Diamonds are a miner’s best friend, a blue gleam in the darkness that you can use to craft the best stuff. The best stuff. Pickaxes that can hack through obsidian, swords that can hack through wither skeletons, armour that can withstand the force of 1000 spiders. Diamond is the best!
Or is it? The thing with diamond is that it’s not really that special. Oh SURE, it sparkles with clarity that seems to capture the infinite complexity of the universe, but it’s just boring old carbon. A good deal of you and I is carbon, one fifth to be more precise, so that stuff is not only all around us but also actually us.
But, you ask, if we’re pretty carbony, why doesn’t light dance through our facets with mesmerising beauty??? Well, that’s because we haven’t been crushed for over a billion years by the intense pressure and heat found 150 kilometres beneath the earth. And the thing about those pressures is that they make diamonds as hard as heck. The hardest as heck, in fact, of any known material.
This hardness isn’t down to boring old carbon. It’s because of the bonds between its boring carbon atoms, which arrange themselves into what’s called a diamond cubic structure, which fits together with such perfect neatness that it just makes you cry at the sheer tidiness of it all, and also gives it incredible strength.
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