Pharaoh's Gem Brighter Than a Thousand Suns

Tamas Feher from Hungary writes "An Italian archaeologist accidentally found that the central gem in Tutankhamun's regal necklace is not amber, but a mere piece of yellow glass. Kinda cheap for the famous Egyptian pharaoh, best known for his splendid golden mask. Except that piece of glass is much older than civilization. Where did it come from, StarGate? Kind of. Scientists now think a meteorite much larger than the Tunguska event fell from the sky and exploded over the Sahara in prehistoric times. The tremendous heat of the 1000 A-bomb sized fireball melted large chunks of desert sand into perfect glass. The memory of such an apocalyptic event may have made sand-glass gems a desirable symbol, meant to emphasize the pharaoh's heavenly powers."

Comments

Re:Lightning?

[Valthan]

I'm sure there has been lightning strikes, but this glass was formed over an enormous area of land, and a lightning strike wouldn't make glass of this magnitude in depth and area, it would have to be something that would be much hotter and a hell of a lot bigger than lightning.

Re:Or..

[hey!]

Graverobbers did indeed conceal their tracks -- to hide caches of treasure from competitors.

Inside the tombs, they didn't waste time. They smashed open sarcophogi and ripped mummies apart looking for jewels and amulets. Anybody visiting subsequently would have found the fact of the robbery clear enough -- by the absence of any scrap of economic value.

Re:Asimov (and Hollywood) got it wrong

[stg]

Just a slight detail - the book he mentioned isn't science fiction, it's just science. Asimov did a lot of non-fiction, too.

Re:Not 800,000 years

[AKAImBatman]

From Wikipedia:

The color of "natural glass" is green to bluish green. This colour is caused by naturally occurring iron impurities in the sand. Common glass today usually has a slight green or blue tint, arising from these same impurities. Glassmakers learned to make coloured glass by adding metallic compounds and mineral oxides to produce brilliant hues of red, green, and blue - the colours of gemstones. When gem-cutters learned to cut glass, they found clear glass was an excellent refractor of light. The earliest known beads from Egypt were made during the New Kingdom, about 1500 BC and came in a variety of colours. They were made by winding molten glass around a metal bar and were highly prized as a trading commodity, especially blue ones because they were reported to have magical powers.

The Egyptians also made small jars and bottles using the core-formed method. Glass threads were wound around a bag of sand tied to a rod and the glass was continually reheated to fuse the threads together. The glass had to be kept in motion until the required shape and thickness was achieved. The final step was to allow the rod to cool then to puncture the bag and remove the rod. The Egyptians also formed the first coloured glass rods which they used to create colourful beads and decorations, they also worked with cast glass. [2]. By the 5th century BCE this technology had spread to at least Greece. In the first century BC there were many glass centres located around the Mediterranean and at the eastern end of the Mediterranean glass blowing, both free-blowing and mould-blowing, was discovered.

Considering that the Egyptians were one of the first civilizations to master glassworks, it seems somewhat unlikely that the Pharaoh's prized gem would be mere glass. Unless, that is, there were other legends or sources of value attributed to the gem. Given the unusual color of the glass (for the period), it seems quite reasonable that it being formed by "the light of a thousand suns" was the source of its value.

Re:I *prefer* man-made gems

[tinkerghost]

Remember though, Kay Jewelers sells only Created gemstones not synthetic ones.
Yes I was actually told this looking for a Vday present.

Re:impact crater anyone?

[Zan Zu from Eridu]

The european crater you referred to is probably the Nördlinger Ries in Germany. Gene Shoemaker was on holiday in Nördlingen with his wife, when they discovered the stones used to build the local St. George Cathedral contained suevite and came up with the impact crater hypothesis. In 1961 he and Edward Chao proved it was actually an impact crater.

Re:Asimov (and Hollywood) got it wrong

[Gulthek]

In fact, Asimov has a book in each of the Dewey Decimal System classifications.

Re:Asimov (and Hollywood) got it wrong

[DerekLyons]

While it is true that the kinetic energy of the components of a shattered object will be the same as the inital whole object there are several things you have neglected.

There are several *huge* things you have neglected. (or alternatively; you've posted what seems to be the 'common sense' version. However, as often happens in science, 'common sense' is wrong.)
 
 

1. Because the resulting pieces will be of varying size and shape, some will be below the size to successfully reach the surface before burning up.

They'll still dump large amounts of energy and dust into the Earth's atmosphere. That's the *real* cause of the damage from an asteroid impact - the crater and tsunami's are just eye candy.
 
 

2.Not all the resulting component pieces will have the same tragectory, thus

1. some pieces will miss the target
2. the kinetic energy will be spread out over a larger area.

I invite you to compare the damage done to a human body that is hit by a) a .45 and b) a shotgun blast. The difference between the two is spectacular visually - but the end result is the same.
 
 

3. Because the resulting pieces will be smaller and spread over a larger area, the resulting damage will be less pronounced. Think of the damage caused by getting a large tattoo. If those thousands of small pin pricks were converted into a single strike the damage would be much greater. Which would create more damage to you: three handfulls of pebbles dropped on your head, or a single rock of equivelent mass of those same three handfulls?

That's the real trick - we aren't comparing a handful of pebbles to one rock. We are comparing a .45 to the chest to a OO buckshot shotgun blast to the chest. The kinetic energy of the two is (roughly) on the same order - and despite the visual differences in damage, both are going to leave you in a deep world of hurt.

Re:Asimov (and Hollywood) got it wrong

[jamie]

Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy: SPOILERS: Review: Deep Impact

Bad: Minutes before final impact, the astronauts blow up the second comet, and we are treated to a spectacular light show.

Good: Aaaaarrgg! This was the Biggest Baddest Astronomy in the movie. Blowing up a comet does no good at all, and might even make matters worse. Just because the pieces are smaller doesn't mean you have changed anything. If every piece still impacts the Earth (by that I mean actually is stopped by the Earth or its atmosphere) you are still dumping all the kinetic energy of The Comet into the Earth's atmosphere! That's a HUGE amount of energy, dumped in practically all at once. It would still create a massive explosion, dwarfing all of our nuclear bombs combined. Even if you could somehow soften the blow, all that heat would wreak havoc with our weather. Some people actually think it might be better to simply let a big one hit rather than blow it up, because the Earth itself can absorb the energy of impact better than the atmosphere can. This is still argued, though. I'd prefer not to try any experiments!

Re:There is a problem though ...

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

From the article:

The Sahara is currently as dry as it was about 13,000 years ago.

Re:Asimov (and Hollywood) got it wrong

[DaveV1.0]

Ok, time to burst your little ego bubble. It looks to me like you are using a false analogy, mostly because you are a dumbass.

A 12ga 00 buckshot round is made up of the equivalent of 9 54 grain .33 caliber rounds. That would make a single 12ga 00 buckshot round about the equivalent of 6 .45 ACP rounds in mass. The kinetic energy of a .45 round is about 340 ft-lbs. For 9 pellet 12 ga 00 buckshot it is about 1,810 ft-lbs. Not a fair comparison. We can however compare a 450 grain SABOT round for a 12ga shotgun. (9 * 54 = 486 giving the buckshot round more mass)

Now, let's talk range. 9 pellet 00 buckshot at 50 yards averages 3 hits. The same round at 75 yards averages 1 hit. At 100 yards, the pellet arrives with a velocity of about 780 ft/sec. As you can see, shotgun pellets diverge upon leaving the gun. So would the pieces of a possible impactor. The would diverge in a cone shaped pattern. Said spread could be enhanced by using a second nuke. The single 450 grain sabot will the target and it will do so with about 1050 ft/sec.

Now, let's talk about penetration power. A single large object has more penetrating power than multiple smaller objects. Interestingly, the results of comparison testing at 7 yards:

round | Ballistic Gel | SAE 1010 .138" steel plate

Buckshot | 13-15 inches | no penetration
450 slug | 21 inches | penetration

Looks like multiple smaller impactors do less damage than a single massive impactor.

Thank you for playing.
source

Re:"accidentally found"?

[Gryphn]

Can you say "cartel"?

Re:"accidentally found"?

[TubeSteak]

Why isn't diamond cheap yet?

Diamonds are cheap... for anything besides jewelry. And that's mostly oligopoly pricing + labor costs (it's expensive to mine diamonds & pay professionals to cut diamonds by hand).

Industrial quality (mined) diamonds are cheap as shiat & are actually outnumbered by synthetic diamonds (around since the 1950's but not mass produced till later).

Until recently, nobody had a viable way of creating gem quality 'synthetic' diamonds. There are currently three companies that can do this & their diamonds are vastly cheaper than mined diamonds.

The various diamond importers don't care so much about the synthetic industrial grade diamonds, because those types of stones were too small/imperfect to be used for gems anyways. However, they are shitting bricks over man-made gem quality stones because the 'fakes' are cheaper to produce and are literally perfect.

So, in summary: The price of gem quality diamonds will be coming down, no matter what the big mining cartels have to say about it.

Re:I *prefer* man-made gems

[budgenator]

Aluminum is very common, but it's always found as a salt or oxide, originaly to smelt alluminum they mixed AlO with sodium metal and heated it until the sodium reduced the AlO to pure AL + NaO; this was a very dangerous and expensive reaction, which is why aluminum was very expensive, worth its weight in gold and rare. The modern method uses electric arc furnaces and electrity to cheap to measure, they just melt the baxite ore and the electricity electrolyses the ore into metal.

Re:Homework for editor

[Fluffy_Kitten]

the z is american english, and the s is british english.

Re:But you know...

[Brother Seamus]

Link for the clueless (like me).

Re:This is a really lame con

[Drakai]

LOL, I seriously doubt they allowed a hardness test to be done on the gem. It requires indentations be made and then measured, unless I am mistaken. And while the latest greatest tools might make very small indents the risk would seem to great for a treasure of King Tut. On the other hand, the refraction index and the static charge are more believable tests.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockwell_scale

Often scientific curiousity takes a backseat to preservation, as well it should.

One word..

[novus ordo]

DeBeers. They have the world's monopoly on diamonds and are quick to buyoff any new mines and ventures to control the supply. They are shitting bricks(diamonds?) and spending millions into detecting the ever more sophisticated synthetic diamonds. With all the effort they force on you to make the "perfect" diamond it will cost more than just buying one from them.

Re:One word..

[TubeSteak]

I read/skimmed through that & learned a few new things.

I guess man-made diamonds aren't exactly perfect.

The (soon to be overcome) stumbling block is that synthetics have a mix of 8 (which is normal) and 4 (which is not) sided internal structures.

Because of the 4-sided structures, synthetic diamonds are UV reactive under "very intense short-wave ultraviolet" and will phosphoresce for a bit in the dark.

Anyways, I still dispute your assertion that the search for the perfect man-made diamond will cause synthetics to cost more than natural diamonds. Most people just won't care. People who, in the past, wouldn't have bought a diamond, will.

The only people who care will be investors & rich pricks who buy the marketing fantasy. Once the perfect man-made diamond is created, the only thing that will keep up values of natural diamonds will be historical or nostalgic interest.

Re:"accidentally found"?

[smellsofbikes]

I was going to talk about how the top of the Washington Monument was made of aluminum because at the time it was nearly as valuable as gold, but it turns out that that's somewhat of an urban myth. Here's a really interesting article about the Monument and the lightning-suppression system they designed for it.

In any case, the price of aluminum and titanium (and for that matter, beryllium, lithium, and other exotic metals) has plummetted as better production systems have come into use.

I've read several essays discussing t-shirts, and how their design echoes manufacturing costs. When the price of a quality t-shirt is maybe double the price of a cheap one, the only way to distinguish a DKNY or Old Navy t-shirt from a cheap Hanes shirt you buy at WalMart is the (copyrighted) image on the front. You're not buying the shirt, you're buying something that bears a copyright which is known to be expensive. So also with diamonds. Wired had an interesting article about synth diamond production a couple of years ago, proposing two to four orders of magnitude cheaper diamonds for fine jewelry usage (meaning: can't be detected as synth by any known tests.) I'd love to have some diamond lenses for some of my projects, so I'm happy with these developments.

Re:"accidentally found"?

[TubeSteak]

1a. http://gemesis.com/wheretobuy/usa.htm
1b. http://gemesis.com/wheretobuy/europe.htm1
1c. http://gemesis.com/wheretobuy/asia.htm

2. http://chatham.com/ (they sell from their website)

Honorable Mention: http://www.apollodiamond.com/
They will have a webstore "in 2006", but will take "special requests" in the meantime.