CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

PASADENA

GATES AND CRELLIN LABORATORIES OF CHEMISTRY

20 June 1962

Mr. Kenneth Snelson

148 Spring Street

New York 12, New York

Dear Mr. Snelson:

I have been pleased to read your letter and to examine the photographs and models. I return your letter with the photographs herewith, and I am returning the models under separate cover.

I remember Buckminster Fuller from a good number of years ago, when I showed him my models. They bear some resemblance to his geodesic dome.

The circle models that you have sent me are interesting and attractive. So far as I can see, they are essentially equivalent to polyhedra. If the circles all have the same diameter, then the polyhedra are limited by being regular and having the same internal diameter. From the standpoint of polyhedron theory your models do not, so far as I can see, have any novelty. For example, the most complex one is represented by the group of 32 atoms shown at the lower left of Figure k of the enclosed paper on the stochastic method and the structure of proteins.

I do not think that your ideas about the electronic structure of atoms, molecules, and crystals have value. They are somewhat similar to ideas about the so-called magneton electron published nearly fifty years ago by a man whose name I forget, a former student in the Chemistry Department of the University of California at Berkeley. I think that his paper, about 1915, was in the Journal of the Franklin Institute. I believe that a reference to it is in the book on valence published about 1922, by G. N. Lewis. I do not have a copy of the book available to check.

I note that on your photographs page 4 you use the expression space groups. You probably should not use this expression, because it has a well-defined and generally accepted meaning. There are 230 space groups (groups of symmetry operations in three dimensional space), and crystallographers are careful not to use this expression in any other way.

I have been pleased to examine your models, and I thank you for sending them to me.

Sincerely

(signed) Linus Pauling