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Diamond Age Coming Soon
Roland Piquepaille writes "In 'The many facets of man-made diamonds,' Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN) writes that synthetic diamonds are getting bigger and cheaper. An example: for Valentine's Day, you can buy a yellow colored man-made diamond, visibly indistinguishable from a natural one, for $4,000 per carat. This is a 30% discount when compared with a natural diamond. This very long article also says that if synthetic diamond makers are targeting the jewelry market first, these new products will have an impact on many other industries. Not only is it now possible to grow bigger diamonds, you also can choose their color. 'Colored diamonds, which are valuable and very rare, can be created by introducing carefully controlled elemental impurities into the stone,' says C&EN. For instance, nitrogen produces a yellow stone. Infusing boron into the growing diamond produces a blue gem. This overview contains some details, references and photos of men-made diamonds, but read the original article for even more technical explanations if you have the time."
The price would be a lot lower anyway. They've got tons of em, they just let out a select portion each year.
They're also sending hundreds people here to mine the diamonds for them.
...that I can't even afford the knock-off diamonds on this V-day, you insensitive clod!
-Valiss
$4,000 a karat sounds a bit higher than a natural diamond.
"Look...I got you this overpriced diamond...and its all nice and yellow"
slashdot, news for crazed liberal socialist zealots
The next girl who fakes an orgasm with me will get one of these. Then we'll see who's a fat jobless loser.
I also reply below your current threshold.
$4,000 per carat is a 30% discount? I'm so glad I don't collect jewelry..
Twenties Retirement
The diamond industry (mining, cutting, and selling) is quite large. Is it possible they can convince governments to regulate the man-made ones, and have them somehow marked to allow people to note the difference? It may seem a bit out-there, but there's a lot of money at stake for a lot of people.
G
Aparently I'm not the only one that can't afford a knock-off diamond.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
I visited a friend's workplace last week, a machine shop.
He said that diamond tooling has made a big change in his workplace, allowing heat treated steel to be machined rather than ground.
Didn't i just see something about lots and lots of cheap diamonds posted on /. ?
I understand it is time to sell my bag of diamonds before they still have some value :)
M.
--
That would save me some bucks this Valentine's Day...
Way to go, slashdot! This is just what the few geeks who actually have significant others want to hear...ON VALENTINE'S DAY AFTERNOON!!!!!
Perhaps last week or before would have served us a bit better, eh?
"visibly indistinguishable from a natural one"..suuure buddy, let me introduce you to a new and sofisticated tool for certifying the authenticity of a diamond, the girlfriend. Somehow they always know...damn it
Tommy: What's got him creased?
Kev: It's a diamond
Tommy: The fuckin' thing's brown.
Paul: It's called champagne; it's a trend
Tommy: Oh right, they were calling it "piss", but they weren't moving any units
Dude, this is Slashdot.
Our imaginary girlfriends would be more than happy with a cubic zirconia. ;)
I like big butts and I cannot lie.
Oh, my. No, "conducting positive charge" does not mean it has a lot of extra charges or the energy associated with them to provide an infinite supply. Silicon in computer chips has stuff added to make it more positive or negative balanced, allowing it to conduct positive or negative charges. Sandwich a positive area between two negative areas and voila! You have a transistor!
Now, try making one out of diamond (carbon) instead of silicon. This.... could be fun to work with.
are likely mined in poor Africian countries with DeBeer's cartel has control of the government and will turn the other way when that government forces children into the state militias. Many of the natural diamonds floating around the market were born out of murder.
Trust us Brits to come up with this - we had a news article on TV a while back about getting the ashes of your cremated loved ones turned into yellow diamonds ! The coloration comes from the nitrogen content of the ashes apparently.
"I am not bound to please thee with my answers" [William Shakespeare]
isn't that offensive? perhaps they prefer to be called diamonds of color?
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
Actually that would mean it is acting as a doped semiconductor. But because of the physics, diamond will almost never act as a conductor. And the positive holes are just the majority carrier. And either way current will flow, whether electrons or holes. It does not imply it supplies any energy.
It's in electronics. Diamonds have plenty of intersiting properites that make them highly desirable for semiconducter applications, as well as heatsinks. See this article for some info. There's a problem, though, real diamonds simply don't come large enough, pure enough, and in the right kinds to make this practical on anything but a small scale. This will not be a problem with synthetics, they can cook up whatever kind they like, and Apollo at least makes them very, very pure. That's where the real money will be at. As big as jewelry is, it pales in comparison to eveltonics, espically given that we will eventually hit the limit of what silicon is capable of. The synthetic makers are basically just using jewelry as a means to an end, to finance their bussiness to get them to the state where they can start mass producing for other uses.
I hear the DeBeers uses a laser to etch their own logo on diamonds. I'm sure the logo is really small, but this is done to authenticate the real thing. So even if fake diamonds are cheaper and better, DeBeers will still sell their own "natural" rocks based purely on marketing.
And with synthetics, you can't use their logo or it would be trademark infringement.
Life is not for the lazy.
My boss has been diamonds sythethically between his ass cheeks for years.
1952 was the year that man made diamonds made their debut. Despite all the innacurate blather from Wired, we can still tell man made from natural diamond.Spectroscopic examination of Chemical Vapour Deposition (CVD) created diamonds, which is the method Apollo uses, or the classic High Pressure/High temperature (HPHT) method, both have characteristic absorption spectra. Furthermore, there are some clues to be had with less esoteric equipment. CVD diamonds have a chararacteristic strain pattern in the crystal structure that is discernable. HPHT diamonds are more identifiable, as the gemmologist community has had more time to examine them... decades.
Man made emeralds and rubies have been made for decades, and in many cases are superior. Chatham offers a life time warranty on their emeralds for example. It hasn't destroyed the price of emeralds, as there are enough people who want the real thing, much like many people can paint a repica of the Mona Lisa, down to the brush strokes, but the real thing is still more expensive.
The real problem as far as the jewellery industry is concerned is that unscrupulous people try and sell these as real, and less knowledgeable jewellers pass them on to consumers. I have no problems selling man made stones as man made stones, but disclosure is the important part. I expect that this might even drive the price of diamonds that are certified as natural up, due to the difficulty but not impossibility of identification.
p.s. To those people who think that diamonds are overpriced due to DeBeers, why is it that now that DeBeers no longer controls the industry (less than half of worldwide production now goes through DeBeers), why have prices stayed stable? Could it be that the price of mining and cutting is reflected in the price of diamonds, and that the pricing actually is correct?
~ a low user id is no indication I have a clue what I'm talking about.
Wired Magazine had a cover-story about synthetic diamonds a few months back with some pretty detailed information. Slashdot covered the story here.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Yeah but this "point" is a totally falsified marketing ploy that is already devoid of meaning.
Chris
The bitter end will come in 2023, when Apollo Diamond's U.S. patents on chemical vapor deposition are scheduled to expire.
DeBeers will still sell their own "natural" rocks based purely on marketing.
Likewise, Coca-Cola had a monopoly on cola soft drinks until Pepsi and RC came around. Some people will always prefer De Beers's conflict diamonds, but others will prefer Apollo brand cultured products, and competition will drive prices down until the bottom falls out of the market in 2023 when Apollo's patents run out.
Find a way to get BPM 37093 or just a large part of it returned to Earth, and you'll have DeBeers out of business instantly...
For those of you who haven't followed diamonds for a while, De Beers is arguably the largest and most prolific monopoly in the world, having survived, among other incidents, an American anti-trust inquiry with its reputation, and vicariously that of diamonds, entirely unscathed.
There are several forms of producing synthetic diamonds, and the closer these synthetic diamonds are to real ones, the more likely the company will be bought and all its intellectual property dissolved.
One company is Apollo Diamond, I recall. From what I understand, their research is conducted in the back of a pharamacy in an undisclosed mall somewhere in the USA.
Apparently, threatening to undermine a multi-billion dollar industry is very risky. I seem to recall there have been numerous coincidental deaths related to diamonds, diamond mines, and synthetic diamonds. Like all things involving enormous economics, life, liberty, and security of person are hardly the most important.
There was a show on Gerogia Public Television last night about Australia's diamond mine called Argile and the rare pink diamond that it produces.
They don't even mention the prices because they go into private collections.
Actually Rubies and Saphires are a more rare gem.
I think I would actually prefer a man made diamond, in places like Sierra Leone and Congo diamond mining is the cause huge amounts of criminal violence and suffering.
In group behavior: 'because they're evil/morons/sheep/crazy' is not 'insightful' it's 'oversimplified'
A few years ago, there was an exellent installment of NOVA that looked into the whole natural/synthetic diamond business. Everything from the early history of how DeBeers cornered the market to the (then) latest attempts at producing gem quality crystals.
Stay sentient. Don't drink bad milk.
Here's something: Literally give your significant other the sun . . . A white dwarf diamond that is!
Scientists from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the University of Cambridge, and UFSC Brazil have identified in the constellation Centaurus what is likely to be the fate of our own sun. With a rhythmically harmonious core and a 'suface' of hydrogen and helium this carbon-predominant cellestial body is known as BPM 37093. It is the largest diamond ever indentified in the wild at Twenty-five hundred miles across and weighing 5 million trillion trillion pounds!". Artistic Representainions and Videos are available here.
The Catto Diamond
A businessman boarded a plane to find, sitting next to him, an elegant woman wearing the largest, most stunning diamond ring he had ever seen.
He asked her about it.
"This is the Catto diamond," she said. "It is beautiful, but there is a terrible curse that goes with it."
"Oh - what's the curse?" the man asked.
"Mr. Catto."
Stuff that matters.
They can only do that so long, though, quite seriously. Imagine trying to corner the aluminum market in 1850, or force everyone to keep using vacuum tubes in 1955, by making death threats against individuals. Sure, it might work for a year or two, but after awhile people might realize that paying a year's pay per pound for Natural Aluminum (tm) isn't worth it.
Granted, this is a flawed analogy.
I say enough of this. I'm tired of diamond being the best at everything. Let's all surround diamond after posting, and set it straight. Maybe we can go all Orwell on this holier-than-thou tetrahedral structure, and erase it from history. Now who's the hardest, huh?
Diamond thinks is so tough....
Try extremely hard, optically clear from infrared through ultraviolet, and a near-superconductor for heat. If we are going to have optical chips enter the mainstream, it's probably going to be diamond rather than silicon for the substrate.
A diamond ring needs to cost about twenty bucks.
Until then it's cubic zirconia and $3980 worth of food and heating oil for you, my sweet.
KFG
...that DeBeers manage to persuade everyone, with a cunning advertising campaign, that there's nothing like a natural diamond, and that she'd be insulted to receive anything artificial as an engagement present? After all, it worked for cubic zirconia... They can afford it, and they do have an awful lot to lose if they fail.
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
The resorting of finding ways to distinguish crystalline properties, is just a stalling tactic on the part of the diamond industry. I doubt the public cares about minute differences in the crystalline structure if all other properties are identical (which is not the case for say cubic-zirconium).
Should the public care, then eventually technology will find a way to make the diamonds the same on even this level. More likely synthetic diamonds will exceed natural diamonds in purity and regularity of structure. The diamond cartel will try to convince the public (unsuccessfully) that they want inferior natural diamonds, and the whole thing will collapse.
For a while the two may exist side by side, much like the cultured pearl industry and natural pearls, but it will have a depressive effect on the price of natural diamonds.
The writing is on the wall my friend.
Letter To Iran
The interesting point about that Wired article is that the owner of one of the companies is not really interested in making money in diamonds via selling it as jewelry. Rather, he may be selling some as jewelry to bankroll more research in developing diamonds that are large enough to supplant silicon in creating new types of computer processors. The semiconductor business is where the money's at. In fact, that's how he originally made his fortune, as an engineer in Silicon Valley developing chips. When he dropped everything and pursued diamonds, many thought he was a kook. Both heads of the companies fear for their lives, I'd imagine, and rightly so -- you don't know how ruthless DeBeers can be.
Linux at home
And what meaning would that be? "I'm willing to spend a few thousand dollars on you"? Buy her a nice car, it will have a purpose and cost way more than some piddling little ring. Buy a house, you're going to be making a family theoretically, you'll want a place to live, right?
There are plenty of better ways to show that you're willing to spend money on someone (how exactly does this relate to love again?) that are actually useful, or that could be just as, if not more, romantic (Paris for two for a week?)
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Gemesis have a gallery showing the usage of their stones in jewellery (also it seems some are from the Accendo Collection,
Accendo Collection a reseller of cultured diamonds also make jewellery and also a loose stone inventory and pricelist.
Or alternatively (if you have the cash) there are other authorised retailers
It is probably wise to bear in mind, that unless the manufacturers can keep the prices close to mined diamond prices, there is no incentive to buy. If I believe a cultured diamond I will buy will produced at a lower price in a few months, I will feel disappointed to put it lightly. However, regardless of cost. I'd prefer a manufactured diamond to a mined diamond. The history surrounding most areas involved in diamond trade and companies involvement in it does not endear me to them.
Personally however I'd like one of these diamonds, however I've never really liked Yellow, regardless of its fancy nature. I prefer blue or black.
Anything that helps destroy their hegemony I'm all in favor of; they're worse than Microsoft and Wal-Mart together in my book.
Luckily for the me, the wifal unit doesn't hates diamonds so I've never had to buy one.
Any woman that ends up with me knows right from the start not to expect diamonds or gold from me. I have no problem buying jewlery, but I buy from independant artisans. Not only does it support the little guy but to me it means lot more to give a unique, one of a kind gift as opposed to some generic diamond/gold piece that you can buy in any mall in the country.
"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better." - Unknown
I understand and appreciate the amount of labor involved in digging "real" gems out of the ground - and this adds to the intrinsic value of those things. [Of course there is some monoplistic markup, too, but that is not the point.] At the end of the day, the utility of a material good is what counts. Just about any other kind of stuff you can think of gets cheaper all the time [adjusted for inflation] - why shouldn't diamonds? [Boo Hoo, De Beers... Boo Hoo RIAA... both of you have distribution models being upset by technology]
In general, I like machine-made, manufactured goods anyhow. I don't really care for artsy-crafty things. Would you rather have a robot-built flow-soldered TV, or some hand-made thing made by the local hobbiest?
"Fake" diamonds are still diamonds - just without all the human toil to get them (and without natural imperfections!) Why should my gems be any different? [Even most "art" - I can enjoy and appreciate copies. Why do I need the original? Heh, if you like some of my programming, I'll sell you the original bits if you like.] How long before they manufacture gems with imperfections so that they seem more natural?
Here is a question I have always had - if you have something that is atomically/chemically/perfectly identical to something else - why isn't it the same? Where do you draw the line? Mfg carbon crystal = diamond. Why is a conterfeit gold coin worth less than a "real" gold coin, if they are both made out of gold and struck with the same dies? Makes you wonder about printed currency. What if you fake the bits that represent my bank account? Now I am getting waaay OT...
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Scientists to DeBeers: FUCK YOU!!!
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
Its amazing to me that we all know diamonds are NOT rare at all, yet we still pay a premium for them. Anyone who watched the discovery channel knows that there are in fact HUGE stores of diamonds held back to keep the price up. I would be willing to bet that colored diamonds are not that rare at all, but are kept back in all but tiny numbers to make them seem that way. We know that DeBeers is evil. We know that deal in blood diamonds so they are certainly not above this.
Heck ADM and its competitors were in a global plot to keep lycean (spelling) prices high for years and they weren't killing people, so just think how far DeBeers would go. \
Assuming that the diamonds are not rare at all as most of us know, what then is the point of making them? They are only cheaper then the inflated price but would most likely be more expensive if people knew the truth about diamonds. IMHO anyways.
There is even a third type of diamond that has been developed at City University in Hong Kong. It differs from the one found in nature (a cubic form) and the one found in meteorites (a hexagonal form) by the way the carbon atoms bond to each other: rhombohedral form.
Restore America: Dr. Ron Paul for President!
Actually, Wired responded that her breasts were NOT photoshopped. I don't recall an apology for anything.
Somebody apparently didn't read the article. They aren't "phony" diamonds. They're _real_. Purer than the real thing in fact. On top of which, diamonds used in diamond tipped drill bits are _already_ industrial (read: artificially manufactured) diamonds. The only difference here is that traditional methods generate only diamond dust or a thin film.
Why?
Your post would have been valid seven years ago.
Kimberly Process. It is being taken very seriously in the trade, and for very selfish reasons, as well as ethical ones. The idea of children with their legs cut off does not sell diamonds. The diamond industry has made every effort to sort it out. Compare our attitude to that of the clothing industry while they continue to use third world slave labour.
~ a low user id is no indication I have a clue what I'm talking about.
Expect PR campaigns emphasizing "the natural flaws of diamonds".
Exactly. By the time you get to where the advertisers are telling you that a $4,000 diamond is appropriate, people ought to be thinking in terms of "our" money, not "his" money or "her" money (with apologies to couples of the same sex). Side note -- counselors say that if you can't bring yourself to think of it as "our" money, and agree in general on financial priorities, your relationship has an excellent chance of failing. Somehow, spending $4,000 of "our" money on a diamond, which was going to spend most of its time in a safe-deposit box because you have to be nuts to walk around with that much in easily stolen/fenced goods on your finger, seemed like the wrong thing to do. Take a romantic trip, save towards a house, pay off some of your school loans, start a college fund for your kids, buy a new television; there have to be a zillion things that are more important to a couple starting out than a $4,000 diamond.
I, for one, would pay a premium for a diamond's profits went to high-tech inventors instead of to slave owners.
The reason a $10,000 diamond is valuable is because it cost $10,000. If it cost $100, you just bought your girl -- the love of your life -- a symbol worth less than an XBox.
Rarity in fashion is a strange thing; the cost of the object becomes an inherent part of the value -- it's not that the object is worth some certain amount, it's that the acquisition of it was so horrifyingly expensive and difficult that only a very precious few could achieve it. To gift someone with the results of this effort -- that's a sign of significance.
This might seem difficult to comprehend, so let me jump domains for a moment. What's the value of a moon rock? I mean, it's just rock from the moon; we could probably synthesize something chemically identical trivially. Ah, lets say you got an award, and were given the moon rock as a prize. Tell me you wouldn't show it off to everyone.
Same sh*t -- only difference is, instead of the cost being that of a trip to the moon, the cost is an enormous amount of one's savings. The price of diamonds is set high enough to be interesting but low enough to be possible.
It has NOTHING AT ALL to do with the value of the rocks themselves.
--Dan
I loved in college (I went to an Ivy League school, so it's worse there) how all the women are still idealistic and romantic and have ridiculously high standards, and being college-age are of course very loud and indiscreet. You get to overhear (or worse, take part in) some wonderful conversations that, if you're a complete nerd like me, will pretty much ruin your week.
One of my favorites was a girl (who I worked with at the time) who said that if *her* (hypothetical) boyfriend asked her to marry him, he'd better have at least a 2-carat ring for her or she'd break up with him immediately. Some women could have said this and it would have been taken as a joke, but not her. (I imagine every guy who read that email felt his testicles recede into his body cavity.)
Now I'm in grad school, so there are actually girls getting married and showing off their shiny new rings, which is even more depressing. (Especially since on my salary I'd probably have to pawn my laptop to buy even a fake diamond.)
Of course, Krups made gas chambers for the third reich, but they still make a badass espresso machine; GE's weaponry has killed more men than measles. Most sizable corporations which have been around long have a checkered past. While I'm mentioning the third reich, I guess I oughta bring up Mercedes and Volkswagen, too.
I'm not sure what my point was in general, but I'm pretty sure that in general, the odds of getting a diamond which came from someone you don't want to support are far too high. I know there are diamonds which are certified to have been processed without ruining anyone's lives, but in general the industry is overinflated because of the actions of some terrible ruthless people, and I'm committed to avoiding natural diamonds at this point. Especially when the artificial ones are going to be cheap as hell and distinguishable from the natural ones mostly because their quality will be higher.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Personally, I'm glad that the price of diamonds is so high... I don't care if it's a monopoly or not. If diamonds weren't worth so much, there wouldn't be as much R&D dollars spent towards developing synthetic diamonds... and without that technology, the "diamond age" of electronics would be much much farther in the future.
One of my favorites was a girl (who I worked with at the time) who said that if *her* (hypothetical) boyfriend asked her to marry him, he'd better have at least a 2-carat ring for her or she'd break up with him immediately.
I'dlike to pull a Churchill on her. Tell her you don't have a diamond ring, but you would give her $50 to sleep with you once. "We already know what kind of girl you are, we're just haggling over the price."
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
The real diamond people are gonna keep buying real diamonds as long as they have the money, this is a better solution to "OH SHIT! I forgot to pay the $20,000 wedding ring" problem, personally, I think this is great, because if I want to give my girl a nice ring, I can.
however, for them to waste this on the jewelry industry is what bothers me, the fact that now we can create diamond is something we need to embrace because we can now make diamond-tipped drills and saws cheaper, and can make quality car parts, (aka, racing parts for real muscle cars) etc.
That's where the money is.
of course, people do like shiny things so jewelry will prolly suffice, all I say is that it's a giant waste of a new source of one of the toughest elements in nature.
Not qute so. Melt-grown High pressure/high temeperature diamonds can have inclusions (tiny specs of the metal solvent) in them and a microscopic defect from the original seed crystal. Also the fancy yellow kind which Gemesis produces used to be extremely rare, so if you see one like this chances are that it is artificial. Then there is fluorescence (shine under UV) with most of these stones, although not with every one. (And a portion of natural diamonds have fluorescence also). The most reliable test is FT-infrared spedtroscopy, there are characteristic absorbtion bands in these artificial diamonds because of a different nitrogen atom distribution than in naturals.
Plasma-deposited diamonds (Apollo) are typicaly flawless, and they do not grow from a seed. So far, these tend to be small and very flat. If anything, they tend to appear "too perfect" upon inspection.
I doubt that we will ever figure out - and I suspect that even if we did figure out we couldn't do much about it
As i understand it, although an extremely strong physical substance, the chemical nature isn't quite so resilient, and they break down over 10,000 years or so. I'm not quoting facts here, just something i vaguely remember from chemistry.
If you're going to have an imaginary girlfriend, you need to learn to do it right. My imaginary girlfriend was quite happy with a new copy of Metroid: Zero Mission.
I mean, hell, may as well go for broke.
That's a lot. Why the hell would anyone pay that amount anyway, because the stone isn't natural in the first place and they can make 10e6 pieces a year on a production line just like cars and other goods. Why would anyone want a diamond that's not unique at 30% discount from the real thing? I mean it has to cost a fraction of the equivalent real diamond. I bet the production costs are a fraction of what they seel the diamonds for.
The term for what the diamond structure is at room temperature is "metastable", which means it isn't stable, but may as well be since you don't care what is going to happen to the diamond in a few thousand years at room temperature.
As for the chemical vapour deposition machines, the technique is simple and the machines are relatively cheap (I used to work in the same room as one in a fairly poorly funded university), and there are quite a few now being used in industry to put diamond and other coatings on things. The trick is always getting the reaction to occur at the surface, and getting things to stick.
Industrial diamond coatings that just have to be hard is one thing, but things that have to be low in flaws or have carefully placed impurities (doped semicondutor junctions) are a bit trickier, or things with large thicknesses (a dirty great big rock to put on someones finger instead of a ten micron thick layer) are also tricky. The old way of producing artificial diamonds, used by DuPont, is to wrap explosives around some graphite and set it off. This produces lots of nice little diamonds, which are great if you don't care about optical properties (they look black) or size (average around 0.1 mm). This is of course completely useless for electronics or jewelry, and it's not that easy to stick little diamonds together to make a large solid object (you need to hit it really hard and really fast, and you can't hit it fast enough in a normal atmosphere).
You guys are all guilty of trivializing what is probably a breakthrough in materials science equal to the semiconductor IC or plastic.
:)
Sure right now these guys are pricing their rocks at Thou$and$ per Carat because they are trying to wrestle up enough venture capital to push to bigger and better production levels in the future.
Now let's try to see beyond the shiny bling blings and see where this technology is gonna take us in the next few decades.
How much would Uncle Sam be willing to pay for a Solid Diamond Tank? Or for that matter a diamond-clad warhead for an anti tank missile? Potentially it'll become possible to "grow" enormous sizes and oddball shapes virtually as easily as we press out fiberglass today. I wonder how easily automobiles with diamond structural components can pass NHSA crash tests? How about replacing home and business windows with diamond sheets instead of tempered glass?
The potential applications are mind boggling to say the least. Undoubtedly the production costs will come down as the technology matures and by the time the patents expire we'll start seeing diamond consumer junk on every shelf. The jewelry industry better sell off its stockpiles while they can for whatever price they can get cause in a few decades a 5 carat diamond will be about as valuable as a 70's era mood ring.
The only real downside I can see about this is how do we dispose of obsolete diamond artifacts when we're done with them? How do you scrap 30 sq. ft. sheets of obsolete diamond window glass?
Personally I'd love to own a chunk of Apollo right now, but they haven't announced an IPO yet. Shiny eye candy and IC wafers are just the beginning of a materials revolution that's gonna blow a hole in conventional industry in a few years, and we're standing here babbling about shiny chunks of glass-like material that we overpay for in the hopes of getting laid
"At a few hundred degrees the transformation [of diamond] would occur in seconds instead of thousands of years, and you would end up with very expensive bits of graphite."
In air (which is about 20% oxygen) diamonds will withstand heat to around 1560 degrees Fahrenheit. It is not necessary for jewelers to remove diamonds from jewelry prior to soldering it with a blowtorch. If you coat a diamond with boric acid, you can heat it to higher temperatures then that.
Diamonds Lasting Forever
not if you're using it as gambling collateral
Oh man, those guys in Iraq were actually trying to make diamonds and not A-bombs, so the explosives were wrapped around graphite instead of uranium. No wonder the WMD search squad didn't find anything. Thanks for the explanation.
Actually you are wrong. A diamond can be heated for several minutes, without losing its shape or color, and during all that time it can be so hot that it would emit white light. And yes, it would be so hot inside out.
"Silver solder melts at a fairly low temperature"
Yes, tin or lead based silver solders can melt around 400 F, but that kind of solders are not very useful for jewelry. Jewelers use hard silver solders, which melt at 1400-1600 F, and silver melts at around 1700-1760 F.
Usually for diamonds more appropriate is gold or platinum, and solders for those metals melt in even higher temperatures.