Today is the fortieth anniversary of the discovery of my favorite molecule — buckminsterfullerene. It will come as no surprise to anyone that this esteemed molecule is named for the famous architect, due to its geodesic dome-like structure.<\/p>\n
Buckminsterfullerene is a beautiful molecule in many ways, and that fact that it occurs in nature has makes me very happy. It consists of 60 carbon atoms, arranged in a semi-regular polyhedron.<\/p>\n
That 32 sided polyhedron is called a truncated icosahedron, which also happens to be my favorite polyhedron. Which is one reason that I love buckminsterfullerene.<\/p>\n
As it happens, the locations of the carbon atoms are identical to the locations of the 60 corners of the panels of a soccer ball. So if you look at a soccer ball (which consists of 20 hexagons plus 12 pentagons), you are basically looking at a buckminsterfullerene molecule.<\/p>\n
Except that the soccer ball is bigger. A soccer ball is about 22.5 centimeters in diameter, whereas a buckminsterfullerene molecule is about one nanometer in diameter.<\/p>\n
Which makes the soccer ball more than 200 million times bigger. Also, you cannot kick a molecule of buckminsterfullerene.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Today is the fortieth anniversary of the discovery of my favorite molecule — buckminsterfullerene. It will come as no surprise to anyone that this esteemed molecule is named for the famous architect, due to its geodesic dome-like structure. Buckminsterfullerene is a beautiful molecule in many ways, and that fact that it occurs in nature has … Continue reading “My favorite molecule”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27777"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27777"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27777\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27779,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27777\/revisions\/27779"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27777"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27777"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27777"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}