7
Set Your Thinking Free
Where do scientists obtain their inspiration? Is it from investigating nature and peering through microscopes? Or is it from philosophy books? Well, you might be surprised to know that sometimes it actually is the latter.
Take two examples: one is an American icon often described as that nation’s greatest inventor; the other is a British academic who played a key role in the discovery of a new kind of carbon chemistry. Both are scientists—Thomas Edison and Harry Kroto—and both combine the spark of imagination with the power of invention. Edison seems to have obtained from his reading of the revolutionary philosopher Tom Paine a kind of humanist zeal, writing, “The world is my country; to do good my religion.” Kroto was an eclectic reader who took inspiration from ideas he came across in many different works, from the speculations of Plato to the imaginary worlds explored by J. R. R. Tolkien, and, to be sure, from some science books, too, notably the popular accounts of quantum physics by Richard Feynman.
Let’s start with the monumental figure of Thomas Edison, who is famous for his extraordinary output of new ideas and inventions. He made important contributions in fields as diverse as electric power generation, mass communication, sound recording, and even moving pictures. As he would later say, “Inventors must be poets so that they may have imagination.”
Growing up in Michigan, Edison’s teachers thought he was an incredibly stupid, stubborn, and disobedient boy, perhaps because childhood illness had left him with acute hearing difficulties. His mother, however, had different thoughts on the matter. Rejecting the school’s verdict, she attempted to educate the young boy at home. Central to her approach was introducing him to books, including ones at a far higher level than recommended for his age. Thanks to his mother’s approach, Edison’s horizons were immensely broadened with a rich tapestry of human achievement not limited just to science but also including English, history, and philosophy. In terms of science, the books kindled Edison’s curiosity to such an extent that by the time he was eleven, he had created his own laboratory in his basement, where he would make new discoveries and develop new skills.
At the age of twelve, Edison was obliged to start a job instead of studying. He sold food, sweets, and newspapers to the passengers on the Grand Trunk Railway that made daily runs between Port Huron and Detroit. Later on, taking advantage of access to the news coming in via the station telegraphs, he wrote and sold his own newspaper, called the Grand Trunk Herald. In Detroit he visited the Free Library and systematically worked his way through its entire stock of books.
Years later, Edison even wrote a special essay on one of his early fascinations, entitled “The Philosophy of Thomas Paine.” Apart from what it reveals about Paine, the essay shows Edison to have had a strong sense of humor and a ready wit. It starts by noting sadly that “Tom Paine” had become unknown to the average citizen and thus had almost no influence on contemporary thinking in the United States. For Edison this was “a national loss” made all the worse by the peddling of unkind myths about the philosopher. Theodore Roosevelt, he recalls, coldly dismissed Paine as “a dirty little atheist” who spent his last days drinking in pothouses. The truth, Edison asserts, is quite the contrary: “We never had a sounder intelligence in this Republic,” he said, adding, “I consider Paine our greatest political thinker.”
Edison focuses on Paine’s most revolutionary pamphlet, the one entitled Common Sense: “an anonymous tract which immediately stirred the fires of liberty.” The pamphlet was written with a terse power that inspired readers to make an immediate choice between their current, secondary status as a mere colony and full-scale revolt and freedom from British rule.
“It flashed from hand to hand throughout the Colonies. One copy reached the New York Assembly, in session at Albany, and a night meeting was voted to answer this unknown writer with his clarion call to liberty.”
Edison does not exaggerate. Within just a few months, the pamphlet had sold more than half a million copies. In proportion to the population of the colonies at that time (two and a half million souls), it had the largest sale and circulation of any book published in American history. He reflects the view of orthodox political commentators in saying that in Common Sense, “Paine flared forth with a document so powerful that the Revolution became inevitable.”
Born in Norfolk, England, the young Thomas Paine worked variously as a staymaker (a tailor who makes corsets, which sounds trivial but actually involves some structural engineering!), a civil servant, a journalist, and a schoolteacher. It was while working in the second capacity for the Excise Board in Lewes, Sussex, that he became interested in politics, serving on the town council and hosting political discussions of the celebrated English philosopher John Locke’s ideas in the White Hart Inn. Actually, Paine downplayed his debt to his political forbear, even saying rather disgracefully that he had “never read any Locke, nor ever had the work in my hand,” but it was certainly Locke’s ideas on liberty and human dignity that made the running in those political debates.
However, it was only when Paine left quiet, sleepy Lewes for the New World, on the recommendation of no less a figure than Benjamin Franklin himself, whom he had met in London (Franklin was then a diplomat) and discussed scientific matters with, that his political activity became serious. On settling in Philadelphia, he immediately began to set out his ideas on paper: equal rights for men and women and for people of different races and even if not full rights at least fair treatment for animals. Paine was one of the first in the United States to press for the abolition of slavery, and his more substantial book The Rights of Man is rightly considered a political classic.
Befitting his own background, Paine was also interested in the details of government, even working out neatly, in double-entry bookkeeping form, exactly how much the kind of democratic government he was proposing would cost, which was not to be very much. In fact, when finances are done his way, there is, happily, enough money to actually pay something to all the poor people of the country! This was truly an idea far ahead of its time. Indeed, in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election, it was still revolutionary when Democratic hopeful and computer whiz Andrew Yang proposed something similar. Such payments to citizens are, Paine points out, no more than remission of their own taxes from hidden taxation imposed by duties on imports and so on.
But it was the novel issue of national self-determination that made the name of Thomas Paine historically significant—the issue that John Adams, second president of the United States, once described as a dreadful “hobgoblin . . . so frightful . . . that it would throw a delicate person into fits to look it in the face.” Indeed, Paine’s nationalistic pamphlet Common Sense started a fire that would eventually destroy the English claim to America. It was with the brisk, efficient language of a journalist that Paine urged in The Rights of Man (1791), “It is time that nations should be rational, and not be governed like animals, for the pleasure of their riders.”
COMMON SENSE
AUTHOR: THOMAS PAINE
PUBLISHED: 1776
Originally a mere forty-nine pages, Common Sense was a pamphlet rather than a book, written by Thomas Paine just at the beginning of the American Revolution in 1775–1776 to advocate independence for the then “Thirteen Colonies” from Great Britain. Writing in clear and persuasive prose, Paine presented powerful moral and political arguments on behalf of the colonies. The pamphlet was read aloud in taverns and at meeting places and made a phenomenal impact. In proportion to the population of the country at that time, the book had the largest sale and circulation of any book published in American history! And it is still in print today.
Paine made a case for independence that previously had not been given serious intellectual consideration. He also linked independence with the freedom of Protestants to pursue their religion, structuring his account almost as if it were a sermon. The historian Gordon S. Wood has described Common Sense as “the most incendiary and popular pamphlet of the entire revolutionary era.”
Part of speaking common sense is speaking plainly, and Paine wrote his pamphlet in a straightforward, simple style, ignoring the then almost obligatory literary pretensions of philosophical references and Latin terms, while sprinkling into the text instead well-known biblical references that would “speak to the common man,” as it were, in the manner of a sermon by a small-town preacher. Within just a few months, the pamphlet had sold more than five hundred thousand copies, or one for every five colonists at the time, and, more than any other single publication, it is credited with paving the way for the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, just a few years later.
Edison goes on to explain he had long been fascinated by Thomas Paine. His father had had a set of Paine’s books on the shelf at home, and he says he thinks he must have “opened the covers” about the time he was thirteen, adding, “I can still remember the flash of enlightenment which shone from his pages. It was a revelation, indeed, to encounter his views on political and religious matters, so different from the views of many people around us. Of course I did not understand him very well, but his sincerity and ardor made an impression upon me that nothing has ever served to lessen.”
The young Edison was, of course, no political activist. Nor was he searching for a philosophical hero. Rather, right from the start, he saw in the Englishman a role model and a practical guide as to how to live. This was because (although it is not widely remembered) Paine was himself something of an engineer and experimenter. Edison writes, “I was always interested in Paine the inventor. He conceived and designed the iron bridge and the hollow candle, the principle of the modern central draught burner. The man had a sort of universal genius. He was interested in a diversity of things; but his special creed, his first thought, was liberty.”
The editors of biography.com recall Paine’s remarkable “other” life, noting that if many of his ideas and inventions never developed beyond the “planning stage,” there were several notable exceptions that did. There was his invention of a crane for lifting heavy objects, a smokeless candle, and the idea of using gunpowder as a method for generating power. It sounds like a dangerous idea, but something similar goes on at the heart of the ubiquitous internal combustion engine, and anyway, Paine survived years of “tinkering” with it.
Above all, though, Paine possessed a fascination with bridges. After the end of the Revolutionary War, he made several attempts to build them in both England and America. At a time when conventional wisdom said bridges were made either of stone or wood, Paine experimented with iron. He worked out a plan for bridging the Harlem River, which General Lewis Morris, founder of Morrisania on the farther shore, was to have financed. Alas, the money failed to appear, and so instead his most impressive achievement was to be the Sunderland Bridge across the Wear River at Wearmouth, England.1 His achievement here was to construct a wide single-span bridge (with no additional supporting piers), and in 1796, a 236-foot span bridge was completed. It was at the time the largest in the world as well as only the second iron bridge ever built. For pioneering the use of iron and steel like this, it is not too much to say that Thomas Paine is an important inspiration behind later iconic bridges such as San Francisco’s Golden Gate or New York’s Brooklyn Bridge. All of this goes some way to explain why George Washington was as much a fan of Paine for his bridges as for his revolutionary prose.
However, for Edison, it was the other way around. He was most inspired by Paine’s famous declaration, already mentioned, that “the world is my country; to do good my religion” and his reputation as the man “who helped to lay the foundations of our liberty,” as he puts it at the end of his observations. And yet, more than this, Paine provided Edison with an inspirational model and the evidence that here was a kindred spirit.
In due course, among Edison’s many inventions would be included the telegraph, the universal stock ticker, the phonograph, the first practical electric light bulb, alkaline storage batteries, and an early kind of moving image projector that he called the kinetograph. Edison, though it is rarely appreciated, was truly a disciple of the revolutionary Englishman that he first came across in some leather-bound books.
It should be emphasized that, at the time Edison was reading these, Paine’s reputation was grim. He had died alone on June 8, 1809, and it was recorded that only six mourners were present at his funeral—three of them former slaves. The only status the press gave him was as a political rabble-rouser, with the New York Citizen printing the following line in Paine’s obituary: “He had lived long, did some good and much harm.”
All of this emphasizes another quality of books: that they are also a kind of time capsule, whose contents are sealed up when written but can be rediscovered decades, even centuries, later. So it was with Edison. When he says that you can’t realize your dreams unless you have one to begin with and that his desire was “to do everything within [his] power to free people from drudgery and create the largest measure of happiness and prosperity,” he is actually echoing the political manifesto of Thomas Paine for the American Revolution.
Edison was dyslexic and almost deaf since his early childhood and only received three months of formal education before he was requested to leave school at the age of seven due to his behavior. Fortunately his mother continued to believe in his rare abilities and intelligence and devoted herself to providing education at home. Edison later remembered lovingly, “My mother was the making of me. She was so true, so sure of me. And I felt I had something to live for, someone I must not disappoint.”
Under his mother’s guidance, a whole new world was opened for the young boy, and he became a passionate reader of world history, English literature, poetry, and the works of the great English scientist Isaac Newton.
Edison realized how lucky he was to have had this sort of education. He wrote later, “The most necessary task of civilization is to teach people how to think . . . The trouble with our way of educating is that it does not give elasticity to the mind. It casts the brain into a mold. It does not encourage original thought or reasoning, and it lays more stress on memory than observation.”
As mentioned above, Edison continued his education at home by creating a kind of laboratory in the basement; his parents had to tolerate occasional explosions caused by his experiments into the properties of chemicals. This was the forerunner for what later would be the world’s first R&D lab created by Edison at Menlo Park in 1876 and intended to be an “invention factory.” Outside the lab, Edison made extraordinary engineering progress too, in particular by designing and constructing the world’s first central power station. Testament to this, in 1882, the streets of Manhattan were for the first time lit up at night. Following a merger led by his friend the financier J. P. Morgan, the Edison Illuminating Company became the world’s best-known energy company: General Electric.
Edison was not just an inventor but also an entrepreneur who focused on what he saw as society’s need for innovation and betterment. He once said, “Anything that will not sell, I do not want to invent. Its sale is proof of utility, and utility is success.” He was a careful investor and built up a diversified portfolio of companies, including electric lighting systems, battery supplies, manufacturing, cement products, mining, and motion pictures. Explaining what he thought were the ingredients of success, he said, “The three great essentials to achieve anything worthwhile, are first hard-work; second, stick-to-itiveness, third, common sense.”
Thomas Edison and Tom Paine show the power of minds that are able to draw inspiration from diverse sources. This is also essentially the secret of the twentieth-century chemist Harry Kroto. While you may not know the name, you’ve probably already benefited from many of Kroto’s inventions—be they in medicine, space technology, or nanotechnology (that’s science conducted on the tiniest scale)—without realizing it. Kroto’s codiscovery of a new form of carbon, the so-called Fullerenes, earned him, together with the American scientists Robert Curl and Richard Smalley, a Nobel Prize in 1996. Their new way of seeing the universe affected science across areas ranging from cosmology to drug delivery and solar panels to light-emitting diodes.
However, that’s just the business-speak. I find his story appealing on many levels. Here is a scientist who was also an artist and a humanist who used his Nobel Prize to create educational opportunities. His arguments in favor of scientists having freedom and opportunities to pursue research that may not yet have a practical application mesh with my interest in promoting reading as a way of broadening horizons. Harry Kroto also praises philosophy as our tool to make sense of the world and distinguish truth and error. And last but not least, for twenty years we both lived in the same small town—Lewes in East Sussex on the south coast of England, the town where Thomas Paine first became interested in politics too. Small world!
Most importantly, Harry Kroto was a voracious and wide-ranging reader. In his home library, all the art, design, and photography books were always carefully filed away by category, but philosophy and science were allowed to mix. Hidden among thousands of other books are at least ten on Einstein with similar numbers for other people Kroto was particularly interested in. But then, a line he often liked to quote from J. R. R. Tolkien’s epic tale The Lord of the Rings is evocative: “Not all those who wander are lost,” and in such spirit he freely switches between references to philosopher Bertrand Russell’s writings and those of the physicist Richard Feynman’s “small and interesting book,” The Meaning of It All. His wife, Margaret Kroto, told me how Harry liked to refer to such texts when talking to young people and encouraging them to find out more about science. A favorite quote from Russell that he often used (actually a popular re-rendering of what Russell actually said) was, “The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubt.”
THE LORD OF THE RINGS
AUTHOR: J. R. R. TOLKIEN
WRITTEN IN STAGES BETWEEN 1937 AND 1949
The Lord of the Rings is certainly a great book. For one thing, it is a great big book. At about half a million words long, it is at least five times the length of the average novel. No wonder that Tolkien originally both presented and published it as three separate chunks, but they are nowadays invariably bound into one hefty tome.
It is also a rather odd book, written not just in English but in fifteen different “Elvish” dialects made up by the author, not to forget new languages for the Ents, the Orcs, the Dwarves, and the Hobbits, among others. Tolkien’s fascination with the workings of language even led him to create a separate sign language for the Dwarves—necessary because the forges they worked with were too loud.
Whether for its length or its obscurity, I suspect that Harry Kroto, like myself and many others, never actually read the whole book; that’s not really the point. The Lord of the Rings is more like an exotic alternative universe, carefully crafted by Tolkien from a range of surprisingly obscure academic sources.
Tolkien, you see, was a professor with a specialty in Anglo-Saxon and Old English. His first civilian job, after a period as a soldier in World War I, was at the Oxford English Dictionary, where he worked mainly on the history and etymology of words of Germanic origin beginning with the letter W, but he soon moved on to teaching and researching English in a university. This meant that he was familiar with works no one else was, such as the Old Norse Völsunga saga and the Old High German Nibelungenlied, both of them ancient texts featuring tales of magical golden rings and broken swords that become whole. Even the details of the characters in Tolkien’s book come from these earlier works. Gandalf, the wise old wizard, is particularly influenced by the Norse deity Odin, who is described in the ancient texts as an old man with one eye, a long white beard, a wide-brimmed hat, and a wooden staff. However, The Lord of the Rings manages to move beyond being just dusty references to long-obscured epic poems to become a series of tales about friendship, loyalty, sacrifice, and compassion.
Whether it was science or philosophy, for Kroto it was always underpinned by a love of mystery. Actually, like many of us, and not just scientists, Harry Kroto didn’t have the time to actually plough stolidly through the works of many philosophers, but he did enjoy snippets or potted versions of them. One such source for him was Paul Strathern’s biography Spinoza in 90 Minutes. The philosopher Spinoza is popular with scientists as he saw the whole of creation as containing an element of mind. In other words, he did not think that mind and matter were two distinct things but rather that both were aspects of the same thing. For Spinoza, this something had many aspects, including that of existing as rocks, as animals, and above all, as God. For scientists, this idea helps solve the mystery of the incredible complexity and precision of nature.
That’s full-blown metaphysics, but Kroto was also fond of skeptical quotes from literary figures such as Walt Whitman, who he reminded audiences had once said, “I like the scientific spirit, the holding off, the being sure but not too sure, the willingness to surrender ideas when the evidence is against them. This is ultimately fine—it keeps the way beyond open.”
As to what might be his favorite saying, though, a website he created himself called Kroto.info mentions two philosophers: Confucius and Plato. It was Confucius who wrote long ago, “I seek not the answer—but to understand the question,” but both philosophers could be summed up by this motto, which is also a fine general principle for all scientists. However, there is also a mystical side to the ancient Green, and this seems to have intrigued Kroto even more than the standard, textbook one. Where most mainstream philosophers hurried by, Kroto paused to look with great curiosity into Plato’s theory of geometrical solids.
TIMAEUS
AUTHOR: PLATO
WRITTEN AROUND 360 BCE
Timaeus, named after a leading character, is one of a series of short books recording supposed conversations between the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates and various members of the Athens elite. The dialogues, which are almost like mini-plays, albeit with more emphasis on conversations than “events,” have had a profound effect on the development of Western culture and influenced many later thinkers.
Each dialogue has its own special themes, with today the most famous dialogue being the one called the Republic, which deals with the nature of government and justice. However, in the dialogue known as Timaeus, Plato explores the geometry of matter and starts by describing Socrates’s invitation to Timaeus to consider the four elements that the ancients believed were the building blocks of the universe: fire, earth, air, and water.
First of all, Timaeus says, “To earth, then, let us assign the cubical form (or hexahedron); for earth is the most immoveable of the four and the most plastic of all bodies, and that which has the most stable bases must of necessity be of such a nature.”
Next, he explains that the shape of a pyramid (tetrahedron) is given to fire with part of the justification being that the shape is pointed and fire feels like being pricked or stabbed; the complicated-sounding, and indeed compli-cated-looking, icosahedron corresponds to water. The idea seems to be that water flows like little balls, and that is the effect of the geometry of icosahedra. Finally, air is made of octahedra, the explanation being that its minuscule components are so smooth that you can barely feel it.
There is, in fact, a fifth geometrical solid, the dodecahedron, concerning which Timaeus obscurely remarks, “The god used it for arranging the constellations on the whole heaven.” Now, okay, in one sense this is all nonsense. But it appears very technical and thus impressive. And at least Plato is right on the money when he says that symmetry defines structure and when, in general, he lent dignity and grandeur to the study of geometry and greatly stimulated its development. Scholars speculate that Euclid planned the classic work of mathematics, The Elements, to culminate with a proof supporting Plato’s ideas. In this sense, incredibly, Plato’s dialogue created most of what we know as mathematics—and foreshadowed atomic chemistry too.
Plato’s text, which is, remember, nearly 2,500 years old, and what is more is reporting the views of even older thinkers, such as Pythagoras, is quite extraordinarily prescient in terms of the geometry of chemical elements. In the Timaeus dialogue, named after an even older, Pythagorean thinker called Timaeus who (naturally) seems to have been interested in math, the central intuition is that the hidden structure of the elements creates their actual properties. This leads Plato to go on to describe threedimensional structures too, supposing that “the solid body which has taken the form of the pyramid—tetrahedron—is the element and seed of fire; and the second in order of generation—octahedron—let us say to be that of air, and the third—icosahedron—that of water.”
Fire, earth, air, water, and ether (which Aristotle added later, meaning whatever it was that filled up the space between the stars and planets): all together making the building blocks of the universe for the philosophers. These ingredients were arranged, they intuited even back then, according to the laws of mathematics. Indeed, today’s atomic microscopes reveal that dull, soft graphite has the carbon atoms arranged in hexagons, whereas the crystal structure of hard, sparkling diamonds is octahedral with the carbon atoms arranged in little pyramids.
In the dialogue known as the Timaeus, written around 360 BCE, Plato explores the geometry of matter. In this engraving, Plato’s five geometrical solids are imaginatively linked to the five ancient elements: earth, water, fire, air, and ether or empty space. (Johannes Kepler, Harmonices Mundi, 1619. http://geometricism.com/c/renaissance-geometricism.)
But calling these shapes the “Platonic solids” is a bit of a shortcut. Instead, they seem to belong to an even more ancient Greek philosopher called Pythagoras, who seems to have in turn been reporting discoveries made in his travels in North Africa and the East. However, maybe due to a Eurocentric cultural bias, these roots are often neglected in discussions of Plato’s writing, with the result that a lot of what was really being said is distorted and stripped from its cultural context. Introductions to philosophy, for example, often breathlessly relate that inscribed over the door of Plato’s Academy were the words‚ “Let no one who is ignorant of geometry enter,” yet it seems likely that it was not geometers who Plato invites in but geometrikoí. A small difference in spelling but a great difference in sense as this is the term for followers w the Great Path (also called the Parmenidean Path to Truth) in search of equality and justice. As the contemporary German physicist Peter Hubral, author of a book called The Socrates Code, say, such a shift in understanding would seem to make a great deal more sense.
Nonetheless, in both medieval and recent popular editions of Plato’s writings, the ancient dialogue is invariably accompanied by more recent line drawings of the elements themselves, showing them as complex geometrical solids constructed of simpler shapes and entitled “The Platonic Solids.” Kroto particularly focused on the illustrations that accompanied books and articles, and these line drawings bring the theory to life.
Likewise, well before him, Plato’s foray into the geometry of matter had inspired Renaissance artists such as Leonardo of Pisa to create sophisticated drawings of spherical solids intriguingly similar to the “buckyballs” that Kroto and his colleagues would later identify as a new class of carbon compounds, while craftsmen likewise adopted the potentials of the strange geometry to create striking wooden inlay panels like the one at the church of Santa Maria in Organo, Verona (northern Italy), in the closing years of the fifteenth century.
Wooden inlay panel by Giovanni of Verona, from the Church of Santa Maria in Organo, Verona, c. 1494–1499. Note in particular the very striking “buckyball” at the top of the image. (Fra Giovanni of Verona, Intarsia, wooden inlay, c. 1503–1506. http://geometricism.com/c/renaissance-geometricism.)
An illustration by Leonardo da Vinci, from Luca Pacioli’s book De divina proportione (On Divine Geometry), 1509 edition. (Leonardo da Pisa, Skeletised polehyrdon, for Luca Pacioli’s De Dvina Proportione woodcut, 1509. http://geometricism.com/c/renaissance-geometricism.)
Nonetheless, the most extraordinary legacy of Plato’s book is the very powerful idea that elements are composed of a few basic geometrical shapes that combine to allow new possibilities. And the key aspect of Kroto’s new carbon compound, Buckminsterfullerene, is a ball of carbon atoms created out of the fusing of simpler carbon shapes. Yet where and how could such fusing have taken place? Kroto favored the idea of compounds being created in the fire of red giant stars, an intuition that may again have been fueled by his reading of Plato, who says,
When earth meets with fire and is dissolved by the keenness of it, it would drift about, whether it were dissolved in fire itself, or in some mass of air or water, until the parts of it meeting and again being united became earth once more; for it never could pass into any other kind. But when water is divided by fire or by air, it may be formed again and become one particle of fire and two of air: and the divisions of air may become for every particle broken up two particles of fire. And again when fire is caught in air or in waters or in earth, a little in a great bulk, moving amid a rushing body, and contending with it is vanquished and broken up, two particles of fire combine into one figure of air: and when air is vanquished and broken small, from two whole and one half particle one whole figure of water will be composed. (Section 57a, Tr. R. D. Archer-Hind, The Timaeus of Plato [1888] pp. 203–05)
For whatever reason, Kroto suggested to his two key American collaborators, Robert Curl and Richard Smalley, that they should simulate the atmospheric conditions of red giant carbon stars. He hypothesized that the mysterious molecules had been created in the atmospheres of carbonrich red giant stars, and he wanted to use a piece of equipment invented by Smalley in order to investigate. Smalley’s apparatus fired pulsed laser beams at chemical elements, achieving temperatures hotter than the surface of most stars and vaporizing the target element.
As the vapor began to cool, the atoms would align in clusters. A second laser pulse ionized the clusters, pushing them into a mass spectrometer, where they could be analyzed. These experiments revealed the existence of a strange new kind of molecule made up of sixty carbon atoms. This was amazing as carbon had long been known to exist as diamond or graphite, or in impure form as grubby but essential coal, but carbon as a small molecule required completely new thinking.
In fact, when first approached by Kroto in 1984, Smalley and Curl had been reluctant to interrupt the cluster research that they had been conducting on metals and semiconductors to make the device available. But they ultimately conceded, and Kroto arrived at Rice University in September 1985. The first results of their carbon experiments, conducted with the assistance of graduate students James Heath, Sean O’Brien, and Yuan Liu, spawned the long carbon snakes that Kroto had sought. Harry was working with one student when the unusual peak was first noticed, and it is in his handwriting that the results are noted on this historic first printout—showing extraordinary peaks in the mass spectra of the clusters formed, indicating the presence of molecules composed of carbon 60 (and also carbon 70) atoms.
But what was this mystery molecule? A love of investigating mysteries was built into Kroto’s professional genes. Right from the start of his career, as a postdoctoral researcher at the National Research Council in Ottawa, Canada, in 1964, he was able, he says, to follow his intuitions; indeed, he describes an atmosphere in the laboratory that was “quite exhilarating.” Kroto started out as one of the more junior members of a team of highly distinguished people; however, there was no pecking order at Ottawa—rather, everyone was encouraged to share their ideas freely. Kroto later wrote that “the encouraging atmosphere was, in my opinion, the most important quality of the laboratory . . . it was a fantastic, free environment.”
A scanned copy of the historic first printout from the mass spectrometer showing two unusual peaks indicating molecules composed of sixty carbon atoms. The results are noted in Kroto’s handwriting.
The philosophy at Ottawa was to make the state-of-the-art equipment available and let the young scientists do almost whatever they wanted. The emphasis was on freedom to explore. Reflecting on this later, Kroto, whose own discoveries were as valuable as they were unexpected, always regretted that although it seemed obvious that unexpected discoveries must be intrinsically more important than predictable advances, it had become more and more difficult for scientists to obtain support for speculative, exploratory research—research, for example, such as attempting to reproduce the conditions that might have existed in the early universe by vaporizing graphite in an atmosphere of helium to generate clusters of carbon molecules.
Of course, the flip side of unexpected discoveries is that they can be hard to make sense of. In this case, though, a breakthrough came when Kroto realized that the atoms were bonding together in a symmetrical hollow structure resembling a sphere.
This is perhaps where Kroto drew not only on his artistic side and knowledge of graphic design but his reading of that ancient philosophical theory too: he proposed that the carbon 60 molecule was made up of a mixture of pentagons and hexagons. Not only had such geometrical patterns been explored even in ancient times but they had also had a contemporary life both in the steel-framed geodesic domes created by the American architect Richard Buckminster Fuller and in the mix of pentagons and hexagons created by the stitching of modern soccer balls. Kroto himself emphasized more the former, recalling seeing some of the domes at the Montreal World Exhibition.
One way or another, the discovery of the unique structure of fullerenes, or buckyballs, opened up an entirely new branch of chemistry. Kroto, along with Curl and Smalley, jointly received their Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1996 for it. At first, though, no one could prove the existence of these new spherical molecules, and indeed many were openly skeptical.
Undeterred, Smalley speculated that the buckyballs might actually be not only one of the most common molecules in the universe but one of the oldest. If they were indeed created in the seething heat of red giant stars ten to twenty billion years ago, he suggested, then they might have served as the primordial nuclei around which the first solid objects coalesced: interstellar dust particles, then rocks, asteroids, comets, planets, and finally the opportunity for life on earth. It’s enough to make you very philosophical.
Indeed, in the following years, Kroto’s work on these large and unstable molecules included a detailed study of carbon chains with David Walton, a Sussex colleague with a knack for making long snakes of these, with whom he had been sharing ideas about carbon atoms for many years. This led to a radio astronomy program that uncovered that the newly discovered molecules existed in vast amounts throughout interstellar space and in the gas ejected from carbon stars.
Kroto’s background in graphic design and his long-standing interest in architecture are the first and most obvious factors regularly cited for his arriving at a possible structure for the mysterious carbon 60 atoms ahead of his colleagues, but ideas grow from subtler inputs.
Indeed, when asked, he usually insisted that pictures spoke more for him than words. As a young child he had cut out and collected images from publications such as the Radio Times (the British TV listings magazine) and also visited travel agents on Saturday mornings to pick up brochures, which in those days used drawings rather than photographs. He had also bought The Eagle, the illustrated British comic magazine that featured Dan Dare and re-created many drawings of airplanes and other images from it. His school biology book had beautiful and intricate drawings, notably one of a frog.
Even as a young chemist, he still devoted considerable time to a student magazine called Arrows, specializing in designing its covers and posters. However, it’s worth restating, Kroto’s passion for art still has a lot to do with books, not least because book covers are part of the magic of reading. In fact, Harry Kroto’s first major award was for a book jacket design. And it was with a mix of grand ideas and an artist’s eye that he visited the 1967 Universal Exposition and saw there the ultramodern geodesic domes of Robert Buckminster Fuller.
Writing for a German science blog, the writer Ashutosh Jogalekar has described Kroto’s life story as one of serendipitous scientific discovery, adding that “the trick in science consists of seeing what everyone sees, and thinking of what nobody thinks.” Indeed, in this case, literally so. Because, in fact, other research chemists, including a team working for the oil company Exxon in the United States led by Andy Kaldor, had seen very similar results about two years earlier but not grasped the significance. Thus the question of why Kroto was the first to understand what he was seeing is a very real one. And although Kroto himself talks of seeing the Montreal Expo dome as the key experience that permitted the later insight into the chemistry, I think the visual observation itself fitted into a larger, more philosophical mindset nourished by books.
A UNIVERSAL MOLECULE
Carbon 60 is now firmly fixed in the textbooks as a third allotrope or physical form of carbon and is being applied to everything from superconductors to solar cells. In a special reprint of a 1991 cover story on Kroto from 2016, in honor of his passing, Edward Edelson described how Kroto’s idea upturned the world of chemistry: “In California, Robert Whetten fired buckyball molecules into a stainless steel wall at 15,000 miles an hour. They bounced back unharmed. ‘It’s resilient beyond any particle that’s been known,’ Whetten exclaimed to Edelson, adding that the newly discovered material was resilient enough, maybe, to be used as rocket fuel, which must withstand enormous pressures.”
For IBM’s Don Bethune, though, that was just the beginning. “This molecule looks like something some genius engineer sat down and designed. . . . There’s the possibility of making molecular Christmas trees. We can decorate them with all sorts of functional groups. It’s a Swiss army knife of a molecule.”
With transistors the size of single molecules, for example, electronic devices can become dramatically smaller. Molecular electronics is a subfield of nanotechnology, the broader effort to view, measure, and manipulate materials at the molecular or atomic scale, approaches anticipated by Richard Feynman in 1959 when he became interested in DNA and the mechanisms of genetics.
Perhaps the most significant fullerenes to emerge since the buckyball are the carbon nanotubes, often dubbed “buckytubes,” discovered in Japan. They are excellent conductors of heat and electricity and extremely strong. Applications in electronics, structural materials, and medicine beckon. You already benefit from them in the form of LED (light-emitting diode) displays. It is this kind of molecular flexibility that seems to have given the carbon 60 molecule a vital role in the formation of the universe and the creation of matter itself.
Following his Nobel Prize, Kroto devoted himself to visiting schools and colleges and campaigning for what he called “an astute analytical approach to all aspects of life.” In general lectures he would stress that natural philosophy, meaning the search for the rules and underlying principles governing nature and the universe, “is the only philosophical construct we have devised to determine truth with any degree of reliability” and that “the ethical purpose of education must be the schooling of young people in the ways of deciding what they are being told or what they believe is actually true.”
With this focus in mind, it is the words of another philosopher, Bertrand Russell (from the book Unpopular Essays), that he would frequently recite to young people: “Man is a credulous creature and without good reasons to believe he is satisfied with bad ones.” In like spirit, Kroto would recall President Kennedy’s dictum that “the great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived, and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Belief in myths allows the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.”
The moral of this seems to be that we cannot always be sure that what we take as factual will always be true. It has even been said that the majority of information in textbooks today will be revised within two generations. Samuel Arbesman, a mathematician at Harvard, calls this “the half-life of facts” and compares this churn of knowledge to radioactive decay. You cannot predict which individual fact is going to succumb, but you can be pretty sure about how long it takes for half the facts in a discipline to become obsolete.
Nonetheless, the idea that science is a grand edifice constructed “brick by brick” persists, with the result that complex issues from climate change to gender roles are often reduced to misleading simplicities by people claiming access to a universe of unchanging, monolithic facts.
All of which is why Kroto would sometimes close a session or talk with a phrase of Don Marquis: “If you make people think they’re thinking, they’ll love you but if you really make them think, they’ll hate you.” More than this, though, it was Tolkien’s words in the epic novel Lord of the Rings that sum up Kroto’s way of doing science: “Not all who wander are lost.” This wonderfully quotable line directly connected to his way of working: if the result he was expecting didn’t come, he looked for the reasons why, often saying, “I think there’s something interesting there.” And that is exactly the spirit that governed his reading too.
ANOTHER SIDE OF THE LORD OF THE RINGS
J. R. R. Tolkien’s son, Christopher, offers a curious insight into “the story behind the story.” He says that it was actually in Yorkshire during a yearlong convalescence from trench fever, contracted in the hellish landscape of World War I in France, that J. R. R. found the spark of inspiration for both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
At this time, even as the war raged on a country away, Tolkien and his wife, Edith, found peace and beauty in a small woodland glade not far from the sanatorium. It seems that here Edith began to dance for Tolkien among the trees, creating a moment fixed powerfully forever in his mind. Tolkien imagined her as a kind of Elvish princess and likened her to Princess Lúthien, one of the figures in the ancient texts, and himself to Beren, a mortal onlooker. “In those days her hair was raven, her skin clear, her eyes brighter than you have seen them, and she could sing—and dance,” Tolkien wrote in a letter to Christopher long after, on July 11, 1972.
And some of the descriptions of journeys draw upon his own real-life experiences too. Bilbo Baggins, for example, the title character and central figure of The Hobbit and a supporting character in The Lord of the Rings, follows a route in the book across the Misty Mountains, including a “glissade down the slithering stones into the pine woods” that is based on Tolkien’s recollections of his real-life adventures as one of a party of twelve hikers exploring the foothills and mountains of Switzerland.
The plot centers on an ancient ring, called the One Ring, with mysterious powers, forged by Sauron, the Dark Lord, that happens to fall into the hands of a hobbit called Bilbo Baggins. For some, but perhaps rather confusingly not all, the ring confers the power of invisibility, echoing Plato’s ancient description of the Ring of Gyges, and just as Plato warned, the price paid by the wearer is a slow corruption of character. Such a thing would not worry Sauron, of course, who, from his base in the Dark Tower of Mordor, searches far and wide for the ring to complete his dominion, but in vain.
Eventually Bilbo reaches his “eleventy-first birthday” and disappears, but not before bequeathing to his young cousin Frodo the task of undertaking a perilous journey across Middle-earth, traveling deep into the shadow of the Dark Lord to destroy the One Ring by casting it into the Cracks of Doom.
Well, that’s the plot, and whether or not people actually read the thing, The Lord of the Rings is indisputably one of the best-selling novels ever written, with over 150 million copies sold worldwide, not to forget entirely the three very popular film adaptations.
Notes
1. The bridge was demolished in 1929. There is only one bridge in the United States that really embodies Tom Paine’s idea, the Dunlap Creek Bridge in Pennsylvania, which stands as the first cast-iron arch bridge in America, built between 1836 and 1839, long after Paine’s death.