Bucky Ball

Just as my name sake I am round like the globe and would like to travel all over the world. The ball is now gone and has been replaced by a Canada Medal. Sorry to see it go but the tale remains.

The 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to three chemists for their discovery of fullerenes, a family of highly symmetrical carbon-cage molecules whose prototypical member is C60, known as buckminsterfullerene, or "buckyball" for short. It is the roundest and most symmetrical large molecule known to man. Buckministerfullerine continues to astonish with one amazing property after another. Named after American architect R. Buckminister Fuller who designed a geodesic dome with the same fundamental symmetry, C60 is the third major form of pure carbon; graphite and diamond are the other two. Buckyballs were discovered in 1985 - the product of an experiment on carbon molecules in space. However, it was not until 1991 that buckyball science came into its own. Just how do buckyballs manage their chemical and physical feats? In C60, hexagons and pentagons of carbon link together in a coordinated fashion to form a hollow, geodesic dome with bonding strains equdistributed among 60 carbon atoms. Some of the electrons are delocalized over the entire molecule--a feature even more pronounced in that workhorse of organic chemistry, benzene. Benzene is flat and many of its derivatives also tend to stack in flatsheets. Spherical buckyballs literally add a new dimension to the chemistry of such aromatic compounds. Buckministerfullerine has been named the Molecule of the Year. In addition to openingup new fields on chemistry, C60 also shows interesting physical properties. It is resistant to shock and it has been suggested that as a lubricant, there is even evidence of superconductivity and it may provide the added ingredient that makes diamond films more practical.