Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert.
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick, and we're back with part three in our series on diamonds. Now, if you haven't heard parts one and two, you might want to regress through time listen to those first, But there's no strict continuity to preserve in this series, so if you'd rather just listen to this one first, that's fine too.
Brief recap of the previous episodes. In part one, we talked mainly about the idea that first got me interested in covering diamonds, which is the question of weather diamonds, especially in the form of crushed up diamond powder, are poisonous. This has long been a belief present in multiple cultures that shattered diamonds or diamond powder are lethal if swallowed, and we talked about some weird and fascinating stories of attempted diamond poisonings from history. We looked at the question
of whether diamonds are actually poisonous or not. The answer we landed on was probably not, and at least one major author from modern times on the subject downplayed this as a myth with no evidence behind it. But we've also never found really strong evidence that diamond powder is safe, so personally, I'm still saying probably better not to ingest it. In part two of the series, we talked about how
diamonds form and how they're brought to the surface. We talked about some of the physical properties of diamonds, such as the fact that they are the hardest naturally occurring material on Earth, and how the property of hardness differs from other properties like toughness, leading to the strange fact that you generally can't scratch or cut a diamond with anything other than another diamond, yet you can shatter a
diamond with a regular steel hammer. We also talked about some wonderful legends of diamonds, including the legendary Valley of Jewels associated with the stories of figures like Sinbad and Alexander the Great, as well as some of the significance of diamonds in Hindu iconography. And today we're back to talk about diamonds once again.
All right, well, what's our first stop on the diamond express here?
Joe Well I got interested in a specific question about diamonds from the starting point of a scene, a movie scene you talked about in part two, I think, which is a scene in Superman three where Christopher Reeve as Superman picks up a piece of coal. I think he's actually like standing at a coal mine. He picks up a piece of coal and then crushes it into a diamond in his fist.
Completely cut, just already beautiful, ready to go.
Yeah, and huge by the way. But this connects to something that, strangely is a one of these well known facts that may well not be a fact, And that well known nonfactual fact is that diamonds are generally formed in the ground out of coal. I have encountered a number of sources arguing that this is, for the most part, not the case that diamonds are generally not formed from coal, though this may be less of a settled question than
it first appears. I don't know. We might examine that question in more depth if we happen to come back in another episode and talk about diamonds some more. But this got me thinking about comparisons between diamonds and coal. There are reasons that it would make sense to assume diamonds are just a sort of continuation of the coal forming process. So diamonds are made of pure carbon and coal is made of carbon. Coal forms deep underground, diamonds
form deep underground. It just seems natural to think that you start with ancient plant matter or organic matter of some kind, probably decaying plant matter, and some kind of ancient swamp. It gets buried, It first turns into peat, and then turns into coal, and then given enough time and pressure, it turns into a diamond. Now, for the most part, it seems like this probably isn't the case. Most diamonds seem to be older than most coal and formed deeper down in the Earth's mantle then you would
normally find deposits of coal. But there are these obvious physical similarities that they are both chunks of carbon that come out of the earth. But a difference to point out is that whild diamonds are pretty close to pure elemental carbon, well over ninety nine percent carbon by mass.
Coal has a lot of different stuff in it. The main constituent of coal is usually carbon, but it's purity is more variable in the range of like forty to ninety percent carbon, with other major elements like hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and sulfur, making up the rest of the mass. But anyways, since you know the main thing people do with coal is burn, it, raise the question can you burn a diamond?
I mean, as we've discussed, it would seem to just run counter to, if nothing else, the idea of the diamond.
Right, it's indestructible. Right. The Greek and Latin word used for the diamond is adamas, meaning unbreakable, indestructible. Well, I found this question addressed directly in several sources. One that I want to cite is an excellent blog post from twenty fourteen by a West Texas A and M professor of physics named Christopher S. Baird, and so to start with a direct answer to the question and then explain
from there. Yes, diamonds are indeed a carbon fuel source, and they can in fact be burned, but they don't burn as easily as coal. So let's expand on that a bit. Fire or combustion, as we've talked about on the show before, is a rapid reaction in which the molecules of a fuel source in the presence of heat, rapidly combined with oxygen, producing additional heat and light in the process. So in order to have fire, it's commonly
said that you need three ingredients. We know the equation now right, it's fuel, oxygen, and heat, and you can prevent or extinguish a fire by robbing it of any of these necessary ingredients. Now that fuel can be a number of different things. We know, for example, that pure hydrogen gas is flammable. It burns. But Baird mentions in his blog posts that the most common form of combustion that we encounter in the world is carbon combustion. So most of the fuel sources we burn in day to
day life are carbon based fuel sources. That means carbon is the fuel in the fire equation. So you get a carbon based substance, you get it hot enough in the presence of oxygen, and the carbon atoms will start to break their bonds with one another and with atoms of other elements in the material to instead form bonds with oxygen from the air. And this combination of carbon and oxygen is the reason that the main byproducts of burning carbon based fuels are carbon oxygen molecules like carbon
dioxide CO two and carbon monoxide COO. So one different way to think of building a fire, say, is making carbon dioxide. That is what the biggest part of what this reaction is doing.
Now.
In fuel sources that have other substances in addition to carbon, there are additional byproducts. For example, fossil fuels that also have hydrogen content will also produce the byproduct of water vapor as the hydrogen reacts with oxygen to form H two O. But to come back specifically to carbon burning, to carbon combustion, the way it works is that, again you have to get a carbon fuel source up to a certain temperature for the react with oxygen to start.
That's the ignition temperature. But fortunately you don't have to keep applying external heat because combustion is what's known as an exothermic process. The chemical reaction releases its own heat, generally more heat than you put in to begin with, and this heat that's released causes more carbon bonds to break and allows more carbon to combine with oxygen, and so on and so on until one of the ingredients
in the fire equation is depleted or removed. But this self sustaining exothermic property is the main reason carbon combustion is so useful to humans. It's a net energy source for us. You invest a little bit of energy up front, and then the fuel and the atmosphere do the rest, letting you take out more energy than you put in. But this brings us back to this question. Since a diamond is made of almost pure carbon, wouldn't it seem
to be an almost perfect fuel source. And at the same time, it still seems counterintuitive to think that a gemstone could burn up in a fire. I think because we think of a diamond as a type of rock, and in our regular experience, rocks do not burn.
Yeah, yeah, I think that's that's totally the case, like the idea of the diamond as indestructible, but also when you you know, at least dip your toes in some of the science about like high heat, high pressure formation, it doesn't seem like the kind of thing you'd be able to throw into a furnace, even if we're having to imagine some sort of like sort of sci fi furnace to drive your diamond powered train across the surface of a distant planet.
Right, But despite these intuitions, diamonds are carbon based products, and they do burn. And this in fact brings us back to a historical figure that we mentioned in the previous episode. The eighteenth century French chemist Antoine Lavoisier, who we talked previously about how he is credited with proving
that diamonds are made of nearly pure carbon. Apparently a major piece of evidence that Lavoisier produced in order to support that conclusion was an experiment showing that diamond could be burned and that the byproduct of its combustion was
almost entirely carbon dioxide. Now, on the fact that diamonds can burn, often, when I learned something like this, I like to see if I can see it with my own eyes, not that I don't believe it in this case, it seems like a well established fact, but just kind of to have increased confidence in knowing what it looks like and so forth. So I went looking for some trustworthy video of a diamond burning, and I did indeed
find several. A good one was a video put out by the Royal Institution for their twenty twelve Christmas Lectures, in which they demonstrate the burning of graphite, which is also made of carbon, but far less compressed than a diamond, and also the burning of a diamond and rob I've attached some pictures for you to look at here in the outline though of course we'll describe them for you at home. This year is a diamond burning shortly after it has been ignited in a glass chamber with a
supply of flowing oxygen. And one thing I would note about it in the early parts of the burning process is that I can't see what looks like a traditional visible flame, you know, sort of the upward rising flame like you would see coming off of a campfire. Instead, I see what looks like the diamond glowing like a coal glowing on a charcoal grill after the flames die down. Except with those coals, they usually glow a kind of
dull orange. Here this is glowing ten times brighter than any piece of coal I've ever seen, and with a wider shade of light than I'm used to seeing in charcoal, more of a yellow white glow than an orange.
Yeah. Like, if anything, this reminds me of special effects I've seen in movies and video games, like when I don't know Marvel's captain Marvel is about to go supernova and her flesh starts glowing with this kind of like flameless intensity, that sort of thing. But of course, this is not a Marvel move. This is not a video game, this is real life.
Yeah, and so there's this glowing imminence coming off of it. However, I did notice that later in the experiment they show there is what looks like a more traditional flame, mostly blue in color, coming off of the diamond. And I'm not sure why that was visible only toward the end of the burning experiment. Maybe it was just an issue of like lighting or camera angle, or maybe it had to do with changing conditions in the chamber as the
diamond burns. Maybe I don't know something about temperature, oxygen flow or something like that. But experiments like this confirm that you absolutely can burn diamonds, So that raises the question should we capitalize on this fuel source. Rob you suggested the idea of like diamond punk technology earlier, you know, like the run a diamond burning steam powered locomotive or diamond fired electric power plants. For a few reasons, a couple of which may be obvious, one little less obvious,
I think that would not work out. Obvious point number one, diamonds are expensive and rare compared to other carbon fuel sources, of course, would not make economic sense to burn them as fuel. Point number two, which I think is less obvious. Though diamonds do burn, they don't burn as easily as fuels like coal and wood. According to Baird, the reason for this is the strength of the bonds between the
carbon atoms found in the diamond cubic. So you remember last time we talked about the crystal structure of the diamond in which each so it's like a three dimensional structure that is linked in all directions, where each carbon atom is attached to four other carbon atoms with strong covalent bonds, meaning each of the carbon atoms is sharing pairs of electrons with its neighbor, and these are extremely
strong bonds. And the dense structure of atoms that is created within the diamond, these are the reasons why the diamond is so physically hard and nearly impossible to cut. These strong bonds and tight structure mean that it takes a lot of energy to break carbon atoms free from the diamond crystal. Now, in the case of physical pressure, friction, and impact, this explains the diamond's resilience, and in the case of combustion, it means that a diamond has a
much higher ignition temperature than other carbon based fuels. And I've seen different numbers for the temperature at which diamond burns. I guess, as with other fuels, this would depend on environmental conditions as well, like the concentration of oxygen and the surrounding air and things like that. But the number that Baird gives is that a diamond burns in regular air at about nine hundred degrees celsius, which is about
sixteen fifty fahrenheit. And for a point of comparison, Baird says that the ignition temperature of normal wood in atmosphere is only about three hundred degrees celsius. So there is a major difference in the amount of heat you need to put in at the beginning to get a diamond fire started, though the heat necessary would be reduced in
an oxygen rich environment. And then the other thing is a diamond fire needs a rich environment of oxygen to continue burning, so you got to give it plenty of oxygen in order to keep powering that reaction of the oxygen in the air with the carbon. However, though it is much harder to burn than coal or wood, Bird does say you can burn or scorch a diamond with regular flame, especially if it's really hot and has plenty
of oxygen. He mentions that jewelers sometimes have to be careful if they're using a blow torch to mold metal around a diamond, since the diamond could technically burn. Though it seems like from other things I was reading, without supplemental oxygen, a diamond typically won't burst into flames and disappear into smoke. It will instead, like show signs of damage directly on the surface, which could have increased opacity, making the diamond look sort of cloudy on the burned surface.
Rob I found an image of this that I attached for you to look at. Here there are parts that are of this. This is a faceted cut diamond, and it has parts that appear to be burn marks where it looks kind of cloudy and opaque, whereas the rest of it is very sparkly and clear.
Interesting.
Okay, now there's another thing that Baird does not mention, But I was also wondering about with the difference in the burning in how easy it is to burn something like coal versus something like diamonds, which would be the porosity of the material, because if you have a less dense, more porous material, it seems that it is easier for oxygen to get in and surround the carbon atoms and
more easily react with them. Whereas a diamond is very dense, very tight structure, you're essentially going to have all of the reaction with oxygen happening right at the surface layer. Another question this raises I assume this would be the case, is that a diamond powder would burn much more easily than a solid diamond. This is true though of most flammable things. You know, most of anything that you could set on fire in a solid form will combust much
more rapidly and easily in a powdered form. And as a final point thinking about burning diamonds, though, the interesting thing is that so they are a carbon based fuel source, and this does mean that even if diamonds were cheap burning them as fuel, if we wanted to create that diamond punk world with the diamond fired steamships and the locomotives, this would be yet another energy source that would result in adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, which of course
is not exactly something we need to be adding to the menu of energy options in the world today. Though, I was trying to see if I could come up with an estimate on this, and I did not get anywhere. I suspect even if we burned all the free diamonds in the world, it would probably release very little carbon compared to what's already being emitted from daily fossil fuel use. But like I said, I could not come up with
solid numbers on that. If any excellent nerds in the audience want to draw up an estimate, we invite your efforts. What would be the carbon footprint of a brief attempt by Planet Earth to go diamond punk?
Yeah, I'd be interested to hear that. Also one of their estimates about how long it would take to burn up all the diamonds. Like, imagine the scenario I was just trying to come with, wy would what would even a very far fetched scenario, and which is what makes sense. Let's imagine outer limits. Ask super advanced alien society just decide they want to teach humanity a lesson, so they gift us this device. And this device is a furnace
attached to a doomsday weapon. And it's pretty simple. All we have to do is keep the fire in this furnace burning, and as long as the fire is burning, the doomsday device will not go off. But the furnace will only burn diamonds. You can only put diamonds in it.
So that leaves the people of Earth to figure out how they are going to collect set diamonds, at what rate they are going to put them in the furnace, and indeed, how long will they be able to keep this up before there are no more diamonds to burn and the device goes off.
This feels like a science fiction variation on the plot of Speed.
Oh yeah, yeah, it is kind of a Speed Yeah yeah, you can imagine a Dennis Hopper. Dennis Hopper is the alien in this imaginary Outer Limits episode.
I really like this idea. Can you imagine though, if aliens actually did come to Earth, we went to meet their ambassador and it's Dennis Hopper, that just would not inspire confidence.
Well, it depends on which what part of Dennis Hopper's somography they're drawing from, Like the younger Dennis Hopper, you know, there are a lot of roles there where he was more of the relatable leading man. It's only you know, later in life we intended to play on the whole more deplorable characters.
Oh yeah, yeah. By the way, I'm not insulting Dennis Hoppers. I just been like I was thinking, we are greeted by the you know, the photo journalist and Apocalypse now or something.
Yeah, he had a knack for playing often unhinged characters for sure. All right, well, let's return once more to the ancient world. Particularly, let's get let's get into some concepts concerning diamonds and ancient Greece and ancient Rome.
Oh boy, I think we got some good stuff on this this one today. Now, briefly to refresh about some stuff we talked about in the last episode we did, I think bring up Plenty of the Elders references to diamonds in his work. Remember, Plenty of the Elder is a first century ce Roman author who compiled a very important, influential sort of encyclopedia of what was known to you know, to his people at the time, known as the Natural History.
And Plenty, I think is the very last volume of Plenty's Natural History that was devoted to minerals and gemstones. And Plenty used in his work a term that was derived from the Greek called adamas, which earlier sources used to refer to a variety of materials that were considered very hard or maybe indestructible, but from description were clearly
not diamonds. Plenty confusingly uses this term to refer to a list of different materials, some of which, it does seem, are diamonds, but maybe others are not.
So.
For example, a footnote in the one of the translations of Plenty we often turned to, which is available online, the Bostock and Riley translation, that is a footnote saying that the author of this footnote thought that Plenty was probably not familiar with actual diamonds. However, this does not seem to be the conclusion of Jack Ogden in his book Diamonds the King of Gems, which we have referred
to a few times on this series already. Ogden does seem to think that in some of these instances, Plenty may be talking about diamonds.
Yeah, yeah, so let's get into some of this, so, you know, drawing again from Ogden. Also, Ogden, along with historian Brian Fagan, in a source I referenced in the last episode, also get into this a little bit. But the introduction of diamond tipped engraving stones during the early Roman period seems to have transformed the world of lapidary, allowing even the hardest jim stones to be drilled and
in grave. So again we have to remember that there's this interesting dual nature to the diamond of the ancient world, where it's used seemingly at times initially as just a raw material to work gemstones that were already popular colored gems, and then there's this transition into realizing that diamonds on their own are beautiful and are also suitable to be considered gemstones.
Right, so in many cases it's thought of as like a useful industrial material before it's thought of as a just beautiful decorative gem on its own.
And this is important because to understand where we're going to go next, you need to realize that, yes, it does make sense to sometimes want to destroy a diamond in these even in the ancient world, because again, not all diamonds are going to be suitable for working into some sort of valuable stone, but also there are going to be uses for diamond fragments and diamond powders if you are working stones other gymstones and preparing them to use in various bits of jewelry and so forth.
Right, it's kind of an unbeatable abrasive.
Yeah, And this brings us to the idea of softening your diamonds up by soaking them in goat blood. Not just any goat blood, but the blood of a he goat.
The blood of she goats will not do yes.
This is mentioned by both Plenty of the Elder and later by pasanias this is the yeah, the idea that while the diamond is hard and resistant to destruction, get yourself a little goat blood he goat blood, Let it soak in there, and that will put it in that that'll soften things up enough that you can break it up and get what you need out of it. Now, Ogden points out that plenty source on this is uncertain and it doesn't seem to be based on anything drawn
from Indian diamond tradition. So again, remember India is like the the hot area for initial diamond culture, and it seems to sort of flow out of India into other cultures, Mediterranean cultures and as we'll discuss, also into Chinese culture
and so forth. So this idea doesn't seem to directly relate to anything known to exist in Indian diamond traditions, but it doesn't go away after it has been brought up, so there are writings about it from the fourteen hundreds onward, with descriptions of goat blood being used to soak and soften diamonds. In time, there were even writings on what sort of diet your he goat would need if you wanted to use its blood to soften up your diamonds.
Wow, that's elaborate.
None other than Roger Bacon refuted this idea during the thirteenth century, though I guess not everyone listened to Roger Bacon because the idea seemed to persist, and Ogden writes that, Yeah, ultimately we have no idea where this came from, but it may be linked to various blood sacrifized rights connected to diamonds, much in the same way that such rights
were associated with ancient metallurgy. He also speculates, and this is where it gets really really interesting, that maybe gem cutters would have needed to crush diamonds to produce chips for their work, like we were saying, and a working medium or paste would be useful to keep those bits
of diamond from flying all over the place. I think we'd touched on this in the last episode or the one before it that like when you do destroy a diamond, there's often this observation that just like it almost vanishes, it turns into this dust. It's just hard to collect. It just goes everywhere.
Right, So the idea is that if you could pound or smash your diamond within the matrix of like a thick, sticky liquid substance, that might help prevent some of it from being lost, just like flying off the table and going all over the place.
Right, right, So what might you use? Might you have used something like goat's blood? Ogden So points out that it's possible that they were that people use something that maybe wasn't blood but contained blood, or maybe just looked like blood. He cites a Sanskrit recipe for medicinal diamond dust that involves first encasing the diamond in a mixture of beaten cotton plant and beetlenut, which has a red coloration. Then you roast it several times and then you're able to break it up.
Oh that's interesting, you know, I've before heard of the I think I've heard of the juice of a beetlenut being compared to blood or looking like blood in some instances. So yeah, I wonder if that could be a mistaken identity at a distance there.
Yeah, I believe there are cases of Europeans encountering peoples that were chewing beetlenut and they would describe all that their mouths were bloody. It's like, not that mouths weren't bloody, they're just chewing beetlenut. Yeah, but anyway, Ogden notes that lead was also used in the breaking of diamonds, something that took on airs of magic, since the that is,
of course very soft and diamonds are very hard. But yeah, while diamonds are hard and have long been used to cut other gems, as we've been discussing, they're also quite brittle, and one means of breaking them and retaining the fragments was to first encase the diamond in lead before striking it with a hammer. Wax or a mixture made from horn was often used in some traditions, with a later idea connected to another tantalizing idea that diamond might be broken with a ram's horn.
Huh. I wonder if that's true. I mean, a diamond can be shattered with a sufficiently powerful blow. But everything I've read about and seen that was used for that purpose would be like a strong metal hammer, you know, like a steel hammer or something like that. Would a ram's horn be hard enough?
I don't know, well, I think maybe the idea is probably not. But in sort of the game of telephone and myth making, the idea of using mixture with ground horn would be the thing you'd use. And then it gets you know, in the same way that eventually you're talking about just soaking your diamonds and blood or in this case, beating it with a horn. You know, it's just it becomes this sort of magical, cryptic thing, but it perhaps has a connection to some sort of actual practice.
Now turning our attention to ancient China first, want to just mentioned some some points that Ogden makes about diamonds in China. He points out that research has indicated that diamonds may have been used to polish nephrite jade from a very early period in Chinese history. I was looking at the source on this. It's from Lu at all, the earliest use of corundum and diamond in prehistoric China. This is from two thousand and five the author's right quote.
We also present physical evidence that later Langzhou actses this would have been around twenty five hundred BCE. This was a Neolithic jade culture quote may made from the same previously undescribed rock whose most abundant component is corundum, where were polished to a mirror like finish with a diamond abrasive. Ogden points out that we have fifth century CE Chinese writings describing diamond set finger rings worn by foreigners and sent to China from India and in one case from Java.
Java was apparently a source for Chinese diamonds prior to European involvement in Java during the seventeenth century. There's a gold ring with a set diamond that was found that in nineteen seventy excavation of a fifth century CE Nanjing tomb. Diamonds, of course, would have traveled on the Silk Road and in an interesting connection of technologies again, thinking about the Silk Road, thinking about various materials and technologies and bits
of culture traveling throughout Eurasia along these trade routes. He points out that an Italian innovation of a crank flywheel belt driven grinding apparatus for working gymstones was seemingly based on silk spinning technology from China and this would have been adopted during the thirteenth century.
Oh interesting.
Yeah, so you know, different different aims, different technological approaches that end up speaking to each other across the silk road. Now, I was also looking around some other sources. I was looking at an older text, The Diamond, a study in Chinese and Hellenistic Folklore, Volume fifteen, issues one through two, by a German anthropologist, birtheled law for this is from nineteen seventeen, but he was a pretty big big deal.
He pointed out in this book that there were Song dynasty tellings of the Valley of Gems, that story we talked about in the last episode, in which you have your diamonds down there at the bottom of this deep canyon or valley, and the only way to get them is,
of course, to throw meat down there. The meat will stick to the diamonds, or the diamonds will stick to the meat rather, and then giant birds will swoop down in there, collect the meat and bring that meat up to the surface, or they'll eat the meat, and you have to kill the birds and then harvest the diamonds from their stomachs.
And often it was said that there were monsters of some kind or like venomous snakes down at the bottom of the valley, which is a reason you can't go down there and get the diamonds yourself.
Right, And so this is a very infectious story. It spreads and you know, through throughout diamond cultures, and it spreads with diamonds to other cultures, and so it's not surprising that there are also tellings of it in Chinese traditions. But the versions that Lafer brings up here mentions that, Okay, in these tellings, the great eagles that feast on the diamonds studied meat in the valley, they just eventually poop out the diamonds, So they're not being there's no driving
them away from the meat and getting the diamonds. There's no looking for there. There's no killing the birds and then digging them out of their bodies. No, you just have to go out to the Gobi desert because that is where they are dropping their diamonds filled poops.
Wow, that seems so much simpler than having to fight the bird and kill it. Yeah, just scour the poop fields.
You know, you're not hurting the birds, you're not stressing them out, you're not having having to fight a giant bird that's eating snakes the size of elephants, and so forth. Now that this of course got me wondering, it's like, well, why the Gobi Desert of all places? You know, I was wanting to line up with reality at all. Sadly, Lafer doesn't really mention the Gobi Desert at all elsewhere
in this particular text. Certainly some precious minerals are found in the Gobi region, though I've not read about diamonds being on that list. Perhaps they are. Perhaps I'm missing something. It's worth stressing. As Laffer does, though, that the original Song Dynasty source on this wrote that he was not sure if the story was true or not, so it's another case of someone passing along this story. But also being like, I cannot vouch for this, but this is what has been told to me.
I was just looking at various maps of no diamond deposits and diamond mines in the world, and the Gobi Desert does not appear to be a hotspot.
Yeah, so, but again, who knows exactly how the story comes together? Now Lafar also touches on the subject of gemstone phosphorescence. I found this pretty interesting so tales of
luminous gems that these go way back. You can find examples of this in ancient writings and medieval writings, and apparently there is some truth to the idea some gems glow in the dark after excitement via friction or heat, and such observations could have potentially been exaggerated into some of the some of the traditions around the world involving glowing stones, and there are some versions that are apparently unique to Chinese traditions, including tales of pearls that glow
in the dark, and even the pupils of certain female whales described as moonlight pearls. So yeah, there would be this pearl like object that glows with like a moonlight luminosity, and you could pull it out in a dark room and you would see the glow. And these were seemingly regarded as a real thing during the fourth century CE, And as the author notes, it's not entirely divorced from the real world. You know, phosphorescent biology in the marine world is a real thing, and it was noted by
ancient observers. They might not have known as much about the undersea world as we know today, but they knew that sometimes you find things that kind of glow or outright glow in the oceanic world.
Yeah, and you don't even necessarily have to go to the deep ocean for that. That's where a lot of the examples we think of are. But there are, you know, masses of smaller organisms that float near the surface of the water and can create bioluminescent glows or phosphorescence sometimes visible just you know, in the waves.
Absolutely, so, yeah, the idea, you know, has at least a couple of feet on the ground here, or maybe not the whole foot, but at least some toads touch on the ground, and some fantasy and other aspects of the telling. But yeah, other tales of whalestone state that you could see a reflection in one at night and that it had purifying qualities. And then there were also accounts that said that they could be found in the
eyes of dolphins as well. Laford points out that other examples of glowing items of biological origin in Chinese tradition includes the horn of the rhino, and also it was said that there was like a variety of will o the wisp that would rise from battlefields. So after some sort of terrible battle on which humans and horses have died.
It would see this glow that rises up like a mist, and a variation of this would continue on into Japanese traditions, with the idea being the other this is somehow connected
to the life force of the beings that perished here. However, as Laffer discusses, there would seem to be something of an open question as to what extent ideas about glowing diamonds and Chinese tradition were based on observations of diamond phosph phosphorescence, or if it was like a continuation of traditions surrounding pearls and other gems, and as diamonds are introduced and or diamonds are upgraded to gymstone status, they
take on these ideas. You know, in general, ideas of phosphorescent diamonds may also be connected to the electrical qualities of diamonds, which plenty of the Elder also wrote about. So basically, when a diamond is electrified or exposed to friction, it can pick up paper and other light substances, though it does not become a conductor. But observations lead ancient writers at times to champion diamonds over loadstones as just
magnetic powerhouses. Interestingly enough, in modern evaluation of diamonds, UV lighting is sometimes used to judge the authenticity of diamonds, looking for that for some sort of like a faint glow, and evidence that a diamond is actually magnetic to any degree or responds to a magnet is it's an indication that what you have here is not one hundred percent carbon and is therefore not a real diamond. If it has some sort of metal content to it, well it's
not carbon. Interesting now, it should come as no surprise that diamond is not just an earth thing. Diamond can be found in meteorites, often in the form of nanodiamonds. In particular, there's a hexagonal diamond as opposed to the cubicle lattice of diamond as we've been discussing it, and it's called Lonsdaleite. By some estimates, more than fifty percent harder than normal or terrestrial diamonds or diamonds as we've
been discussing them. So, this form of diamond was first identified in nineteen sixty seven in the Canyon Diablo meteorite in the form of nanocrystals Lonsdolite is formed when graphite containing meteors strike the Earth, with the resulting heat and
stress transforming the graphite into this form of diamond. However, the largest of these are merely a kron in size, so it's not if you're imagining sort of like a scene from the opening of the classic film The Blob, you know, in which the perfectly round meteorite cracks open and there's something inside it, perhaps a diamond. In this case, that does not seem to be the case. These would be very small, but you do have some interesting appearances
of this material. Lonstal light deposits were apparently discovered in Tunguska and having to do with the Tunguska event, which of course is a supporting evidence for the idea that what we're talking about there is a meteorite as opposed to a comet, and it's thought that this form of diamond also forms in major planetary collisions as well.
Yeah, I was reading about some other interesting cases of probable impact diamonds that are found. You mentioned Tunguska, but there's a really big impact structure in northern Siberia called the Poppy Guy impact structure, which is the result of a huge impact like thirty five million years ago, and it is also thought to have created a lot of
diamonds when it struck. It's thought that the intense heat and energy of the impact event essentially yeah, turned graphite that was already present in the rocks in the ground into diamonds.
Wow. But again we're still we're talking about nano diamonds here, and I realize that's probably not what's going to captivate everyone's imagination. You want to consider some serious space rocks. And indeed, stories about possible giant space diamonds do periodically pop up in the space news like this is the kind of thing that I don't have specific memories of this occurring, but it's the kind of thing that could
pop up on like late night television. There's so many jokes who can make about giant space diamonds, and there's something about it's just an interesting reflection on how we treat diamonds here on Earth. Again, that they're rare, they're generally small, and the idea that there could be an enormous one out there in space somewhere but we just can't get to it. It's kind of an interesting tease though.
I mean, the funny thing is people think like, oh wow, if we could you know, if we could just get this planet sized diamond back to Earth, then I'd really be rich. But I don't know. Then it just seems like diamonds would be worthless if there was that much of them.
Yeah yeah, Or like, what are we We're going to bring it back to Earth and bring it into an orbit around our planet, what happens next? I don't like the possibilities.
You'd have to tightly control, like how much of it that you mind and brought back to Earth so as not to flood the market and make it worthless.
And yeah, yeah, this is an interesting There is this idea that I believe it is no longer favorite at all, but the idea that Jupiter in our in our own solar system, the idea that it could have a core that is essentially a huge diamond. And in fact, this is the idea proposed any work of fiction by Arthur C. Clark in his book twenty sixty one Odyssey three. Now I haven't read Odyssey three. I've only read his first book in the series, twenty and one in Space Odyssey,
based on his screenplay for the Stanley Kubrick movie. It's my understanding, however, that this is not necessarily a trilogy in the sense of other like sci fi and fantasy trilogies, just kind of like it's more of a continuation of some of the same themes, but with more futuristic events occurring.
Now you mentioned it is no longer favored the idea that at the core of Jupiter there's a big old diamond. But we did talk in our episode on the moons of Uranus about the idea that the atmospheric dynamics within the atmosphere of Urinus produce diamond rain all this.
Yeah, the diamond rain.
Yeah, that it rains diamonds within within the gases of Uriness. So you can go listen to those episodes if you want the fuller explanation there.
Well, I'm glad you pointed that one out. Yeah, that's also a great idea that I think captivates the imagination because it's like that Treehouse of Horror episode where where Homer freaks out because there are no doughnuts in this one reality that he transfers into, and then after he leaves, it turns out it actually rains donuts here that's right anyway. In this Arthur C. Clark book, which again I haven't read. If you have read and you want to write in
with more details, feel free. But basically the idea is spoiler for the Second Odyssey book twenty ten. But in that book, Jupiter explodes and becomes a star, and in twenty sixty one it's revealed that since the core of Jupiter is made of diamond, there's now a mountain made
of diamond on Europa. And at the time of his writing this was apparently not entirely out of the question, but the Galileo probe's findings gave us more insight into Jupiter's composition, and this ultimately ruled out the diamond core hypothesis. But again, don't give up hope. There's still the diamond rains potentially on Urunas. And then there are some more far flung candidates that you might consider for diamond worlds. These are two that have definitely popped up on a
lot of the space news websites. I'm going to tell you about a couple of them here in case you haven't heard. The first one is a place called that's classified is fifty five cancer e also known as Jansen. This is forty one light years away in the Cancer constellation. It may have lava oceans. It may have a diamond
core discovered in two thousand and four. We of course don't know for sure what its composition is, but based on observations and observation data, it might be a rocky, high carbon world and its mass could be as much as one third diamond. However, don't buy your ticket yet. More information is needed. More information is required. I don't want you to travel all the way there and find out that it is not a rocky world and it is not one third diamond.
Be a real time enough at last situation to get there, ready to mine the diamond, and then realize that, oh it doesn't have oxygen.
Yeah. Now, another place in our universe that has also popped up in these various science stories is a white dwarf star classified as HD one nine four one two C. This one's located one hundred and four light years away, and scientists have theorized that it could be in the process of cooling and crystallizing into a giant diamond. WHOA
All right, you know it sounds promising. However, big caveat here This process is thought to take somewhere on the order of one quadrillion years, which would mean that this particular white dwarf, along with oh, I don't know, all other stars, is simply not old enough to have transformed yet. And I think it's going to be a hell of a waiting game if you show up there anticipating the possibility that it's going to turn into a big diamond.
But I love these ideas of like giant space diamonds, and especially in this latter case, out of reach in both time and space. I mean, Beker's anything on the measure of light years away is out of reach in both time and space to us. But especially the idea of HD one nine oh four one two C because it's if it does become a diamond, it's going to become a diamond so far into the future that it's basically a dream.
Maybe that's where the diamond punk technology regime actually arises.
Yeah, yeah, I was thinking about it a little bit when you were talking about diamonds as fuel, Like if you had some sort of diamond world, or it doesn't even have to be a diamond world, just we could borrow from Arthur C. Clark and just imagine a scenario where you have an enormous mass of diamond on some world, some moon, some war that was ejected from some sort
of diamond core scenario. If that, and if it provided diamond in enough quantity, then perhaps you could use that to prop up your idea of a diamond furnace that powers something. I mean, maybe it ends up taking on religious connotations because the I mean, the idea of a furnace that burns entirely on diamond, even if it's not practical from an energy standpoint, maybe there is something kind
of like spiritually attractive about that. Again, assuming the culture that's powering the furnace sees diamond as something that is special and beautiful and holy and not just something to be used to work other gemstones or to fire up a furnace.
Well, should we blast off from the diamond planet for today?
I believe so. But don't worry. We'll be back with another core episode on Thursday, because Tuesdays and Thursdays that's when we have core episodes of stuff to blow your mind. We're primarily a science podcast, though we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film. On Weird House Cinema. On Mondays we do listener mail and on Wednesdays we do a short form episode. Let's see
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