Buckyball: The Magic Molecule
BUCKYBALL: THE MAGIC MOLECULE
From Popular Science, August 1991
Popular Science, August 1991
This past weekend, British chemist Sir Harry Kroto passed away at the age of 76. He is the co-discoverer of buckyballs, a form of carbon that is made up of 60 atoms and shaped like "a hollow soccer ball." The discovery won Kroto and his team the Noble Prize in chemistry. This cover story, written by Edward Edelson and originally published in the August 1991 issue of Popular Science, explores how buckyballs were accidentally discovered and the future of possibilities to those scientists in 1991.
A revolution in chemistry is taking place in a small room in a converted mining building in Tucson, Ariz., where a woman wearing a soiled smock and a face mask is painstakingly scraping soot off a metal container.
Although it's not too exciting to look at, this is the world's first production facility for a newly discovered, exotic material, dubbed "buckyball," that has such extraordinary potential that chemists and physicists around the country are lining up to pay $1,200 a gram for the stuff, roughly one hundred times the price of gold.
"This is the biggest news in chemistry I could have imagined," exclaims Robert Whetten of the University of California at Los Angeles.
The reason? Together with the plain-Jane carbon particles that make up most of the soot is a carbon molecule with a unique structure, totally different from that of the two previously known forms of carbon.
The discovery of a new kind of carbon came as a stunning surprise to most scientists. Carbon is the most intensely studied of all the elements because it is the basis for most ofthe molecules of life—the organic molecules. Look in any chemistry textbook and youll read that for centuries research showed carbon came in just two basic structures: hard, sparkling diamond, whose carbon atoms are arranged in little pyramids; and dull, soft, slippery graphite, which consists of sheets of carbon-atom hexagons.
Those chemistry textbooks are now obsolete. There's a new basic form of carbon with an almost unbelievable structure: Its 60 carbon atoms form something that looks like a hollow soccer ball. It is the only molecule of a single element to form a spherical cage.
The molecule's official name is buckminsterfullerene, because it is shaped like the geodesic dome invented by that American original, Buckminster Fuller. Informally, chemists call it buckyball, or C-60. Its atoms are arrayed in a collection of regular pentagons and hexagons—12 pentagons and 20 hexagons to be precise. It's one of a newly discovered family of similar molecules that has a related geometry, but different multiples of carbon atoms. Scientists have called this whole family the fullerenes; scores of chemists and physicists are working full blast to unravel their properties.
Read More at:
https://www.popsci.com/buckyball-magic-molecule
From Popular Science, August 1991
Popular Science, August 1991
This past weekend, British chemist Sir Harry Kroto passed away at the age of 76. He is the co-discoverer of buckyballs, a form of carbon that is made up of 60 atoms and shaped like "a hollow soccer ball." The discovery won Kroto and his team the Noble Prize in chemistry. This cover story, written by Edward Edelson and originally published in the August 1991 issue of Popular Science, explores how buckyballs were accidentally discovered and the future of possibilities to those scientists in 1991.
A revolution in chemistry is taking place in a small room in a converted mining building in Tucson, Ariz., where a woman wearing a soiled smock and a face mask is painstakingly scraping soot off a metal container.
Although it's not too exciting to look at, this is the world's first production facility for a newly discovered, exotic material, dubbed "buckyball," that has such extraordinary potential that chemists and physicists around the country are lining up to pay $1,200 a gram for the stuff, roughly one hundred times the price of gold.
The reason? Together with the plain-Jane carbon particles that make up most of the soot is a carbon molecule with a unique structure, totally different from that of the two previously known forms of carbon.
The discovery of a new kind of carbon came as a stunning surprise to most scientists. Carbon is the most intensely studied of all the elements because it is the basis for most ofthe molecules of life—the organic molecules. Look in any chemistry textbook and youll read that for centuries research showed carbon came in just two basic structures: hard, sparkling diamond, whose carbon atoms are arranged in little pyramids; and dull, soft, slippery graphite, which consists of sheets of carbon-atom hexagons.
Those chemistry textbooks are now obsolete. There's a new basic form of carbon with an almost unbelievable structure: Its 60 carbon atoms form something that looks like a hollow soccer ball. It is the only molecule of a single element to form a spherical cage.
The molecule's official name is buckminsterfullerene, because it is shaped like the geodesic dome invented by that American original, Buckminster Fuller. Informally, chemists call it buckyball, or C-60. Its atoms are arrayed in a collection of regular pentagons and hexagons—12 pentagons and 20 hexagons to be precise. It's one of a newly discovered family of similar molecules that has a related geometry, but different multiples of carbon atoms. Scientists have called this whole family the fullerenes; scores of chemists and physicists are working full blast to unravel their properties.
Read More at:
https://www.popsci.com/buckyball-magic-molecule
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