Tuesday, July 6, 2010

60 ball sphere





The blue ball shown here is, I think, my most geometrically interesting piece. It's not exactly a Sierpinski structure, but heading in that direction. The individual spheres are dodecahedrons, and the overall structure is a buckyball. It differs from the one in the beaded molecule blog, though, in that the small spheres are not strung together to form the large sphere. Instead, the adjoining small spheres share a face, just as cubes do in right angle weave. In order to make this work I had to change the buckeyball. Where the beads in a beaded buckyball usually represent the edges of the ball (so there are 90) in this structure they represent the vertices, so there are 60. In terms of the carbon-60 structure, I suppose that would mean they represent the carbon atoms, instead of the links between the atoms. Again, I'm not a chemist, so I'm more or less guessing, but that seems logical to me.
The other 2 pictures are earlier attempts to make the sphere. In each case I got sidetracked when I got partway through. I found that I didn't want to close up the sphere, but I wanted the inside to show. For the first one I just added long fringe to the open edge. For the 2nd one I added another row of 6-ball circles to give it more height, and then added some balls on the outer edge to make a lip. I think they're prettier that the sphere, but I did want to make one actual sphere, so the 3rd time around I completed it.

2 comments:

  1. Awesome work; the buckyball dodecahedron is amazing!

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  2. Lovely work. Nice photos. Keep up the great work!

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