Let’s say an 80+ carrot cut diamond is secured to a stationary mounting platform of some kind, and then is blasted at close range with a .300 win mag or a similar load. What would happen?
I realize diamonds aren’t indestructible, but is the diamond most likely to:
a) Crumble
b) Break in to a couple larger parts
c) Be chipped, but not penetrated
d) Come out as before, no worse for the wear
Would it make a difference if the bullet was hard or soft? Somehow, I don’t think Mythbusters would have the budget for this experiment. Any ideas?
I think the diamond is going to structurally fail in a spectacular manner.
Diamonds are hard, but they aren’t indestructible. If you try to cut a diamond with metal, it’s not going to work. However, you can shatter a diamond with a hammer. A bullet is overkill.
My understanding is that it will indeed shatter, but only if you hit it at the right point, and the bullet is likely to miss. Unless I’m totally off base.
I’ve cleaved a lot of crystals in my work (not diamonds, although I’ve spent a lot of time talking to and trying to talk to diamond folks), so this is a semi-educated guess.
Diamonds certainly aren’t indestructible. Like most things that are tough and resistant to scratching, they are brittle. So your bullet is likely to shatter your diamond, possibly mainly into a couple of large chunks, but with lots of diamond granules and diamond dust around. If you’re really unlucky, you’ll have nothing but diamong gravel and dust.
Although I did spell the word wrong in the OP, Carat is a unit of mass that you could weigh anything with, but is used mostly for gems. The sky is the limit.
Karat is a unit of purity used for metals like gold, where 24K gold is indeed pure, and can’t go higher.
According to the chap I was chatting with, who was a manager of a diamond mine, one had to be very careful with diamonds, particularly large ones as they could easily be broken. Diamond is very hard (i.e. difficult to scratch), but also very brittle so would break into smaller pieces if hit or dropped.
The mining process involves grinding up the rock and then using gravity separation of a rock slurry. The grinding process had to be carefully controlled (more of a heavy massage of the rock than crushing) to prevent destroying exactly what they were after as the large diamonds where where the profit was at.
I’m in the wrong tax bracket to routinely go around whacking diamonds with hammers, but from everything I’ve read, this is a common myth. It’s so common that I was able to find several internet sites that claimed if you hit a diamond with a hammer, you’ll likely only end up with a dented hammer.
Diamonds are #1 on the scratch test, but just because they are the hardest material doesn’t mean they are the strongest material. Diamonds shatter fairly easily on impact. Steel, on the other hand, is much stronger, but you can easily scratch steel with a diamond.
I was hoping to find a picture or a video of a diamond being shattered with a hammer. Unfortunately, my googling only ended up with lots of links for MC Hammer and some legend of zelda games. So, instead, here’s a video of a woman putting a diamond in a blender.
Unfortunately, the video doesn’t say what her boyfriend did for his ring to deserve such a treatment. Suffice it to say that the diamond doesn’t fare too well in this test.
Possibly the origin of the idea that you have to hit a diamond in the exact right spot to crack it is the fact that to accurately cut a diamond to shape you must hit it in exactly the right spot. Otherwise the diamond will break in the wrong place and you don’t get the facets you are trying to achieve.