Bengt J. Olsson
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LinkedIn: beos
Fullerens and “buckyballs”
As a PhD student in Orsay, just south of Paris, in the summer of 1986, I had the pleasure of meeting Professor Harry Kroto — who later became Sir Harry and a Nobel Laureate in Chemistry. His team had, more or less by serendipity, discovered the C₆₀ molecule: a structure of 60 carbon atoms bonded together in the shape of a soccer ball.
(Wikimedia Commons)
The structure consists of 12 pentagons and 20 hexagons (the black and white panels on a soccer ball), with one carbon atom at each vertex. Professor Kroto often made a show of pulling a soccer ball out during lectures to demonstrate their discovery. C₆₀ was theoretically extremely interesting, primarily due to its high symmetry and unusual electronic structure, but it has had relatively limited practical use. However, its “offspring” — graphene and carbon nanotubes — have proven to be extremely important in nanotechnology.
The team named the family of closed, hollow carbon molecules “fullerenes,” and specifically C₆₀ came to be called a “buckyball.” Both names reference Buckminster Fuller, whose geodesic domes — designed for housing and other buildings — bear a striking resemblance to this structure. Fuller had passed away only a few years before the discovery, and the naming can be seen as a way to recognize and honor this original thinker.
Buckminster Fuller was not only an architect but also a systems thinker with a relentless focus on the whole of the problems and solutions he analyzed. His ideas have had a significant influence on modern sustainability debates, systems analysis, and resource-efficient design — long before these concepts became mainstream.
Fuller used the metaphor “Spaceship Earth” to describe the planet: a spacecraft with finite resources that must be managed efficiently. In short, he was an early systems engineer for the entire planet.
What Would Buckminster Fuller Have Thought About Today’s Climate and Energy Debate?
I asked ChatGPT what Buckminster Fuller likely would have thought about today’s climate and energy debate, especially regarding renewables vs. nuclear, and received this interesting answer:
Fuller coined the concept “Spaceship Earth” and was driven by a simple yet powerful principle: do more with less — less material, less energy, less friction across the whole system. His thinking was engineering-oriented rather than ideological.
🔹Renewable – Solar and wind fit well into Fuller’s worldview as flow resources with low marginal costs. However, he would have been relentless about systemic illusions: intermittency, grids, storage, and material demands are not peripheral issues — they are the system itself.
🔹Nuclear – Nuclear’s high energy density, minimal land footprint, and low material use per kWh are almost textbook examples of Fuller’s idea of “ephemeralization” — doing more with less. Fuller would have seen waste and safety challenges as organizational and institutional problems, not physical showstoppers.
Fuller likely would have dismissed slogans like “100% renewable” or “technology X will save us.” Instead, he would have viewed decarbonization as a global system optimization problem, where both nuclear and renewables have roles — but only if the full physics of the entire energy system is accounted for.
Climate change, from Fuller’s perspective, isn’t an identity issue — it’s an engineering problem at planetary scale.