buckey balls

has anyone heard of buckey balls(sp)?

my science teacher and i were talking about different minerals for flashlight lenses, and she mentioned somethings called buckey balls.

she said they are molocules naturally formed by silicon (i think) and that their molecular structer was shaped like a soccer ball, and that the were extremely slippery. i asked if they were used in any lubricants, and she said she had only read about them in journals and such.

whaddaya think...nye lube replacement?

I have heard of them. Carbon 60 or something like that. Discovered by Buckminster Fuller I think.

http://www.reade.com/Products/Carbons/fullerines.html
http://newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/chem99/chem99618.htm

I remember when it was first discovered and Popular Science ran an article on it. I was in school at the time and took the magazine in to show my science teacher. Cool stuff.

PopSci predicted we would be using it to make all kinds of cool stuff in the future. Haven't seen anything yet...

They did mention that it was the most expensive substance on the planet at the time.

Mark

most expensive substance?! wow, that must be some valuable stuff indeed? where can i mine some and why the heck is (was?) it worth so much?

my teacher made it sound like it was new...it apparently isn't though, thanks for the links guys.

First a disclaimer I didn't check the links and my info (and memory)are old.
It is manufactured made up of carbon. Cheap like coal and graphite expensive like diamonds. It was named after Fuller the 'father' of the geodesic dome. The reason it would be expensive is we are not Nano-technologicaly advanced to make it well. I believe it is a hit and miss chemical reaction to make it. Hope that helps and is accurate.

Here is a comprehensive essay about them.

Bucky Ball

Originally posted by Minjin:

They did mention that it was the most expensive substance on the planet at the time.

Click to expand...

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">OK I've gone off Ti, can I have an Arc AAA made out of Buckminsterfullerene.....Peter ?

I found this at http://accurapid.com/journal/17org.htm
-------------------
Smalley's group at The Center for Nanoscale Science & Technology, at Rice University, Houston, TX, by 1998 was able to offer 90%-pure SWNTs [Single Walled NanoTubes] for sale at a price of $2,000 per gram ($906,000 per pound). Minimum order: $500.00. They were churning out roughly 60 g of "buckytubes" per week. At the same time, Professors Robert C. Haddon and Peter C. Eklund at the University of Kentucky, Lexington, had founded CarboLex, Inc., to develop the production of nanotubes and its engineered derivative materials.
-------------------------------
Boy if you combine this thread with the info in the AAAA Arc thread about the AAAAA battery http://www.spacedaily.com/news/energy-tech-02q.html
maybe one of the modders can come up with am implantable, 3 million CP, LED based, rechargeable light. Just keep the price under 1 million and you could sell them to the military

Originally posted by x-ray:
OK I've gone off Ti, can I have an Arc AAA made out of Buckminsterfullerene.....Peter ?

Click to expand...

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">Hey, Fullerenes would make a great material for an Arc AAA. The carbon-based fulleric molecules, IIRC, are both excellent conductors and insulators, depending on their orientation!

I seem to remember a scientist on PBS saying that the fullerenes are quite likely the strongest molecule in the universe, and that we'll probably never find anything to top them.

I still find it amazing that it looks exactly like a soccer ball. Who'd have thought that the design that we came up with for the soccer ball, was actually perfected by nature long ago...

Mark

Minjin, we can only dream to come as close to perfection as nature already has... Remember , nature has had a lot more time to perfect its creations...

Originally posted by Bart.:
Minjin, we can only dream to come as close to perfection as nature already has... Remember , nature has had a lot more time to perfect its creations...

Click to expand...

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">don't you mean God is a lot smarter than us?

I prefer to think that randomness is smarter than us.

Or rather, given time, good stuff happens.

Buckeye balls? They're my favorite too!

http://christmas.allrecipes.com/AZ/BuckeyeBalls.asp

can you imagine what kind of knurling it would take?!?

stongest in the univ!? wow!

my teacher said today that she believes the value has been much reduced after the discovery that they are also naturally occuring.

Originally posted by Albany Tom:
I prefer to think that randomness is smarter than us.

Click to expand...

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">You'll need to explain how randomness exists. I'm not saying there is no such thing. But, I'm unable to imagine it's mechanics. It seems that rather than randomness there is complexity beyond our ability to predict. Even a flickering flame at any particular instant has a definite shape and characteristic resulting from environmental forces and circumstances. Unpredictable? Yes, but it's due to complexity beyond our ability to track, not randomness.

Originally posted by Albany Tom:
Or rather, given time, good stuff happens.

Click to expand...

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">I couldn't begin to judge whether good or bad, but longer periodical systematic order and precision do occur between sustained reiterations of detrimental events, thus the current relative security and order of our little segment of the universe.

"every action has an equal and opposite reaction" is an interesting statement and perhaps from this we can conclude that for each phenomenon that we observe (or theorize about) arrived at that given condition in the frozen instant because of a series of reactions that set it into place?

I read something about superstrings that freaked me out. I mean we say so easily that "an electron is found in the second orbital" but in reality it's popping in and out of existence... like almost completely impossible to follow due to it's nature (er... electromagnetic or particle?)... that's pretty difficult to predict. So we call its general neighborhood an orbital. We might be able to predict that some day... but certainly not before we can predict, say, in which direction a wet bar of soap will fly when you squeeze on it hard. Before that, we should be able to predict the coin toss, right after it leaves the thumb?

But man, superstrings... if they exist... little suckers going in and out of existence like electrons but way way more pinner and...well... about as small as it gets?

Say the big bang began as a singularity. After the BOOM... why didn't stuff fly right that was flowing left, and why wasn't it equally distributed? The Boom wasn't in the center? Then I guess it wasn't a singularity, eh? I guess it's either that or it was the Very First Example of Randomness (happening all over again?).

heck, I dunno. Too late, getting called to slumberland.

PS. I read about buckyballs a long time ago (20 yrs?) in a cool book with other stuff on Fuller. After that, I've always wanted to live in a geodesic dome. Haven't thought about it much after that (besides a pop-trivia question in Organic chemistry). cheers.

pss... bottom line? stuff happens. If you can predict it, you are a sage or a billionaire.

One of the fun things about the carbon bucky balls is that they have extremely high tensile strength. Bucky balls and diamonds are the only 2 substances which may be strong enough to construct a space ladder.

What is a space ladder? Think of it as an elevator that reaches into high orbit. Instead of launching rockets to deliver space bound payloads, we just hook them on to the space ladder and winch them up. Less noisy, less dangerous, and the energy expended can be recovered when the payloads are returned to earth. Check it out in 3001: Final Odessy by Arthur C. Clarke. Can't remember where he got that idea from.

Too bad we still can't divert those hundreds of billions of dollars spent annually all over the world on the military forces of various countries. We might have had the space ladder by now, and maybe even more wonderful things we haven't thought of.