as the original BuckyBall discovery, and more readily exploited.

More after the break.

Any fan of quantum mechanics knows about Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, the idea that light acts like a wave or a particle depending on what you're looking for. (That's Dr. Nordlander to the left. He's Swedish, jah you betcha.)

Nordlander's team has broken through some of that uncertainty in the form of "a simple geometry where light behaves exactly as electrons do" in nanoscale structures. (I like it when geometries are simple.)

How this was discovered is pure Rice. The research was done within a multi-disciplinary group called the Laboratory for Nanophotonics (LANP) under Professor Naomi Halas. The generic name for the science they're working on is plasmonics.

In layman's terms we're studying the resonances coming off single-atom metals like silver and gold, and finding some extraordinary things.

For instance when graduate student Nyein Lwin placed a tiny nano-ball of gold within nanometers of a thin gold film, and shone light on it, this excited a plasmon in the nanosphere that could be observed as a wave.

A unified theory under which electricity and light operate is what we're coming to. And it was possible because of a multi-disciplinary approach that brought scientists from different backgrounds together.

That's the lesson here, at least for me. You want to break down walls in physics, break them down in the academy. This is easier to do at a small school ike Rice than a mega-versity like, say, the University of Texas at Austin.