C60 and carbon:: a postbuckminsterfullerene perspective

The discovery of the fullerenes and nanotubes has completely changed our perspective on various aspects of carbon chemistry and materials science in quite fundamental ways. The experiments, which uncovered C-60, occurred between 1985 and 1990 and there are lessons to be learned of various kinds over the way scientific advances occur and more importantly the way misconceptions can propagate. For instance much of our received wisdom over the behaviour of carbon, in particular graphite on a microscopic scale, was really quite ill-conceived and certainly misleading. Questions might be asked as to why it took almost till the end of the 20th century for the fact to be uncovered that the elegant C-60 molecule had been lurking in the dark shadows of soot chemistry all the time. After all, mass spectrometric techniques were sufficiently advanced for the discovery to have been made in the 1960's-perhaps even earlier. Some of these issues are addressed here and the discussion gives an insight into the curiously unpredictable way fundamental scientific advances sometimes occur and also highlights the limitations of applied research in this case. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V.