On an otherwise normal day in the lab, Eva Andrei didn’t expect to make a major discovery. Andrei, a physics professor at Rutgers University, was using graphite – the material in pencils – to calibrate a scanning tunneling microscope. As part of the process, she turned on a very powerful magnetic field. When she looked up to see the material’s electronic spectrum, she was astonished. “We saw huge, beautiful peaks up there, just incredible. And they didn’t make any sense,” she recalled.