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Qwinn said: "Actually, to go from lead to gold, you need to remove three protons from each atom (82 to 79). "

D'oh !!! I've referred to my periodic table three times today. Should've been four.

Good point about how our predecessors deserve a lot of credit for what they were able to discover.

One of the things that I admire Newton for was his single minded pursuit of a way to prove that the gravitational attraction of a spherical mass can be approximated very closely by a point source at its center. I've never been so fascinated by a problem that I have invented calculus to solve it.

Some of the applications of bucky balls and bucky tubes are getting interesting. The regular repeating structure is similar to the underlying structures of semiconductors and applications are being worked on to exploit the possibilities. It's fascinating that C60 was discovered just because there was an unexplained peak on a spectrum.

Has anyone made a bucky ball out of silicon yet? Perhaps it is unable to support its own weight under 1 gravity. Sounds like a mission for the space station. Has anybody done any work on this? If not, I wan't it named "WilliamTell-ine". It's only fair.

One of the things that I admire Newton for was his single minded pursuit of a way to prove that the gravitational attraction of a spherical mass can be approximated very closely by a point source at its center.

It's not really an approximation.

Has anyone made a bucky ball out of silicon yet?

Yes (there are probably better examples):

http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v74/i8/p1427_1

Superconductivity in the Silicon Clathrate Compound (Na,Ba) xSi46
Hitoshi Kawaji, Hiro-omi Horie, Shoji Yamanaka, and Mitsuo Ishikawa

Department of Applied Chemistry, Faculty of Engineering, Hiroshima University, Higashi-Hiroshima 724, Japan

Received 8 August 1994

A new silicon clathrate compound containing barium, (Na,Ba) xSi46, becomes a type-II superconductor with a critical temperature (Tc) of about 4 K. In the compound, the silicon atoms are bonded tetrahedrally with about the same bond distances as in ordinary cubic diamond Si, but form 12- and 14-hedral cages which are linked by shared faces. The metal atoms are located in the center of the polyhedra. This is the first superconductor consisting of a Si sp3 covalent network.