Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Fullerenes and Femtoseconds: Ten Stories Inspired by the Nobel Prize in Chemistry Laureates, 1990 to 1999

Fullerenes and Femtoseconds: Ten Stories Inspired by the Nobel Prize in Chemistry Laureates, 1990 to 1999

Alden, Simon

Paperback

Series: The Nobel Chemistry Stories: A Decade-By-Decade Short Story, Book 10

Chemistry

ISBN13: 9798195481735
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jul 1 2026
Pages: 190
Weight: 0.52
Height: 0.48 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
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.

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