  Since the discovery of superconductivity in the alkali-doped fullerenes
\cite{hebard}, the electron-phonon interaction has been the primary suspect for
superconductivity in this class of compounds. In this paper we first provide a
pedagogical review of how the question of mechanism has traditionally been
settled, and then some well-known properties of the optical reflectance (and
the derived conductance) are summarized. Finally we demonstrate how a recently
derived inversion procedure can use the optical properties of a metal to infer
the magnitude of the electron-phonon interaction. We conclude that in the case
of the alkali-doped fullerenes, the electron-phonon interaction is sufficiently
strong to explain the transition temperatues found in these the materials.
