"Bruce Sterling - Buckymania" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

making electrical batteries out of buckyballs.

Then there are the "buckybabies:" C28, C32, C44, and C52. The
lumpy, angular buckybabies have received very little study to date,
and heaven only knows what they're capable of, especially when
doped, bleached, twisted, frozen or magnetized. And then there are
the *big* buckyballs: C240, C540, C960. Molecular models of these
monster buckyballs look like giant chickenwire beachballs.

There doesn't seem to be any limit to the upper size of a
buckyball. If wrapped around one another for internal support,
buckyballs can (at least theoretically) accrete like pearls. A truly
titanic buckyball might be big enough to see with the naked eye.
Conceivably, it might even be big enough to kick around on a playing
field, if you didn't mind kicking an anomalous entity with unknown
physical properties.

Carbon-fiber is a high-tech construction material which has
been seeing a lot of use lately in tennis rackets, bicycles, and high-
performance aircraft. It's already the strongest fiber known. This
makes the discovery of "buckytubes" even more striking. A buckytube
is carbon-fiber with a difference: it's a buckyball extruded into a long
continuous cylinder comprised of one single superstrong molecule.

C70, a buckyball cousin shaped like a rugby ball, seems to be
useful in producing high-tech films of artificial diamond. Then there
are "fuzzyballs" with sixty strands of hydrogen hair, "bunnyballs"
with twin ears of butylpyridine, flourinated "teflonballs" that may be
the slipperiest molecules ever produced.

This sudden wealth of new high-tech slang indicates the
potential riches of this new and multidisciplinary field of study, where
physics, electronics, chemistry and materials-science are all
overlapping, right now, in an exhilirating microsoccerball
scrimmage.

Today there are more than fifty different teams of scientists
investigating buckyballs and their relations, including industrial
heavy-hitters from AT&T, IBM and Exxon. SCIENCE magazine
voted buckminsterfullerene "Molecule of the Year" in 1991. Buckyball
papers have also appeared in NATURE, NEW SCIENTIST,
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, even FORTUNE and BUSINESS WEEK.
Buckyball breakthroughs are coming well-nigh every week, while the
fax machines sizzle in labs around the world. Buckyballs are strange,
elegant, beautiful, very intellectually sexy, and will soon be
commercially hot.

In chemical terms, the discovery of buckminsterfullerene -- a
carbon sphere -- may well rank with the discovery of the benzene ring
-- a carbon ring -- in the 19th century. The benzene ring (C6H6)