FULLERENES AND FEMTOSECONDS: TEN STORIES INSPIRED BY THE NOBEL PRIZE IN CHEMISTRY LAUREATES, 1990 TO 1999 - Couverture souple

ALDEN, SIMON

Couverture souple

ISBN 13 : 9798195481735

Editeur : Independently published, 2026

Synopsis

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.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Independently published
• Date d'édition: 2026
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 13: 9798195481735
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 189
• Coordonnées du fabricant: Manufactured by Amazon on behalf of the author; https://www.amazon.fr/hz/contact-us; ; c/o Amazon Media EU S.à.r.l., 38 Avenue John F. Kennedy; Luxembourg; L-1855; Luxembourg