2 NOBEL PRIZES SHARED BY 6 SCIENTISTS : 5 AMERICANS, ONE BRITON HONORED FOR DISCOVERIES IN CHEMISTRY, PHYSICS.

Byline: Malcolm W. Browne The New York Time

Six scientists, five of them Americans, shared two Nobel Prizes Wednesday, one of them for founding an important branch of chemistry based on molecules shaped like soccer balls, and the other for discovering intriguing connections between the physics of the ultra-small and the ultra-large.

The Nobel Prize in chemistry was won by Dr. Richard E. Smalley, 53, and Dr. Robert F. Curl Jr., 63, of Rice University in Houston and Sir Harold W. Kroto, 57, of the University of Sussex, England. They were honored for their discovery of a previously unknown class of carbon molecule, in which 60 carbon atoms are linked in the form of a soccer ball.

These and similar molecules were dubbed ``fullerenes'' or ``buck-yballs'' after the discovery in 1985 because their geodesic molecular structures are suggestive of the architectural domes designed by Buckminster Fuller. Since then, chemists have synthesized some 5,000 variants of the buckyball, including elongated spheroids, sheets of carbon and microscopic tubes.

The Nobel Prize in physics, which, like the prize in chemistry, is worth $1.12 million, was awarded to Dr. David M. Lee, 65, and Dr. Robert C. Richardson, 59, of Cornell University and Dr. Douglas D. Osheroff, 52, of Stanford University. At the time of their 1972 discovery of a phenomenon called superfluidity in a rare form of helium, helium-3, Osheroff was a graduate student at Cornell.

Superfluidity is a condition ob-served in liquid helium when it is chilled very close to absolute zero (about minus 459.67 degrees Fahrenheit). Superfluid helium loses the viscosity associated with ordinary fluids and flows without resistance. It can climb the walls of containers and flow down the outside, among many other strange tricks.

In ordinary liquid helium, helium-4, superfluidity was discovered in the 1930s by Russian physicist Peter Kapitza (for which he was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1978). Superfluid helium-4 has become a common tool of science and will be used as the coolant fluid in the Large Hadron Collider, a huge particle accelerator being built under the border between France and Switzerland.

But a rare isotope, or form, of helium - helium-3 - proved to be much more difficult to convert to a superfluid state, despite theoretical predictions that the substance could exist. After many failures by other groups, in 1972 the Cornell team succeeded in achieving helium-3 superfluidity at a temperature of about two one-thousandths of a degree above absolute zero.

The substance proved to have properties very different from those predicted by theorists; in particular, its magnetic properties came as a major surprise.

``It was because our results were so unexpected,'' Osheroff said in a telephone interview, ``that our paper reporting the discovery was initially rejected by Physical Re-view Letters.'' A reassessment of the paper by Physical Review Letters, one of the world's preeminent physics journals, resulted in its publication.

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Photo: Dr. David Osheroff of Stanford celebrates after win ning Nobel Prize.

Associated Press