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Race to Catch a Buckyball
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Program Overview
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Carbon is one of the most common building blocks of nature. An
entire branch of chemistry-organic chemistry-is devoted to the study
of carbon-based matter. For centuries chemists believed that pure
carbon could only be found on Earth in two forms, diamond and
graphite. The differences between these two materials illustrate a
fundamental aspect of chemistry: Different numbers and
configurations of the same atoms can produce different materials. In
an unexpected discovery in 1985, scientists identified pure carbon
in a third form: a molecule that contained 60 carbon atoms in what
had to be a different configuration from diamond and graphite. This
episode of NOVA documents the experiments that led to this discovery
and the subsequent competition between scientific teams to confirm
the existence of Carbon 60, isolate a sample of it, and determine
the structure and properties of a Carbon 60 molecule.
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