 Welcome to the first talk of the afternoon session. It's my pleasure to present to you Dr. Brian O'Brien, Associate Professor of Chemistry and Chair of the Chemistry Department, who will introduce our speaker Harold Croto. Our next speaker, Professor Harold Croto, is Royal Society Research Professor in the School of Chemistry and Molecular Sciences at the University of Sussex in England. Professor Croto received his PhD in 1964 at the University of Sheffield during the spectroscopy of free radicals with Professor R. N. Dixon as his PhD research advisor. He then did post-doctoral work both at the National Research Council in Ottawa, Canada and at Bell Laboratories. In 1967 he began as a professor at the University of Sussex, attaining the rank of full professor in 1985 and Royal Society Professor in 1991. Dr. Croto is also the recipient of numerous honors and awards among them membership and academia, the Hewlett-Packard Europhysics Prize, the Longstaff Medal of the Royal Society of Chemistry, the International Prize for Human Materials from the American Physical Society, and the Ital Gas Prize for Innovation in Chemistry. He's also a frequent commentator in areas of popular science and also an author of many articles in popular science publications. Professor Croto's chemical training and experiences are uniquely varied, yet complementary, often in ways which have led to important and singularly interesting chemical discoveries. His early studies in the spectroscopy of small molecules produced many fundamental discoveries, among them the preparation and characterization of the first compound containing a phosphorus-carbon double bond. This is a structural type which had been thought by many theoreticians of the time to be incapable of existence. As Professor Gray pointed out during that time you could ask a theoretician and find out all the wrong answers to your questions. This discovery and Dr. Croto's further efforts in the general area of carbon phosphorus multiple bond chemistry form a major part of the basis of what has grown into a highly active and completely new area of modern inorganic chemical research. Harry's interest in small molecule spectroscopy led him not only into the laboratory but also into outer space. In the depths of space exist, we now know, many bizarre molecules. We know of many of them through Harry's research in the area of radio astronomy, a subset of the field known as Cosmochemistry. Many of these discoveries were of molecules containing high percentages of carbon. The high carbon deep space molecules in which Harry had developed an interest led him back to earth where he began studies of composition of carbon vapor. These recent studies led to what is certainly one of the most startling discoveries of the 20th century in any field of science, perhaps one of the most startling scientific discoveries of all time. This discovery has given rise to an entire field of chemistry and material science which would have been viewed by many as an impossibility just a few years ago. Dr. Croto will tell you the story of that discovery and of its consequences. It is my privilege and honor to present to you Professor Harold Croto. That was wonderful, thanks a lot. Well it's an honor to come here and it's not an honor to follow the last speaker I tell you. They say that was a wonderful talk and the Marines have been I've just come from Boston and I'm going to say the British are coming. My also say that I too have been and my wife are here and have been treated like kings. Perhaps not quite like I suppose Gustav King Gustavus of Dolphus but wonderfully. Two students, Ryan and Matt and of course Brian who I don't know what I'm going to do when I have to carry my own bags to the airport. It's going to be very difficult. It's indeed an honor to come here and it's an honor to speak in the presence of such wonderful speakers. Harry Gray told you today I think some of the most important things I've heard a speaker tell you of that we chemists are not just polluting the environment, we're really trying hard to solve the problems. They have really hard problems and he's right that somewhere out there in this audience there are going to be people stimulated by him to solve the problems and save us because we've got some big ones coming. Chemists are not all bad. Not as bad as physicists but we're fairly reasonable. Let me just start with the first slide with a bit of luck it will come up and I'll switch this fellow off as I'm going to talk about that. I hope you can see that. Can you see this guy in the back? Yes, well if you didn't say anything I know you saw him anyway. It's actually Brunofsky playing with his grandchild doing an experiment. I want you to put your hand up anyone who played with a toy like this when you were a child. It's a very large percentage. Now let me tell you if you're a parent how many of you gave it to your children? See what those subversive parents are up to because I know what they were trying to do. They gave it to you if you're a child and if you put the sort of cube through the square hole and the triangle through the triangle hole that made them really happy and they went off and you did that. But actually when their back was turned I know that some of you it doesn't matter which one you'd look for the round hole and you'd try to force it through the round hole and when they come in and discover this they get worried because they realize they better tell you to see a psychiatrist. And the psychiatrist says look don't worry he said anyone who tries to force it through the round hole all the time is just perfect to be a theoretical physicist. Anyway let me just say that's an in-joke obviously. Let me just say that it's a wonderful toy and I think it's one of the most important experiments any child could ever do and that's because they're learning something about shapes and it's not an accident that we sort of like this molecule and I feel really privileged and honored amongst a lot of chemists that we co-discovered this molecule. That it picked us out really is something to be very proud of because I mean I've just been through Brian's lab and he's got these wonderful plants and doing some beautiful science and stuff that I really like doing and I've got stuck with this molecule which is not all good and it's not all bad either. Now the interesting aspect of this toy is that we know that the brain is actually stimulated by certain shapes, horizontal lines and vertical lines round shapes and so it's deep in our brain and the things that stimulate us is this joy of structure and symmetry and we know that everything takes place in the brain all are the things that we love and things that we hate and so it's interesting to think about that and that symmetry is fundamental to many aspects of the world. Now it's not only in this but it's also in neolithic structures like these that were found in Scotland that you see that primitive man was really enjoyed making these things and these are the platonic structures, five of them. So you don't have to be an intellectual by the way intellectual is not a great thing, a friend of mine he's written a book and in there you'll find the definition of an intellectual is an intellectual is a parasite who exudes culture so if anybody calls you an intellectual beware they may not be complimenting you but anyway these guys really appreciated some of the wonders that we appreciate. Now we know the Greeks also were stimulated by crystals and perhaps many of you who were scientists, many of the kids who were taking chemistry and physics were stimulated by having crystallized materials and these beautiful structures told the Greeks something that perhaps deep down in chemistry structure and symmetry was important and they developed a periodic table which had originally four elements, the four platonic structures and then a fifth one was discovered, one on the right the dodecahedron and over here and in fact I have a feeling that the British government put so little money into chemistry nowadays that I think they still think there's only five elements in the periodic table. I'm hoping that over here you know differently but I'm worried by this month's Scientific American that even here there's going to be problems in funding fundamental science. However, nevertheless there'll be some people who in the garages and the backyards will do the work anyway because they are unstoppable the real scientists. Now there's a nice story there this is going to be a story about the discovery of C60 which will involve many people, many football teams and particularly students and one of them Sean O'Brien sent me a letter he said dear Harry did you ever hear the story of the discovery of the dodecahedron? He said in 470 BC Hippasus found it he was very boastful of his discovery so much so that his colleagues drowned him. Sean goes on to say there is a lesson here for everyone okay right so from Chicago I think his grandmother must be Italian now let me go on because there are not only these wonderful shapes I would like to say that although this picture of the elements at first sight might seem rather naive in actual fact I think it's very deep because the Greeks actually appreciated that deep down symmetry was important and now we know the nucleus has these symmetries somewhat more complex somewhat less complex but basically those were right and therefore their real feeling for nature was perfect and spot on and that was an important aspect now apart from those symmetries there are wonderful symmetries in space and one of my favorites is beautiful spiral galaxy we can consider our own Milky Way galaxy to be rather similar and if we consider the sun and the stars around us the dog house as we look across the galactic plane we see massive clouds of gas such as this one here where the hot stars are heating the gas to incandescence and by spectroscopy we can say that this is mainly hydrogen we can tell what else is there not only structures like this but there are wonderful stars very important stars this star has bloated off its outer shell this shell is perhaps a light year across a light year it's 10,000 times Pluto's orbit that's a big object that gas from this central object has been blown off into space and that material goes on to form new stars and planets all the elements all the carbon in your body apart from the hydrogen was synthesizing the star like this and fortunately this star wasn't very keen on your particular carbon acids and it spewed you out otherwise you'd still be in there and there are some people I can think of who should still be in there they're causing a lot of problems at the moment okay well these stars as I say are really important in the story I'll come back to them there are also some very important objects such as these the black clouds that streak across the sky and the Greeks used to look at these and see them and they thought that these were holes in the celestial sphere they thought that well the celestial well no is a glass dish here with diamonds stuck in it and it's all held up by turtles and ultimately Arnold Schwarzenegger is underneath this thing holding this thing up and I don't know whether you have the same sort of rivalry as we have but the picture that they had was that a sort of Scottish football team supporter had heaved a brick through this thing and broken a hole in it and so you could see out into space so that was the image that there was a hole through this dish and those black areas were placed where you could see them so we now know that that was not correct it turned out it was an English football supporter that actually threw the brick but in fact what happened was in the 60s Charles Towns who was an incredible scientist who basically developed the maser and invented the maser and the laser turned his mind brilliant mind to space and he it was who really pushed to try and find out what was in these clouds and we discovered they're full of molecules and there's enough alcohol in say the Orion over the Orion to make something like 10 to the 28 gallons of Jim Beam now that's not the best whiskey I tell you I much prefer sort of Scotch but then my whole rest of my family are all Scotch so I would have to say that wouldn't I okay now it turns out that these are fascinating areas if you talk about the chemistry we're doing we're doing no chemistry at all compared to the chemistry in these clouds there's fantastic amounts of chemistry going on in these clouds and they're fascinating areas well it turned out that I was interested in this and what happened was that about the early 70s I got interested in radio astronomy and here we see a radio telescope it's in Algonquin Park in Canada and it's the one that the NRC was running and just to give you an idea this here is the prime focus and there's an amplifier receiver now a radio telescope is just a radio it's got a slightly larger dish on it this one it's 46 meters and very very sensitive amplifiers and here this door you can actually walk through it and in fact there's a little winch here to winch up apparatus and if you're observations aren't going very well and you're getting a bit unhappy about it you can always hang yourself from the end of here and anyway this dish was one that I was familiar with because I've been a postdoc at NRC and about the early 70s David Walton my close friend and colleague who was the world's expert at stringing carbon change together we got together with an undergraduate and one of the great places here is that you have undergraduates doing research this is perhaps these are the best people in the world because first of all a some of them believe you alright as a research and then 50% but the other 50% don't believe you okay and both the things are good alright as we all shall see now Dave Walton can string these long carbon chains as he's done here and he made a chain of 32 carbon atoms and I got interested in what would happen if I gave the Gustavus Adolphus cheerleader at the beginning of the football game a very bendy cane I would think to throw up in the air right now that would solve interesting problems of quantum mechanical problems fundamental problems and it all started for me with this what happens when a molecule which is so long as it rotates and bends and Dave could make these molecules and we had this wonderful undergraduate Alexander Anthony Alexander to make it we can no longer do that because in England or in Britain now we cannot do something new with an undergraduate it's you know you already so we can't do research anymore which is a bit unfortunate thing however Alexander came and he was a wonderful student he synthesized these and made the first of the molecules and it's here it was a five carbon atom chain I call it cyan or diacetylene this molecule had been detected in interstellar space by radio astronomy and the way you do that is you take a radio telescope you point at one of these black clouds this molecule is rotating because it has a dipole moment it gives out a radio wave just like a radio transmitter the electrons are going up in the in the air in the transmitter and you detect it this molecule is rotating and the negative and positive ends are changing and so you can see the rotational of this molecule this was detected we just made that and worked out what it was the frequency of its rotation and I sent the letter to T'Keshi Oka a fantastic scientist at Chicago now but then at NRC and we were close colleagues at postdocs and we got together and believe it or not we detected that molecule this is the detection of Hc5N in Sagittarius B2 and here we see a well known molecule used to be called acid aldehyde it's called ethanol now I think it's much less interesting molecule now it's named by this thing but anyway here is this signal and it was a big surprise in these dark clouds long carbon chain molecules were floating around and if you can do that maybe longer ones and Dave Walton worked out how to make another one with seven carbon atoms and Colin Kirby a great student who was working on boron sulfur compounds in his spare time synthesized this fellow all that and finally we worked out T'Keshi worked out how to see that one so at the end of the 70s and beginning of the 80s we had this peculiar result that these black clouds had these long carbon molecules floating around and why was that well just about that time some fascinating stars were being detected by the advances in infrared astronomy now this is not one of them but it's somewhat similar I'll show you because you can see it the central star is blown off the outer shell and some stars have got so much garbage and dust inside them okay that you know it's like Los Angeles you know it's all coming out of this thing and some of it gets out into the atmosphere and out into space and you can't see them and it turned out that these were carbon stars old carbon stars that were throwing out the carbon and all the carbon in your body came from these carbon stars so it seemed to me that this was an interesting area particularly because these carbon chains were coming out long carbon chains were coming out of them and that was the situation at the beginning of the 80s then as luck would have it one day in Easter 1984 I went to Houston and I've been invited there by Bob Curle this is a picture of Houston in the middle of winter I thought you'd like to see that picture here you know you know I lived in Canada for two years and I don't think it's much difference we've seen wind chills of minus 14, 52 but anyway this was it and a few down the a few miles down the road from the center is Rice University where Rick Smalley had developed a technique which has revolutionized one area of material science and it's called cluster science an important really important area and Rick had worked out how you could juggle with something like 40 aluminium atoms and let them do what they want you gotta juggle imagine this how do you throw up 40 iron atoms and let them do what they want this technique I'll just show you it's a little bit technical but not very much this thing here is a one millimeter channel it's about two centimeters long and at this end there's a solenoid valve which opens and shuts and passes down to this point and when the helium pulse gets to here a laser fires and it's focused on this disc and at the time I think it was a silicon carbide disc or an aluminium disc here and a plasma comes off the disc and is blown into the vacuum on the right hand side and it's a fantastic and Rick was jumping all over this he was so proud of it and he's a very persuasive guy this was actually on the inside Rick wasn't jumping over this this is the inside of the thing here and here's the plasma coming out and then it passes through this comb which is a very sharp skimmer and so you imagine a gas wind coming through here passing through here so a beam ends up in this it's got a pipe on here okay Gustavo's adult okay it hits this crown alright now then what I would now do is go to the next picture it's a little bit technical but don't worry I hope you can see this but let me just take you through it the nozzle is here the laser goes in through this hole and the plasma comes out here and is skimmed by this comb so the beam goes to this point now here are two plates which are charged so imagine this guy coming down there and it arrives at this point and then as it gets here you hit it with the laser and the laser ionizes this cluster and because these are charged it flicks them up this tube oh it went too fast okay you go up this tube now then if it's a heavy guy it goes slowly if it's a light guy it goes fast and so by time of arrival at the top the time it takes for it to get from the bottom here to the top you can find out how heavy the thing is now if you started with iron and you know it's only iron atoms you can work out whether it's 1 2 3 4 or 50 iron atoms so I looked at this and I thought well this plasma coming out looks a bit like this carbon star and when I got home that evening and I was staying with Bob Curle who had invited me and told me to see Rick I told Bob I said look if we put graphite in here maybe we can produce a plasma similar to the carbon star and maybe we can produce these carbon chain molecules maybe we can prove at least in the laboratory that this is a viable way of producing these carbon chain molecules and there were two other ideas of how it was done but this was mine and I was keen to show this one and Bob Curle was really keen and he said he would work on Rick to try and get this experiment off the ground well that was eastern 1984 around August 1985 about 17 months later I got a phone call from Bob and said yes we're going to run this experiment and I said are you coming of course I'm coming so I got the first plane which was continental and I got there in three days but I got to Houston not Brussels in joke I hope maybe not anyway so I got there and the first thing was I met two students and on the left is Jim Heath now at UCLA he's a really fantastic career as a young scientist and Sean O'Brien who's at Texas Instruments and I tell you these two guys this guy's probably going to produce the best semiconductors in the future and Jim is going to produce the best clusters and new materials and you can tell why because we're drinking Budweiser alright this is an eating chicken fajitas which I really got to enjoy and now in Japan Yuan Liu who's from China and is working for Herkst in Tokyo at the moment these were the fantastic students and it was just wonderful because I could just sit in front of the video screen and they could run this 747 and it was very difficult apparatus it all sounds very easy so he started off and almost immediately these carbon chains turned up it was unbelievable it was just but something else happened and this is why fundamental science is so important applied science is important and 85% of the funds going to applied science and you've got to work out how much you're going to put into crazy people like myself we just want to follow astrophysics and I suggest it's more than zero okay I don't know what that number is I suggest it should be about 14-15% and it's getting precious but it's zero now in Britain it's getting below 10% in this country anyway we do this experiment and believe it or not on the 4th of September almost exactly 10 years ago Wednesday the 4th 1985 we got this and this is the key mass spectrum now let me take you through it on the bottom we have the timing microseconds that says how that tells you that this fellow here took 20 here 20 microseconds to get from the bottom of the tower to the top of the tower this guy took about 21 and this is carbon 10 this is 10 carbon clusters stuck together it's probably well this has got 9 okay so this is 9 there probably that's what it is we don't know at this stage but we see that 11 is a strong guy 12, 13, 14, 15 13 is a win these are the marines alright these guys we know we've seen them since the 60s but we still don't know what the hell those are 11, 15, 19, 23 but in our experiment something quite unbelievable turned up here we see a signal and I wrote on my printout C60 plus question mark and in the top left hand horror repeat this healing to carbon ratio C60 huge and C70 also and I wasn't the only one because the students and this is another lesson for students let me press the right I got so many of these things okay press the right thing they wrote on the same day we find in the students C60 and C70 are very strong exclamation mark that's the exclamation mark on the poster alright that was written by one of the students the next day C60 is very large on the fifth and here's the lesson if you're doing research really write up really good notebooks because you can bet your life your supervisor won't alright I mean I'm really not very good I mean I had these wonderful students who really have and it's sometimes crucially important to know exactly what happened now then what was this C60 cluster well we started off and Brian's brought this really nice model we know from the textbooks that graphite is sheets and layers of carbon and that's the picture you see and here is a real lesson this picture a chunk of carbon like that is almost a no no alright that it will we now realize is a highly unstable structure we should have known it in fact if theoreticians had told us that we would never have believed but they didn't tell us that so we still didn't believe them okay but so that's what we have we're sitting there trying to find out well what it is and this is where we were we're sitting there with our it's the same thing right we've got to put something but nothing fits how do we put this through there now then we've got graphite that's what we started off with we've got the number C60 we're sitting there with our little model have we got the right structure so we're looking there now I was staying with Bob Curle and I thought I'd show you the floor of his loo now this is the washroom for translating on it now every morning I would sit and contemplate this floor alright what was special about this thing well we've got the number 6 and if we had the number 6 that would be wonderful but we didn't have the number 6 if we had 6 hexagons around here that would be C24 and it wasn't C24 it was C23 you can look you can sit forever in Bob Curle's loo you will never see something special about the number 60 well not on the floor anyway and so we were looking around for but the other thing we knew that it just had to be a beautiful solution so we looked around for a beautiful solution involving hexagons and we found one now but it had too many carbon atoms the other thing let me say in these days of political correctness do not make the assumption that you know the sex of the person wearing these suckings I'll leave that for the question period okay anyway so there we are that wasn't a good thing so what the hell was going on well when you're in this sort of situation we were so excited the obvious thing is to go out for a meal and we went out to our favorite Mexican restaurant and the good company in Houston great chicken fajitas I really enjoyed going there and we were writing on serviettes and trying to solve this problem and sitting at a particular table which let me just check well it didn't matter I think it was upside down we were so excited we could have sat on it whether it was upside down or not anyway sit here and discussing what the hell was going on and as the discussion during the day on the Monday went the consensus was that maybe you know if C60 was made out of this the edges would be very unstable so a pure carbon structure out of flat sheet of graphite perhaps it could stabilize by the sheet curving round into a sphere and that was the essential consensus that arose during that Monday and that reminded me that in 1967 when I'd been a postdoc at Bell Labs we'd gone up my family my older son had gone up to Montreal and we'd seen this fantastic building which is the Expo Pavilion that Buckminster Fuller had designed in Montreal and this is from my favorite journal which is Graphis if you ever want a really good journal, Graphis is the journal of graphic art and one of the 1967 issues was devoted to the Expo and this is a picture out of there so this is the image I remembered that and Rick went off to get a book from the library on Buckminster Fuller the second thing I remember was I'd made something for my children and I brought this with me it's a stardome and I hope you can, I don't know whether you can see this but I've made this for my children many years beforehand and it's a map of the sky and during this maybe it's up there you can see that it's a very nice thing and I made this and I thought well I'll ring my wife up and I thought about it and then forgot about it then went back and by that time it was about three or four o'clock in the morning I wasn't sure if you'd be too pleased to get up try and find this wherever it was but anyway discussing it at the restaurant I said well look you know this thing's not just got hexagons in my memory it's got pentagons as well anyway that night Rick started cutting out carbon little sheets of hexagons and he went to the freezer and got himself a Budweiser or something you see and then he remembered that what about these pentagons and with the hexagons alone nothing happens it stays flat but when you put the pentagons in it started to cup up into into a ball and believe it or not the next morning he came in with this fantastic model here okay it was a beautiful thing it had 60 vertices and at that point we just knew this was it I remember thinking it's too beautiful to be wrong and anyway if it was wrong everybody would love it anyway so you know it didn't really matter and so that was it we decided that was on a Tuesday and we wrote paper the next day because we thought well you know this is such a simple experiment now we better move very fast and the question is well what was it well it was C60 molecule it was a round cage there it is and then we had a discussion what to call it and I suggested we call it up to Buckminster Fuller and called it Buckminster Fullerine and there was a discussion that was a bit of a long name and somebody said it's clumsy and no it's not clumsy Buckminster Fullerine is not well the English can say it I don't know you know but it's not it's long it's the best you can say but you know if you don't like it you can always use the upank name and I guarantee that is worse okay anyway at this point I think Rick then called a mathematician and described this over the phone and he said we've got this molecule which is this shape you know what's what is it and this I must have made me totally ashamed because this American mathematician ran back and said it's a sock of all sock now I don't know whether you can believe this because you know have you ever seen one of those situations where you look at something and then you told that it's something else and when you look at it again for the rest of my life it always seems like a sock of all I don't know how I don't know how that happens but it happened you know anyway let me tell you something about the secrecy 60 it's very simple it's so simple that of course we didn't know it okay the first is that from Euler's law you cannot close a cage with hexagons alone it will never close up it's a beautiful book on growth and form by Darcy Thompson it's discussed in there many other aspects the second thing if you're a chemist you will know something else and that is if you have two pentagons side by side in a structure that will be unstable so from Euler's law you can show that you need 12 pentagons if you only got hexagons it won't close if you got pentagons and hexagons you must have 12 so 12 is 60 and then add in the fact that the pentagons mustn't be together you have a very nice explanation of why the C60 molecule is stable it's as simple as that it is the first cage that can close without the pentagons abutting side by side well that was it but how to prove it these were the days of cold fusion it wasn't just enough to have a beautiful idea and suggest it I decided I think we better be right ok here and if we weren't I think that we had better prove it ok because I didn't want there were some people I really didn't want to prove as wrong ok well let me go on because there's a beautiful technique and it's called nuclear magnetic resonance and I understand that companies in this country are taking the word nuclear off their nuclear magnetic resonance I suggest that those companies take the nuclei out of the people who put them in that they put into their apparatus before it is a disaster we're all made of nuclear and just to a euphemism is a disastrous thing that the world has got to realize that we're made of atoms we're atomic believe it or not now nuclear magnetic resonance can tell you how many different types of carbon atom you have and this molecule is the C9 so it has this one is the same as that so that's one type this is the same as that so this has five different types of carbon atom the one in the center is different from the others so this will have five different resonances C60 is a fantastic molecule it has 60 atoms but they're all the same so the magnetic resonance spectrum will have only one peak fantastic now that's one up on the average organic chemical physicist I'm going to take a 60 carbon atom molecule and prove its structure by only seeing one line that's what I like can we do it this was the holy grail well we tried something at Sussex we didn't have any lasers and we set up a carbon arc and in 1985 just 86 we set this up we took two carbon rods and we vaporized material onto an electron microscope slide and I made a fundamental error I made the assumption that this simple thing would only produce maybe one part in a million C60 so I thought well let's look at the electron microscope image and see what we got and we found that the carbon that was deposited changed in structure between 60 microns and 95 microns so I thought well this these are rounded objects which had formed round objects in the gas before they deposited and then I thought well I'll use a quadrupole mass spectrometer to try to see whether C60 was being formed and I made a fundamental error I didn't need a quadrupole there was already about one to ten percent of C60 in that picture but I the other unfortunate thing is I tried to get it from British companies and they're not interested in research anymore and so I failed and for about a year and a half still trying to get this quadrupole and then one day a friend of mine Mike Durer who's an astronomer at UCLA sent me a letter and it's an incredible letter and it's by Kretschmer, Fosteropoulos and Huffman at Arizona and Kretschmer, Fosteros at the Max Blank Institute in Heidelberg and it says Harry presented at Capri do you believe this and here is the question mark on the poster okay Mike and what did it say the search for the UV and infrared spectra of C60 in laboratory goose carbon dust it was a remarkable paper what they had taken on board was that C60 would vibrate and would have only four infrared active modes if you have a violin it has four fundamentals if you have a guitar it has six in the infrared only four modes of the vibration of this molecule would be active and they looked for them and they showed this spectrum and here were one, two, three, four vibrational modes very close to where theory suggested it was impossible for me to believe it there had to be one to five percent of C60 in there I just felt it was impossible for this to be right however it was impossible but I wanted to have a look at it so what do you do you give it to an undergraduate alright that's what you do because with an undergraduate you don't want to give them experiments you don't want to give them work because then they think research is easy right you've got to give them hard things no I'm being rather serious in fact with undergraduates you can be much more speculative so we have undergraduate projects in the third year and you can be speculative and do those really non-conservative experiments that you sometimes have a problem with the postdoc who needs to get a job with academia now the pressures are so huge that many great scientists are really not doing the really speculative thing and taking risks in the British system you still in some cases can do that and that's very very important so I put these two an undergraduate and a graduate student again on the left is Armit Sarkar and on the right Jonathan Hare and here's just the Belgium we just wheeled it out we'd already drilled the hole in for the argon that had been done two years let's repeat this stupid experiment by the stupid physicists they couldn't be right could they? it's impossible this is chemistry here's Jonathan adjusting the electrodes here and believe it or not they were there this is done on a sodium chloride plate it can be done in the teaching labs with an infrared spectrometer and this should become the quintessential example of the application of infrared to the detection of molecules it's a wonderful story this is a beautiful piece of science absolutely wonderful because they tracked it down and they were interested in astrophysics as well well this was unbelievable but not only that we sent it down to mass spectrometric study here we see came back from Scotland this is Jonathan's wonderful book 26th of the 7th from Scotland to find fab mass spectrometer that would be done with exciting results let's see what they are a 720 mass signal 720 mass signal 720 that's 12 times 60 really be there unbelievable then really important experiment this is I believe to show you that you don't need high tech the most important experiment ever done in my laboratory we had discussed what C60 would it be a gas a liquid or solid Jonathan took it all on board and he believed it was C60 we used to call it C60B this is before this is a Friday he added 25 mls of benzene and allowed to stand for the weekend what was there a red solution now this was incredible he put a red solution if you're going to pass this I'll pass I'd like it back this is a red solution you never know this is fascinating we started off with carbon and carbon has diamond which is here and that's insoluble and graphite that makes pencil that's insoluble and if you had a diamond ring and you started and it dissolved away you'd be pretty irritated wouldn't you and so would the person who bought it I mean you know and in the notebook just to show you Jonathan written the solution looks slightly reddish this is on the Monday Thursday we look on the sorry let me just stop here on the Thursday evaporated down to about four or five drops and tried the mass spectrum but didn't see C60 that turns out to be a very very difficult experiment but it was the right one that was a Thursday the next day on the Friday I got a call from nature now that's the journal and the editor said would you referee this new paper by Kretschmer and his colleagues see whether it's any more than that previous paper I said well sure I'll do this I know a bit about this but I didn't know quite enough because this was Friday morning at 12 o'clock a fax came through and it was the worst day of my scientific career it was C60 a new form of carbon by Kretschmer, Lamb, Foster-Ophelus and Huffman it was a fantastic paper because as I read it through there was a red solution sitting with a red solution on my desk and there were crystals and there was an X-ray structure and the X-ray structure was absolutely sure that this was C60 crystals and I rang up and I said you've got to publish this paper immediately that was after well I went for lunch first I had two alternatives I had to go for lunch or commit suicide I decided to go for lunch and delay the suicide until later and I rang up about 2 o'clock I said look this is going to be faxed around the world fantastic paper and also congratulate Wolfgang Kretschmer whom I knew I knew from before because we worked in similar areas he's a very close friend and then what to do and you know in that film North by Northwest where Cary Grant is hanging onto Mount Rushmore by his fingernails right and the villain is stomping on his fingers tonight that's how I felt as I read this paper through however there was one crack left you can hold on and it was the chemists you see there were physicists one thing they'd left for us the beautiful elegant proof it was there it was no problem it was the NMR and to a chemist that was the beautiful final touch they'd left us just that little thing to hang on because we separated it Jonathan had got it we got the mass spectrum could we get to the NMR well we were probably in a better position than anybody else because we had the stuff we had it already because Jonathan had already made some and my colleague Roger Taylor I met him at tea he said look I'll help you and he discovered it was fascinating when you take the red solution and chromatographically separated it separates into two solutions let me show you them on here it turns out into a magenta and a red one the red covers up and here let's send those around there's loads of them I hope you can see them this wonderful magenta color appeared what was it was it would it give so we send it down to NMR and Tony Evans we got a one of us standing NMR guys Tony said I've got come down I've got this fantastic single one line for you and there it was it's fantastic line and he pointed to this and he said you know this line he said that's benzene now he said benzene's been done I've just been looking it up here he said Faraday extracted it in 1831 so he said even nature won't accept this he said he said but look he tells you something if you look here he said that and I tell you I can't even see it from here but this thing here he said I reckon this is C60 and he was right because Roger went back rechromatographed that miserable little line which we needed an electron microscope to see in the lab I don't know what you could you need a telescope to see from out there it was indeed C60 and it was fantastic because the magenta gave a single line and that was C60 but the red solution was C70 and C70 should have five different types of carbon atom and that was great because it was very similar to this molecule I just showed you now the end ones are different from the ones in the middle and in fact it's almost exactly except that there are five here and five there five here and so on so C70 is the icing on the cake there were not only not just C60 but C70 as well and that's how the field was born now then there's an epilogue perhaps we should have known because in nature you've got viruses which have this same pattern here is a pentagon on the corners right has the same structure this allonia is to be found in Darcy Thompson's book on growth and form now it's got hexagons here but you know it knows more than we chemist it because it's got to have some pentagon somewhere and sure enough you find the pentagon because it cannot close with hexagons alone so it had already solved the problem this guy solved the problem too you see if you try and do this and a fly gets into your apparatus you end up with this guy here and look there you go and it's nature even in the eyes of insects has solved this problem my favorite this is a tortoise right and we see the hexagonal plate here right now if you only had hexagons the shell would be flat right and it'd be bloody draughty up the backside I tell you now let's put the pentagon into the back ok so let's go on because Fra Luka Pocholi is a famous religious man who was fascinated by symmetry and wrote a book and he decided he was a bit lazy he decided he wanted someone to do his drawings for him ok he didn't do it himself so he had a friend of his who was quite good at drawing and it turned out to be Leonardo da Vinci ok now what would you imagine you got a mate to do your drawings for your book right and it's Leonardo I hope you can see a little bit it's Ucosahedron Absiscus vacuous it's hollow it's the first image that we can find the way we can trace it to a hollow structure that is C60 another drawing by Pierro de la Francesca of the truncated Icosahedron to be found now if you don't know all the work of Pierro de la Francesca when you're in London you go to the National Gallery and you'll see this fantastic painting and what makes this painting exceptional I think is the symmetry of the dove over Christ's head there's two v symmetry which is the symmetry of all living animals and even a devout atheist like myself can appreciate the wonderful beauty and spirit of this painting just as I can of the thing that's made my couple of days actually is the chapel here this is one of the most wonderful buildings I've seen on my recent visit so I had a great time architecturally as well as I was going to start well what else let's go on to a few things we should go back to because if you go to Montreal go out to the expo site and try to find the pentagon there's one on here somewhere and if you look you see it there that's the only one you can see on this picture and it's triangulated so you see a very interesting structure it's a great piece of engineering because there's an outer skin which is this hexagon which is triangulated of hexagons incredible structure and you could span the whole of Minnesota in the winter with one of these things right we have the technology to do that and that might be a good idea because it seems to me it's going a bit cool in the last couple of days anyway I wanted to make my own but Mr. Fuller's done so I bought 300 quids worth of molecular models and here's another interesting thing bought it just for fun there's no reason at all just to have my own but Mr. Fuller's done and believe it or not somewhere under here okay there you go and but look it's rather interesting it's not round it's got pentagons in the vertices and I'll roll this out oopsie daisy okay right it doesn't roll very well because it's not perfectly round and it was interesting because it turned out making that model explained the structures of carbon round carbon particles that they would have these icosahedral patterns so a piece of just fun turned out to explain something that had not been understood for 20 years shows another aspect well I should show you this because this is another but Mr. Fuller's done but not only that sticking out here is what we call a nano tube anybody heard of the nano tubes these are amazing things these will probably be the first applications of fullerene related materials now I used to call these zeppelines all right my students have a slightly ruder name for it actually I'm going to hand this round too so you can have I need them back actually but okay and these are the ends have the pentagons on and they're just round graphite structures they're about a hundred times smaller than carbon fibers and these are almost certainly the strongest materials that have ever been made and if these can be put into composites they be wonderfully strong materials and that I think is the future area of nanotechnology well I've got another guy there's some chemistry Paul Burkett working with Dave Walton and Roger Taylor and myself has managed to put phenyl groups this is like one of those little fossil creatures from the old days right and it walks around and it's fascinating I'll have to send this round because we now know where the phenyl groups go you see it's got five phenyls it's got five legs and it's got this hydrogen atom so far we've only succeeded in making the male of the species but send that around okay so well let's finish because there's football teams let me show you the key ones here on the right is Jim Heath people have asked can you put an atom on the inside Jim Heath worked out how to do that he made lanthanum C60 you put the first atom on the inside on the left is Sean O'Brien he worked out under what conditions was C60 stable what was going on there in the middle is Bob Kerl he's really the captain of the team that's why he's holding the ball and it was Bob to whom I first suggested this and it was Bob who was keen to do this and it was Bob who convinced Rick that this experiment was worth doing and of course Rick was the guy who really made it possible by developing this cluster beam technique which as I say has revolutionized cluster science and clusters are important because what is bringing the physics community and the chemistry community together is that the physics are getting to smaller and smaller molecules and the chemists are making bigger and bigger molecules and we're getting together for the first time in a hundred years and realizing physics are not that bad after all okay they're not that good either but they're getting better okay so that was good there's another football team that I'd like you to see and it's the Sussex team and it's Abdul Siddhar who worked really hard to get that mass spectrum breaking down and we just managed to get it it was really bad news for us actually because it delayed several weeks on the right Jonathan who as I say fantastic student really one of wonderful with kids and he has developed lots of projects with schools there are schools now in the area who are making C60 and the kids are just loving it and it's done wonderful things for chemistry because it's beautiful and also something that they can actually do Roger in the middle well he's looking happy because he's the first guy to see that beautiful magenta solution and on the right David Walton who really got me interested in the carbon molecules in the first place but there's another football team and it's this one and you know the really bad thing about this I'm sure that this is there because you don't want to show you that I once had hair alright this is my hair right this used to be black you know believe it or not he never had any hair at all actually as you see here Tecashioca in Chicago the guy who got the spectrum of H3 plus a fantastic piece of work John McLeod, Lorne Avery and Norm Broughton with the astronomers who really knew where to point the telescope in this project that discovered the carbon chains well I can't finish this without pointing out we got into the newspaper they got the wrong photograph unfortunately here we got here on the right hand side as organic find will add to the origin of life controversy I won't go through this but this is a scientist on the front of the times and we're discussing the origin of life you know should you laugh or should you cry it's really difficult to know what to say and then it got into the local newspaper the Brighton Evening Argus okay and it was life's key may lie among the stars and a student wrote that show biz underneath here he took an extra year to get his degree for writing that let me go on because Sussex University Buffins could make scientists change their minds about how life began their theory is that the very first forms of life could have been created in outer space I'm reading that and realizing the people next door know me and they're reading this okay and I try to tell them I'm doing some reasonable stuff so I think I'm working on this area you know there's another part of unbelievable they have discovered proof that there are organic chemicals in some of the vast dust clouds between the stars only one simple step would be needed to change these chemicals into the building blocks of life the chemicals were discovered thanks to Canadian work in radio astrology but believe it or not someone thought about it the first one is David Jones in 1966 thought of hollow molecules as there is a curious discontinuity between the density of gases and that of liquids and solids deedless has been contemplating ways of bridging this gap and has conceived the hollow molecule this would be a closed spherical shell of a sheet polymer like graphite whose basic molecule is a flat sheet of carbon atoms bonded hexagonally rather like chicken wire he proposes to modify the high temperature synthesis of graphite by introducing suitable ill-fitting foreign atoms his idea was quite correct he wanted to induce the pentagons and that's the way C-60 is made believe it or not and what's more something I'm sure you can all read is shown on the next slide because here we see the soccer ball and down here I hope you can see it here it says C-60 because A.G. also a brilliant Japanese scientist thought of C-60 and said if you could make this it would be stable well one other slide and I got another just a few more left I thought I've taken you on a random walk and I changed here Leonardo's man to show you a random walk through science art and design to show you that Leonardo was pretty close if only put this one round if we'd been fine I've got one other thing I'd just like to change the carousel is that possible let me just see this because I probably have to read this out because I'd like to share something with you which came up it's quite remarkable we have a verbatim account of what goes on in the House of Lords and it's called Hansard and Hansard on the 10th of December Lord Errol of Hale asked Her Majesty's Government what steps they are taking to encourage the use of Buckminster Fullerine in science and industry and there was a discussion and it actually makes more sense this way than it does so leave it that way after this discussion Lord Williams of Elville he said is the local Lord aware in supplementing his answer that the football shaped carbon molecule is known for some extra ordinary reason as buckyball Lord Williams of Elville, I don't know whether you've read Tolkien but he never made those names up he just got them there are actually people in England who are they he just has to go to the House of Lords and you don't have to beg a film of the Lord of the Rings you just take the House of the Lords the next one was can the noble Lord say whether this thing is animal, vegetable or mineral is it the shape of a rugged football or a soccer football it turns out there was a photographer present at the time I think this Helmut Schwarz in Berlin sent me this photograph and I think it's the most wonderful one of the most wonderful pictures I've ever seen I feel so much empathy with this animal that I'd rather be in his cage than in the House of Lords anyway, at the end of the day you have to give them credit because ultimately the House of Lords are going to come up with a $64,000 question and it's here from Lord Campbell of Allaway, my Lords what does it do Lord Ray, my Lords it is thought that it may have several possible uses for batteries as a lubricant or as a semiconductor all that is speculation, it may turn out to have no uses at all but of course there are some smart guys and there are people who know their literature because Bertrand Russell's youngest son is in there too and he got the last line he says my Lords can't one say that it does nothing in particular and does it very well thank you very much that was really enjoyable we'd like to have a brief panel discussion here I can keep it to about 10 minutes coffee will be served outside I believe unless it's raining somebody should let me know it's dry, Chaplain says so coffee and cookies will be served out on Ekman Mall shortly let me begin by seeing if someone has a question or comment Harry I can start wonderful talk can you say a little bit about the reactivity of C60 in terms of organic chemistry is it simple to describe is it simple as just a double bond type reactivity or is it in other words is it more like Ethylene and more like benzene trust Harry to ask the question which has a 10 minute answer it's interesting that also were said it would be super aromatic and there's been a lot of controversy about whether C60 is an aromatic compound or not now for those of you I hope know a little bit about aromatic benzene has a structure where the double bonds flip from one to the other and it turns out that C60 reacts as though the bonds are localized so that they're localized outside the pentagons that's the way it reacts and it's turning out that if you talk about aromaticity other people say well it's not bad it's ring currents it's the way in which the electrons circulate and they do circulate and the carbon atoms do appear to have aromatic character if ring currents are what you're talking about but the reactivity is more like a polyene okay it reacts as though it's a double bonded compound so even though it has a spectrum it absorbs light in a visible region indicating you know there are it's more in fact it's red shifted from benzene it reacts more like UV absorbing the problem is you can't really substitute it right because it's not you can't substitute the carbons and so it changes your picture of what aromaticity is I think it my view is that it is an aromatic compound it's like wave particle duality if you look at it and ask you know some questions it will be aromatic if you ask other questions it will be a non-aromatic compound and we're starting to learn where the groups go and they add to the surface and the molecule I sense around with five is a beautiful result that Paul Burkett, a post-doc working with Jessica and he's showing exactly how that molecule will add groups and it's very difficult work but it does pay off in the end it's a molecule that really deserves to be kicked around a lot okay and when you do that in the end it gives in and tells you its secrets and the secrets are fascinating because it's a bit different from other molecules you can imagine me for a second being a high school student why died after your talk I come up to you and I say Professor Croto should I work on C60 now and if so what should I do or should I go explore some other area what would you say? I mean I think C60 is the molecule of the 21st century obviously but it's going to take until that time to find out what is happening there's going to be an interesting molecule for a platform for putting things on the outside and so if one wants to think about biological molecules you can put 60 groups on there and the question that Paul Banniston asked this morning you know why do you have to be so specific if you want to make say an HIV virus inhibitor which C60 has more positions in which to position accurately molecule sits in particular cavity so it's the molecule which will be the complement of the molecules that you're making you're making the cavities but biology has made some cavities that we want to put something in and this molecule has some possibilities of being more flexible than other molecule around so I think it has tremendous possibilities has the HIV protease inhibition gone anywhere or was that just a one shot? Not to my knowledge I mean I know that they're trying to make some other ones my view is however I think that you should be interested in the molecule as I know I'm sure you are and the reason is that it's got fascinating electronic properties for instance something that should interest you is that the ionization is very long lived ionization it can store energy maybe a hundred times longer than other molecules so if you irradiate it with photons it takes a long time for the electron to pop up and so those are the sorts of things that might interest someone who is trying to slow down electron transfer properties it does things other molecules don't do and it's already been linked to some donors and acceptors for chart separation there has been work done in that area already that's very interesting. Can I make a comment? I think the risk of appearing like and I have only one subject of interest I think it's almost as miraculous I do think that the molecule is miraculous but it's almost as miraculous the discovery of Arthen, Art Hebert that if you add exactly three electrons to the molecule and the appropriate amount of sodium or potassium or cesium it's a metal it's not a metal if you add three minus epsilon or three plus epsilon but just exactly three and no one what so ever that I know knows why it's amazing. It's a metal and it's a supermetic metal with a very high transition temperature. I think the to add to that and to add to Harry's question if you can put say a lanthanum on the inside of C60 you could then add the three electrons by internally and that opens up huge possibilities for you know you just may be the room temperature system you know you just I mean I'm probably not but nevertheless the holy grail in this area and the area of a young scientist comes up and says what should we do? We should try to put an atom on the inside and for every you know there's a whole periodic table to put in on the inside and not only that when the atom goes on the inside it stabilizes different types of pulleys so C82 you can't easily get but you put lanthanum on the inside and it stabilizes the C82 so there's a whole new periodic table of every element you can put a cage around. Not only that you can put lots of cages around. How big is the hole in the metal huh? It's big enough for most lanthanum I mean it's probably you could put any yellow you could put any about five four to four angstroms across three of electrons you knew that hollow you knew the hole was there from the models or from any simple considerations you knew that from the beginning yes because the you knew it wouldn't sort of collapse because you knew that the carbon to carbon distance is seven angstroms and the graphite the pi electron is one and a half so three you got seven angstroms minus three so it's four angstrom gap in the center all we need is a microgram so yeah C60 it's very very hard but I mean this wonderful piece of work now in Santa Barbara Fred Woodles group we've got nitrogen into it so C59 nitrogen which is the C60 analog of pyridine the heterocyclic chemistry is starting up and they've also opened a hole in the cage and we have to Paul Burkett just found a hole in C70 opened up so now we can probably put something in and then close it up again but it's exciting but it's hard but you know the youngsters of today they're going to beat us easily into the ground they're not going to have these petty rivalries between chemists and physicists they're going to be the chemical physicists of the future and they're going to solve problems that we find hard Dream on Harry along those lines let me share something that I just observed when that large ball was being passed around one of the undergraduates that I know carbon carbon bonded broken and said to me you suppose that's where substitution reaction could occur and that's the kind of question that they're apt to ask isn't it? Yeah and it can now be done because the most recent one is this nitrogen one which I think is an absolutely beautiful piece of work because that now puts another electron into the system and you know if you put three nitrogens you put three more electrons and that looks like an interesting thing to do I'm working with substituting other materials like silicon and germanium. Yes the problem with silicon I don't think you'll ever see a silicon 60 I know from a bitter experience that whenever I say you'll never do but someone turns up does it you know I'm sure almost any scientist as they get older they become more cocky about what they can predict and as they get even older they realize that they're getting more stupid silicon 60 is pretty difficult anyone who I really would take my hat off because silicon really doesn't like to make a double bond very difficult and the only reason we've got C60 is that carbon really loves double bonds and that's why we're here and if silicon liked it as much as carbon we'd be made out of silicon and the Marines really would be tough then What if you look at the what if you do the same cluster experiment with silicon what do you see now you see lots probably have the data right now so you're very confident oh yeah that's been done I mean Rick Rick's done you don't have any peaks up in that we don't know what the structures are lots of peaks and maybe silicon 45 some types of diamond structure but the problem with diamond and one of the major things which I'm slightly surprised hasn't been discussed is what's called reconstruction as materials get smaller and smaller sizes I mean the reason why the physicist's day is over in the major region why they have to come to talk to chemists is that if you want to miniaturize silicon in a semiconductor and get to smaller and smaller units you hit a point where the silicon will start to form a cluster of a given structure and lose its semiconductor capability but the chemists know how to make molecules with the size of ten angstroms or some and will learn and if they come together to try and work out what those molecular storage units will be that will be the molecular electronics of the future and so I think it's very exciting very exciting time and I think C60 will play a part in that I think the young scientists I think should be solving the high I mean the real problem is the one that Harry mentioned is this is what we're all thinking about and I think if you just put C60 into your system you solve it you'll make it work alright well thank you very much we'll reconvene in about 20 minutes after the hour for music and then Professor Shwaver's paper at 330