You’re right, I misunderstood. Thought you were talking about the shape diamonds naturally formed into. D’oh!
I believe they can now also make diamonds in a process similar to computer chip manufacture where they lay down the carbon atoms one atomic layer at a time. Again, it’s probably not economically competitive with mining. It may be the source, however, of the earlier comment about diamond-lined cylinders in IC engines.
“non sunt multiplicanda entia praeter necessitatem”
– William of Ockham
Some people have mentioned some stuff about DeBeers, diamonds, and the like. Here’s some interesting facts about Girls Best Friend (ever wonder why man’s best friend is a dog, and a girls is a diamond? I think we got gyped fellas).
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Diamonds are the most abundant gem quality stone on the planet. Even if you eliminate all of the industrial grade diamonds, there are more gem quality diamonds mined than any other common stone.
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Diamonds are, expensive as they are, somewhat less expensive than rubies. A pure, flawless, blood-red ruby will be about half again as expensive as the comparable quality diamond.
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Already mentioned, but a diamonds strength comes from its resistance to crystal deformation. Cleaving between crystals is relatively easy (which is how diamonds get “cut”) but the crystals themselves are amazingly resiliant. A sharp diamond will rarely “dull” since it will easily cut through other stuff without deforming
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Diamonds burn, and without too much trouble either. A standard housefire will turn most diamonds into so much soot and CO2.
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Something like 90% of all gem quality diamonds mined come from South Africa. DeBeers is a South African company, a syndicate that buys up ALL of the diamonds in South Africa as well as about 90% of what’s left. Thus, only about 1% of gem quality diamonds do not, at one point, go through DeBeer’s vaults. Since they have a monopoly on world diamond distribution, they get to set the price. It has been estimated that on an open market, if supply and demand were left to themselves, diamonds could wholesale for less than a quarter of what they do now.
Jason R Remy
“What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate”
Warden in Cool Hand Luke
And a top-quality emerald is more expensive still. A true red diamond is, I believe, the rarest and most expensive stone; but when you start getting into weird stones like that it’s hard to give comparative prices.
A ruby and sapphire are both the same sort of stone, BTW; the only difference is color. If it’s pink, blue, green, yellow, white–it’s a sapphire. If it’s red, it’s a ruby (the term for the best color in a ruby is “pigeon’s-blood red”).
“Eppur, si muove!” - Galileo Galilei
A perfect diamond is a single covalently bonded molecule, no matter how large it is. Even in real (i.e. imperfect) diamonds, you’d get single perfect crystals much larger than four atoms.
The atoms have a tetrahedral geometry, meaning that (again, in a perfect crystal) each atom’s nearest neighbors are at the vertices of a tetrahedron.
Vapor deposition of diamond films has been around for a while (I recall reading about it ten years ago, and it didn’t seem to be considered a particularly new and exotic technique even then). It would take forever to build up a noticeable crystal one layer at a time, so I don’t think this is practical for gems, but it might be possible to use it to put a very tough surface layer on an object.