John Carlos Baez on Nostr: I'm preparing a talk called Visions for the Future of Physics, so I'm bumping into ...
I'm preparing a talk called Visions for the Future of Physics, so I'm bumping into various cool things I hadn't known about. This one comes from chemistry: the Stone-Wales transformation!
Buckminsterfullerene is a molecule shaped like a soccer ball, made of 60 carbon atoms. If one of the bonds between two hexagons rotates, we get a weird mutant version of this molecule. This is an example of a Stone-Wales transformation.
But the same sort of transformation can happen in graphene, which is a flat sheet of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal tiling of the plane. I'll show you how it works.
(The image here created by L. A. Openov and Mikhail Maslov in their paper "On the Vineyard Formula for the Pre-Exponential Factor in the Arrhenius Law", which you can find here:
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Stone-Wales-transformation-in-fullerene-C-60-The-black-color-indicates-the-C-C-bond_fig2_263126695)
(1/n)
Published at
2025-05-06 07:33:57 UTCEvent JSON
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"content": "I'm preparing a talk called Visions for the Future of Physics, so I'm bumping into various cool things I hadn't known about. This one comes from chemistry: the Stone-Wales transformation! \n\nBuckminsterfullerene is a molecule shaped like a soccer ball, made of 60 carbon atoms. If one of the bonds between two hexagons rotates, we get a weird mutant version of this molecule. This is an example of a Stone-Wales transformation.\n\nBut the same sort of transformation can happen in graphene, which is a flat sheet of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal tiling of the plane. I'll show you how it works.\n\n(The image here created by L. A. Openov and Mikhail Maslov in their paper \"On the Vineyard Formula for the Pre-Exponential Factor in the Arrhenius Law\", which you can find here:\n\nhttps://www.researchgate.net/figure/Stone-Wales-transformation-in-fullerene-C-60-The-black-color-indicates-the-C-C-bond_fig2_263126695)\n\n(1/n)\nhttps://media.mathstodon.xyz/media_attachments/files/114/459/684/359/686/495/original/1e1777b34f9c14fa.png\n",
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