Jim Heath Interview: What is a buckyball?

The discovery of C60 was an interesting story. We were trying to basically emulate the surface of a carbon star... ...and we were vaporizing carbon in an environment of other gases... ...when we found that this one molecule of carbon didn’t react with these gases. Now, there’s only two forms of carbon that were known at the time: diamond and graphite, and it’s hard to have 60 atoms of either one of those, and not have it react, because they have edges and the edges of these... ...structures will react with the molecules that we had present. C60 is not that – it’s curved up, it’s a... ...European football or an American Soccer ball, it has no edges. So it's a round carbon. The interesting thing about it is that it really illustrated that if you could begin to... ...control matter at the dimensions of a few atoms, it really did new and different and unusual things. So C60 is certainly a very interesting molecule, but the whole class of fullerenes, and class of other nanomaterials that came out of that kind of a study... ...turned out to be full of very rich science.