Lucky Seven

In high school chemistry I was pretty glad when I managed to complete the project that had us making aspirin. I think I got a B.

George Wang, a student at the Oklahoma School of Science and Math, outstripped me just a bit. He proved a fundamental tenet of chemistry wrong. And got himself published in a chemistry journal.

Carbon atoms, most of the time, can form four bonds with other atoms. This helps it play its role in the creation of things like alcohol or methane. Under very specific circumstances, carbon can form six bonds with other atoms; a team of German scientists discovered this in 2016 and called such atoms "hypercarbon."

Wang's chemistry teacher asked his students if it was possible to form more; which most scientists believed a carbon atom could not do. Wang discovered that if carbon was in a form called "tropylium trication," it could actually form seven bonds, and when his teacher checked his work they collaborated with a University of Oklahoma professor and published it. The seven-bond carbon could turn out to have practical uses, rather than just be an oddball scientific anomaly.

Wang himself has already been accepted to Stanford University, where the article at Inverse says he "hopes to study chemistry."

I bet they'll let him.