The first synthetic diamond and why it mattered

20:54They use a kind of belt apparatus. It's it's effectively high pressure high temperature, okay? So, you take graphite, you would subject it to 10 gigapascals, which is 100,000 times atmospheric pressure, you raise the temperature up to 1,000° and you get diamond. This was a triumph in material science. Francis Bundy, Hall, Strong, and Wentworth. They got enormous recognition. They They're in the Inventors Hall of Fame. Um very controversially, no Nobel Prize for them. It might be because there's four people and the Nobel Prize can only go to three. But usually when that happens, you just wait for one of them to die. >> Right. >> And then you give it to the other three, you know? But they didn't even do that,

21:35which I think is quite controversial because like lab-grown diamonds are a game-changer for all of these industrial applications that I was telling you about, right? So very much has changed the landscape of material science and industry. They should probably should have gotten the Nobel Prize. But I think now all four of them have passed away, so it's too late. >> Understood. >> In any case they've shown that we can make cubic diamond. And they >> This is also where we get the meme and the like colloquialism about uh strong as a diamond, diamond under pressure, like all of these various >> thingies >> Yes. >> is because the way you make diamonds is through It's almost like like almost most people kind of know it's like high heat >> Yeah. And squeezing. Yeah. >> diamond.

22:16>> Yeah, that's why it happens deep in the Earth's crust if it's natural. And here we're just trying to sort of replicate that natural mechanism. That's why Yeah, exactly. Harder than a diamond. The diamond is forever stuff. That's Hollywood. >> Hollywood. >> Right. That's Hollywood and the DeBeers corporation. The as hard as a diamond, diamond under pressure, that's physics. >> Right. Right. Right. Just to be clear. >> Yeah, just to be clear. There is a difference here in in how we approach things. So people start making lab-grown diamonds and now we want to make lonsdaleite. We want to make hexagonal diamond. >> We've made cubic diamonds. We still have not yet made the the thing we've already theoretically identified >> Exactly. Impossible. >> Yeah. Yeah. But there's a lot of problems. The samples are too small. The

22:57crystals are submicron in size. And there's no real definitive proof because you need a lot of a sample. And by a lot, I mean even like a millimeter >> Mhm. >> worth of stuff >> Mhm. >> to do anything. >> Right. >> Right? So, with all of this comes skepticism. It's like, well why can't I just make >> Right. >> hexagonal diamond? How come every time I'm trying to make diamond, I always get cubic diamond? >> Right. >> Which is the stuff that I see on Earth. >> Right. >> And now you're telling me that this this meteor has it, but like even the meteorite sample might not be that good, and that's where we come to 2014. Nature Communications, there's a paper