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By Helen Czerski
June 9, 2017 11:10 a.m. ET
A few weeks ago, a small pink rock was sold for $71.2 million. It’s a staggering amount of money—enough to buy a few mansions and a very shiny yacht, with plenty of spare change for a space tourist ticket to orbit the Earth. Of course, this was no ordinary rock; it was the 59.6-carat Pink Star diamond, the largest flawless pink diamond ever found and, as of April, the world’s most expensive gemstone.
But high prices aren’t the only extraordinary feature of diamonds. They’re extraordinary in the world of science, too, and not just for their famed hardness. The diamond is nature’s standard-bearer for the beauty of slowing things down, especially the fastest thing of all.
The next time someone offers you a glass of sparkling water with ice in it, take a closer look before your first sip. The air bubbles, the water, the glass and the ice are all transparent and colorless. The question is: Why aren’t they invisible? You get a bit of help from reflections off the outside, but not much. Light goes through them all, but the crucial subtlety is that it doesn’t go straight through them all.
As light travels into the glass from the air, it slows down, which makes it swerve. The swerve is known to physicists as refraction, and the greater the change in speed, the greater the change of direction.
Lab-Grown Diamonds: How They're Made, How They Differ
Lab-grown diamonds are marketed as an ethical alternative to natural stones, but mining companies argue they’re no match for the real thing. Here’s a look at how synthetic gems are made — and how they compare to those culled from the ground.
“The speed of light” is well known to be the fastest that anything can travel, but even light doesn’t have to move at that speed. As light flows through glass, it is only traveling at about 67% of that maximum. Then it hits the water, and speeds up slightly, to 75%. Then air, then ice, and more water, speeding up, slowing down and swerving until what arrives at your eye is a contorted image of reality, with some parts missing and some magnified. Your brain is used to this contortion and correctly infers the existence of the invisible components that caused it.
In fact, none of us has ever seen or touched light that is traveling at its full speed. Even the insubstantial air around us slows light by a few hundredths of a percent and bends it by a similar amount. At sunset, the moment you think the bottom of the sun’s disk is just touching the horizon is actually when the sun has just passed below the horizon. You can see it because the air has slowed the light and bent its path around the Earth, so although it isn’t straight ahead of you, it’s still visible.
Diamond is the champion of this game, slowing light down to a languid 41% of its full speed, less than almost any other material that lets light through. The shimmy as light enters is enough to guide the beam all the way around the inside of the diamond and back out, making a facet opposite shine.
But the real beauty arises because different colors cross the jewel at different speeds: from 40.7% for violet light to 41.5% for red, with all of the rainbow spaced out in between.
The colors are split at the first swerve and split further on the way out, turning plain white light into vivid glittering sparkles. The pink color of the Pink Star is caused by something different: a minuscule shift in the gem’s crystal structure. Deep inside the volcanic pipes where diamonds are forged, the pressure is immense, and even a diamond may yield slightly in the most extreme conditions, turning it pink.
So when you hold a diamond, you’re as close as you’ll ever get to holding light, as it dawdles through the crystal. This moment of serenity brings out the richness of that light, twisting and turning it in such a distinctive way that it’s obvious the sparkle is caused by something special. Even slowing down a tiny bit gives us more to appreciate, and maybe that reminder is the real value of a diamond.
By Helen Czerski
June 9, 2017 11:10 a.m. ET
A few weeks ago, a small pink rock was sold for $71.2 million. It’s a staggering amount of money—enough to buy a few mansions and a very shiny yacht, with plenty of spare change for a space tourist ticket to orbit the Earth. Of course, this was no ordinary rock; it was the 59.6-carat Pink Star diamond, the largest flawless pink diamond ever found and, as of April, the world’s most expensive gemstone.
But high prices aren’t the only extraordinary feature of diamonds. They’re extraordinary in the world of science, too, and not just for their famed hardness. The diamond is nature’s standard-bearer for the beauty of slowing things down, especially the fastest thing of all.
The next time someone offers you a glass of sparkling water with ice in it, take a closer look before your first sip. The air bubbles, the water, the glass and the ice are all transparent and colorless. The question is: Why aren’t they invisible? You get a bit of help from reflections off the outside, but not much. Light goes through them all, but the crucial subtlety is that it doesn’t go straight through them all.
As light travels into the glass from the air, it slows down, which makes it swerve. The swerve is known to physicists as refraction, and the greater the change in speed, the greater the change of direction.
Lab-Grown Diamonds: How They're Made, How They Differ
Lab-grown diamonds are marketed as an ethical alternative to natural stones, but mining companies argue they’re no match for the real thing. Here’s a look at how synthetic gems are made — and how they compare to those culled from the ground.
“The speed of light” is well known to be the fastest that anything can travel, but even light doesn’t have to move at that speed. As light flows through glass, it is only traveling at about 67% of that maximum. Then it hits the water, and speeds up slightly, to 75%. Then air, then ice, and more water, speeding up, slowing down and swerving until what arrives at your eye is a contorted image of reality, with some parts missing and some magnified. Your brain is used to this contortion and correctly infers the existence of the invisible components that caused it.
In fact, none of us has ever seen or touched light that is traveling at its full speed. Even the insubstantial air around us slows light by a few hundredths of a percent and bends it by a similar amount. At sunset, the moment you think the bottom of the sun’s disk is just touching the horizon is actually when the sun has just passed below the horizon. You can see it because the air has slowed the light and bent its path around the Earth, so although it isn’t straight ahead of you, it’s still visible.
Diamond is the champion of this game, slowing light down to a languid 41% of its full speed, less than almost any other material that lets light through. The shimmy as light enters is enough to guide the beam all the way around the inside of the diamond and back out, making a facet opposite shine.
But the real beauty arises because different colors cross the jewel at different speeds: from 40.7% for violet light to 41.5% for red, with all of the rainbow spaced out in between.
The colors are split at the first swerve and split further on the way out, turning plain white light into vivid glittering sparkles. The pink color of the Pink Star is caused by something different: a minuscule shift in the gem’s crystal structure. Deep inside the volcanic pipes where diamonds are forged, the pressure is immense, and even a diamond may yield slightly in the most extreme conditions, turning it pink.
So when you hold a diamond, you’re as close as you’ll ever get to holding light, as it dawdles through the crystal. This moment of serenity brings out the richness of that light, twisting and turning it in such a distinctive way that it’s obvious the sparkle is caused by something special. Even slowing down a tiny bit gives us more to appreciate, and maybe that reminder is the real value of a diamond.
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