FULLERENES AND FEMTOSECONDS: TEN STORIES INSPIRED BY THE NOBEL PRIZE IN CHEMISTRY LAUREATES, 1990 TO 1999 (The Nobel Chemistry Stories: A Decade-by-Decade Short Story Series, Band 10) - Softcover

Inhaltsangabe

Fullerenes and Femtoseconds is the tenth volume in a series of thirteen short story collections, each covering a decade of Nobel Prize winners in Chemistry.

Between 1990 and 1999, chemistry mastered the extremes of speed, scale, and complexity. Scientists caught reactions happening in a fraction of a trillionth of a second, discovered an entirely new architecture of carbon, and moved quantum theory into the computer as a "third laboratory". They learned to copy and edit DNA at will, tracked the hidden environmental chains destroying the ozone layer, and turned the synthesis of complex molecules from a trial-and-error craft into a rigorous, backward-planning strategy.

In this tenth volume, ten prizes become ten works of literary fiction: a forensic chemist who solves a designer-drug case backwards, mapping the retrosynthetic "disconnection tree" to a single bottleneck reagent; a food-fraud investigator who uses multidimensional NMR to expose counterfeit oils through the subtle dynamic motions of their molecules; a bridge collapse blamed on material defects, until a chemist proves the surrounding micro-environment accelerated corrosion via electron-transfer pathways; a cold-case detective whose newly amplified trace DNA evidence reveals a deliberate, long-game contamination; an industrial accident reconstructed by trapping a fleeting, positively charged carbocation intermediate that management claimed was impossible; a coastal town's sudden UV spike traced to a radical-driven atmospheric chain reaction triggered by a supposedly compliant factory; a journalist tracking a sophisticated counterfeiting ring that relies on the unregulated, cage-like architecture of newly discovered fullerenes; a hospital sabotage campaign executed by subtly interfering with the molecular turbines and pumps that maintain cellular energy; a computational chemist whose low-energy prediction of a catastrophic plant failure is tragically ignored by management; and a reluctant whistleblower who watches a chemical reaction unfold frame-by-frame on a femtosecond timescale, contradicting the community's most celebrated theories.

Every discovery is accurate. Every story is new. Together they make the 1990s not a chapter in a textbook but a living world, full of people for whom these ideas arrived not as settled knowledge but as sudden, disorienting, and irreversible light.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.