654877bd_erials_Science_and_Engineering__Significance
[Date] 1985 [Candidate Moment] Robert Curl, Jr., Richard Smalley, and Harold Walter Kroto discover that some carbon arranges itself in the form of soccer-ball-shaped molecules with 60 atoms called buckminsterfullerenes or "buckyballs." [Significance] 
Opens the possibility that carbon can assume an almost infinite number of different structures.
Greatest Moments in Materials Science and Engineering
Significance