Richard Smalley Atom Quotations

Nature - how, we don't know - has technology that works in every living cell and that depends on every atom being precisely in the right spot. Enzymes are precise down to the last atom. They're molecules. You put the last atom in, and it's done. Nature does things with molecular perfection.

The buckyball, with sixty carbon atoms, is the most symmetrical form the carbon atom can take. Carbon in its nature has a genius for assembling into buckyballs. The perfect nanotube, that is, the nanotube that the carbon atom naturally wants to make and makes most often, is exactly large enough that one buckyball can roll right down the center.

After a few years of intensive research, we found a way to use a pulsed laser directed into a nozzle to vaporize any material, allowing for the first time the atoms of any element in the periodic table to be produced cold in a supersonic beam.

Diamond, for all its great beauty, is not nearly as interesting as the hexagonal plane of graphite. It is not nearly as interesting because we live in a three-dimensional space, and in diamond, each atom is surrounded in all three directions in space by a full coordination.