Nobel Prize winner Sir Harold Kroto expands the universe of scientific thinking with a mind-bending lecture on buckyballs, bridges that can’t break and the harmful effect of religion

Nobel Laureate Sir Harold Kroto graced the St Augustine campus with his presence as part of the Distinguished Open Lecture Series on Friday, October 13. Sir Harold, who received the 1996 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, was disarmingly, and unexpectedly, lucid, despite the title of his presentation, “Architecture in Nanospace”. All fears of his talk being obscure and highly technical evaporated, as he made the discovery of a class of carbon compounds called fullerenes, or buckyballs, seem like child’s play.

The youthful and energetic 67-year-old bounced on the balls of his feet of the LRC auditorium as he raced, excitedly, and with that charming British passion for wordplay, through a spell-binding sojourn in a universe made up of collapsible buckyballs, Meccano sets, an unbreakable carbon and nuclear bombs.

As if to get the matter of why he was awarded the Nobel Prize out of the way, Sir Harold, backed up by an artillery of Power Point slides, quickly explained how he came to discover previously unknown forms of carbon containing even numbers of carbon atoms ranging from 40 to more than 100. Loosely translated, it is unbreakable. Sir Harold and his team’s discovery—imagine if we could make a plane or bridge out of such a material—has opened up an entirely new branch of chemistry. Buckyballs can also be used to make cheap solar cells; “doping” plastic solar cells with C60 increases electricity production.

Far from being nerdy and bookish, Sir Harold has always been well-rounded, and amazingly down-to-earth. He spent the last year of his first degree doing two to three hours of work every day in the sports office in the student union, managing to do enough chemistry in between tennis, some snooker and football, designing covers and posters for the student magazine, painting murals as backdrops for balls and trying to play the guitar, to get a first-class honours (1958-61) and a PhD (1961-64), as well as some job offers. He also got married.

The media have painted a portrait of science and scientists as either mad (like Einstein) or boringly obscure, he said. He showed photos of the young Einstein, well-groomed and spiffy, having already begun to work on the theory of relativity at age 17. Yet, the iconic image used is that of him in his older days, his hair apparently electric-shocked. This has made science unappealing and un-hip to the younger generation. Having developed an unhealthy interest in chemistry himself through lessons with a teacher who used a gas blowpipe to melt lead, Sir Harold lamented the banning of experiments in classrooms—“the smells and bangs that endowed chemistry with that slight but charismatic element of danger”. The “wimpish” chemistry training that schools are now forced to adopt is one possible reason that chemistry is no longer attracting as many talented and adventurous youngsters as it once did, he has said. “If the decline in hands-on science education is not redressed, I doubt that we shall survive the 21st century.”

In true renaissance style, Sir Harold also contemplates philosophy, art and history. He dispenses with religion and the rise of fundamentalism as a disturbing movement that does not bode well for the human race. Religion smothered the freedom to doubt, to think critically, to ask questions—and has put the world in the crisis it’s in now. “The desperate need we have for such organisations as Amnesty International has become, for me, one of the pieces of incontrovertible evidence that no divine (mystical) creator (other than the simple Laws of Nature) exists,” he said in his Nobel acceptance speech.

Indeed amnesty-internationalism is one of his four “religions”; the other three being humanism, atheism, and humourism. He drew on all as he traced the trajectory of his life’s work as beginning the moment he encountered a Meccano set as a child. Unlike Lego, which Sir Harold dismissed as a mere toy, Meccano was a real engineering kit and it taught him the basics of engineering. That and working in his father’s small factory making balloons. He filled in everywhere, from mixing latex dyes to repairing the machinery and replacing workers on the production line. It was an outstanding training ground in developing the problem solving skills he would need as a research scientist.

“I am also sure that what I was doing then would contravene present-day health and safety at work regulations,” he said in the Nobel speech. “I would have been considered too young and inexperienced to do the sort of maintenance work that I was often called upon to do. I did the stocktaking twice-a-year using a set of old scales with sets of individual gram weights (weighing balloons 10 at-a-time to obtain their average weights), my head, log tables and a slide rule to determine total numbers of various types of balloons.”

One of his pet projects is the Vega Science Trust, an educational charity he set up in 1995 to create high-quality science films and teaching resources for TV and the Internet. In addition to using his talent as a graphic artist to design logos and his website (www.vega.ork.uk), Sir Harold also takes his buckyballs around the world to classrooms to spark children’s interest in science. They all have games and computers, he pointed out, but how many understand how a watch works? He highlighted how bad science and maths education was these days, referring to cases in the UK where nurses who didn’t know simple maths, such as the significance of the decimal point, had given patients ten times the prescribed dose of salt.

The future of the world rests on science, he told the audience. “Governments, parents and industry must work towards getting our best and brightest working to solve the problems facing the planet.”

Additional source: Les Prix Nobel. The Nobel Prizes 1996, Editor Tore Frängsmyr, [Nobel Foundation], Stockholm, 1997]