Philadelphia Symposium Honors Buckminster Fuller

The extraordinary influence exerted on science and society by the work and ideas of the American geometrician, engineer, architect, and designer R. Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) was the subject of Science Kick '94--a special, day-long symposium held at the University City Science Center (UCSC) in Philadelphia on May 25. " 'Bucky' Fuller was a really special guy," says William Reach, a Philadelphia songwriter who was the principal force in organizing the event. Reach first became interested in the visionary engineer in 1977, when he attended a talk given by Fuller in Los Angeles. His enthusiasm eventually led Reach to launch a recent effort to educate the public about Fuller's ideas--resulting in the symposium, which was supported in part by the National Science Foundation. Held at UCSC, where Fuller had worked for the last 10 years of his life, the symposium featured talks by people from different fields whose work has been colored by Fuller's concepts. Best known for popularizing the geodesic dome, Fuller was described by many at the meeting as a "true Renaissance man," having, at different times in his life, been an inventor, poet, and philosopher. The many fields of endeavor in which his ideas continue to have a profound impact are perhaps best exemplified by the variety of people who gathered to pay tribute to his life and work. They included architects, artists, and engineers, as well as chemists, biologists, and even a dress designer. A onetime associate of Fuller's, Arthur Loeb--a senior lecturer on visual and environmental studies at Harvard University--spoke about the applications of Fuller's design principles in determining the stability of shapes and structures in a lecture titled "Buckminster Fuller Vs. the Irrational." Using a stick model that Fuller once gave him, Loeb demonstrated the instability of four-sided figures as compared to triangles. "Bucky often commented on people's obsession with the cube as a basic figure, when really the tetrahedron and octahedron are more stable and fundamental shapes," said Loeb. The extension of these same principles is the basis for the extraordinary stability of geodesic domes, which, say engineers, are the only large domes that can be set on the ground as complete structures. It was owing to the geodesic dome that Fuller's name became immortalized as the official designation of a 60-atom form of carbon discovered in 1985. The extremely stable, soccer ball-shaped molecule echoed in form the geodesic dome, with the 60 carbon atoms at the vertices arranged in a pattern of 20 hexagons and 12 pentagons. It was dubbed "buckminsterfullerene," and is now most frequently referred to as the "buckyball." "The initial genesis of the name was in a joke," says Richard Smalley, one of the codiscoverers of the molecule and a conference attendee. "But though the name seemed long and unwieldy, and with too many syllables, none of the other suggestions--'carbosoccer' among them--had the same zing." A professor of chemistry and physics at Rice University in Houston, Smalley spoke on the properties and potential of buckyballs and related materials called fullerenes, which-- resembling their versatile namesake--have many possible applications in several different fields. Fred Wudl, a chemistry professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, for example, spoke about derivatives of buckyballs that act as inhibitors of reverse transcriptase, the enzyme that viruses like HIV use for replication. Participating in the Philadelphia meeting via videophone from his home in Sri Lanka was science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke. Clarke had speculated on the possibility of an earth-to-space elevator held by diamond cables in one of his novels, The Fountains of Paradise (Victoria, Australia, Richmond South, 1979), and Fuller, a friend of Clarke's, had sketched pictures of the proposed elevators. Smalley, speaking of "buckytubes"--microscopic carbon tubes looking like elongated buckyballs--commented on the truth-imitating- fiction quality of Clarke's elevators. While warning the audience that the longest tubes obtained as yet were still only microscopic in scale, Smalley remarked on Clarke's astuteness in using cables of diamond, which was the material with the strength and composition closest to actual buckytubes then known to scientists. As a symbolic gesture at the end of the day's program, Reach kicked a soccer ball that had been injected with some buckyball particles synthesized by scientists at the nearby Laboratory for Research on the Structure of Matter at the University of Pennsylvania. Coinciding with Science Kick '94, UCSC sponsored an art exhibition featuring works by Harvard students that reflected Fuller's ideas. The exhibit, held at UCSC's Esther M. Klein Gallery, also displayed some of Fuller's own drawings and sculptural designs.

Philadelphia Symposium Honors Buckminster Fuller

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