The five rings they commissioned a professor at the University of Warrick two work and make this molecule because it's a new molecule hasn't got a name, So they called it Olympus Scene, which is quite nice name.

Once it had been made on, I presume it was a white powder.

They then worked with scientists in the IBM lamp in Zurich to actually produce an image so you can see the shape of the molecule, which is really quite a good feet off science to image the molecule.

I look to the image really excited.

And then I suddenly felt disappointed because the rings were not linked in the way that the Olympic rings ought to be linked.

I then thought, Could you actually make the rial Olympic rings where you have molecules linked together?

It turns out that people have made molecules of rings linked together like these two rings here.

They even have a name they called cattle names, and the first time that they were made, they took a molecule, which essentially a straight string of carbon atoms and carbon hydrogen atoms with reactive groups at the end.

So you can react them together and make a ring if you dissolve these molecules and solution and get them to react.

If the solution is concentrated, different molecules just stick together and you get long chains.

But if the solution is very dilute, the molecule will is it were bite its own tail and form a ring.

So now you have a solution of rings.

You then add some more material, but now more concentrated and hope that one or two of these molecules poke through the hole so that when you add the re agent to make them react, they will react together, and you will get to linked one inside the other.

When I was a student in the late 19 sixties, after a huge amount of work, some people managed to make a very small amount off cattle Nane like this, with two rings doing together.

More recently, chemists in France came up with a much clever a way of making Catalans, in which you could make them in quite large quantities.

You begin with a solution of metal irons like copper or something like that, and you have the same sort of long molecules.

But this time you have some sort of group in the middle, which will bond onto the metal.

And so you bond first full.

One met one of these molecules onto the metal and the new bond on a 2nd 1 So now if you imagine you have these two long straight molecules joined together by the metal atom, you then do the reaction, which joins If I could do it, which joins the two rings together, and it's easier to do it with a molecule that notice with this piece of rubber, and then you've got the two rings joined together.

Then you've got the two rings still joined with the metal and the final stage with a bit more chemistry, and the metal comes out.

So now, instead of relying on chance, you've got the linked rings because the metal acted as a sort of mould to join these things together.

And you can imagine that you could keep on doing this and make a longer chain of rings.

You may not have realized, because I didn't realize until a few days ago.

Olympic rings.

Although it has one ring under another, these two are not joined together.

So in fact, there's a chain of rings.

They're five rings in the Olympic symbol, and the problem is that and I still haven't thought had to do this.

Is that if you use one of these corporate atoms, you always gonna get even number of rings.

So I could imagine how you could make two rings for ring six rings.

But I haven't worked out yet how you don't make five.

So I think that's a problem Which side should leave for the students like you to solve?

I've given you the basic idea like any good teacher.

Now I leave it to the students as their homework exercise to work out how you'd make five rings in a row.