Ever since the Buckyball story broke big last year, Rice University chemist Rick Smalley has been getting the phone calls. Rick, they say, this is Jamie in Minnesota, and I saw this article. I just wanted you to know that I’ve dreamed about this molecule and now I can see it. And Smalley, whose job it is in a sense to dream about molecules, finds himself talking to a complete stranger about the one he discovered by accident.
Officially, the molecule is called buckminsterfullerene, in honor of the eccentric futurist-inventor R. Buckminster Fuller, and it fascinates not only the Jamies of this world, but the Paul Chus as well….
Ride easy, Jim.
