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Science Technology

The Diamond Age 653

Posted by michael from the two-months'-salary dept.
bigner writes "The new diamond age is here and will revolutionize the computer industry. Diamonds show amazing potential as a superior semiconductor."
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The Diamond Age More

The Diamond Age

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  • Copying Apple again (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 12, 2003 @07:57PM (#6681439)
    Apple invented the word 'super,' and also invented incredibly over priced computers. You PC losers are just jealous.

  • Back in the day. (Score:4, Funny)

    by prichardson ( 603676 ) on Tuesday August 12, 2003 @07:58PM (#6681447) Journal
    Now it will be back in the day when computers cost like $4000. Oh yea, no more stupid users. If someone really wants a computer they're going to have to take the time to learn to use it or it will end up being a waste of 4 grand instead of $600. I predict a new golden age!!!

  • But is the reverse true? (Score:5, Funny)

    by jdreed1024 ( 443938 ) on Tuesday August 12, 2003 @08:00PM (#6681473)
    Diamonds show amazing potential as a superior semiconductor."

    Bah, I'm more concered about the reverse being true. You know, like when semiconductors will show amazing potential as a superior diamond. Because it's a hell of a lot cheaper to give my girlfriend a chip than a diamond ring. And just because you're not using diamonds doesn't mean you can't differentiate on the value. The slick executive types will propose with dual Athlons, while the poor struggling college student will have to resort to a 6502 or something.

  • Real vs. Fake (Score:5, Funny)

    by Dancin_Santa ( 265275 ) <DancinSanta@gmail.com> on Tuesday August 12, 2003 @08:01PM (#6681479) Journal
    I thought about getting Mrs. Claus one of these fake diamonds as an engagement ring stone, but then I thought about what I was saying by doing such a thing. Is my love for her just a facsimile of true love? Though chemically and physically the manufactured diamond is identical to a mined diamond, there is the lingering feeling that it is somewhat untrue to the spirit of diamonds. It is a perfect, fake diamond.

    I didn't want to have that sort of guilt hanging over my head, so I didn't go with the cheaper diamond.

    I decided to buy her a cheapy cubic zirconium instead.

    • Re:Real vs. Fake (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I'm not sure I understand how the diamond is fake. Do you measure a diamond by its strength? Appearance? Or where it comes from? If you want the first two, you can go with fake diamonds. If the third is all that matters, you could give her a chunk of rock (silicon and other chemicals) from the same area as diamonds. In the end, it's really just a psychological issue, something which De Beers has strived to manipulate to increase the importance and hence worth of diamonds. In some ways, I'd rather get a

    • Re:Real vs. Fake (Score:3, Informative)

      by Kynde ( 324134 )
      I thought about getting Mrs. Claus one of these fake diamonds as an engagement ring stone, but then I thought about what I was saying by doing such a thing. Is my love for her just a facsimile of true love? Though chemically and physically the manufactured diamond is identical to a mined diamond, there is the lingering feeling that it is somewhat untrue to the spirit of diamonds. It is a perfect, fake diamond.

      Seriously, you're qually full of it whily buying diamonds. Diamond carbon has interesting physica

  • ...will it now? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by aerojad ( 594561 ) on Tuesday August 12, 2003 @08:02PM (#6681485) Homepage Journal
    For years, we've heard about semiconductors the size of human hairs and how it would revolutionize the computing world.

    I still see an AMD chip in my computer, and nice, large visible chips in the stores.

    So now it's diamonds? I'm not trying to troll, but when will mainstream applications (see: desktop computers, or at least universities) come around? Until we see anything, it's all theoretical, and all subject to just being vaporware.

  • Does this mean... (Score:5, Funny)

    by El Cubano ( 631386 ) on Tuesday August 12, 2003 @08:02PM (#6681488)
    I can tell my wife that she should let me a new 3 carat Radeon 18000 Pro for our anniversary? I mean, it has diamonds, after all.

  • Give Peace a Chance (Score:5, Insightful)

    by zachster ( 677285 ) on Tuesday August 12, 2003 @08:02PM (#6681490) Homepage Journal
    I'm so pleased. Really really pleased. Aside from furthuring the hopes and dreams of everyone's favorite science fiction writer [amazon.com], this has a real potential for curbing South African violence. Call me liberatarian, but much like the pending legalization of all controlled substances [stopthedrugwar.org] (I can dream can't I?), a potential for cheap diamonds could destroy any black market demand for our little carbon friends.
    • by "pending" I assume you mean "once every single Republican and most Democratic politicians are dead", right?

    • Re:Give Peace a Chance (Score:5, Interesting)

      by commodoresloat ( 172735 ) on Tuesday August 12, 2003 @10:48PM (#6682499)
      I think it will be great if the diamond market crashes because of this. The violence is in many parts of Africa, and the industry is corrupt from top to bottom. Horribly corrupt and brutal governments and mercenaries are being propped up and enriched by the trade. Look at Sierra Leone [amnesty.ie]. Diamonds don't just stand for love; they also stand for murder and brutality. And diamonds aren't even naturally scarce; de Beers hordes them to keep the prices artificially inflated. They've maintained an empire with their virtual diamond monopoly for a century and they pretend not to be involved with the brutality. All the while convincing every hot chick in America that what they really need more than anything else in the world is a stone on their finger. I personally will feel a large amount of wry satisfaction if all those $20,000 bracelets and necklaces and rings are suddenly worth $5 a carat.

    • I'm so pleased. Really really pleased. Aside from furthuring the hopes and dreams of everyone's favorite science fiction writer, this has a real potential for curbing South African violence. Call me liberatarian, but much like the pending legalization of all controlled substances (I can dream can't I?), a potential for cheap diamonds could destroy any black market demand for our little carbon friends.
      Sure it would be nice if synthetic diamonds lead to world peace, but all I really care about is that this

  • Diamonds without guilt (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Hentai ( 165906 ) on Tuesday August 12, 2003 @08:05PM (#6681508) Homepage Journal
    I've been waiting for this for years. I want to get my girlfriend a diamond ring (even if the concept of 'traditionalism' was manufactured, a diamond ring sends a cultural message that I wish to buy into), but I refuse to buy from anything that might have been touched by DeBeers. Now I can get a high-quality diamond, and be certain that no 14 year old Sierra Leone girls had their hands cut off to get it to me.
  • In Response to the famous /. proposal [slashdot.org].
    Kathleen, I bet you are kicking yourself for giving in so soon now!

    (with apologizes to CmdrTaco)

  • Good news (Score:5, Interesting)

    by archen ( 447353 ) on Tuesday August 12, 2003 @08:07PM (#6681528)
    Hopefully this will break the diamond cartel permenantly. I can't wait for diamonds to become like salt. Hard to believe the romans actually paid soldiers with salt. Now everyone will have diamonds cheaply, and western culture can wonder about all that brainwashing they've endured thinking that investing in a diamond ring was worth it.

  • and by the way (Score:4, Informative)

    by roman_mir ( 125474 ) on Tuesday August 12, 2003 @08:08PM (#6681534) Homepage Journal
    diamonds are not really forever [theatlantic.com]

    at the bottom there is a link to the next part...

  • Don't Buy Diamonds (Score:5, Informative)

    by Bonker ( 243350 ) on Tuesday August 12, 2003 @08:09PM (#6681544)
    They're not really rare. As the article states, Debeers has a stockpile and controls the supply ruthlessly with tactics that makes Microsoft look like reasonable.

    They pretty much ignored an antitrust judgement [usdoj.gov], have been held responsible for untold exploitation of black African minors [stanford.edu], and have been accused of much worse. In the article, one of the interviewees recalls and indirect death threat and treats the journalist with suspicion, fearful that he is an agent of Debeers.

    Yes, ladies, we know they look pretty. They may also be more responsible for more terrorism than drugs [globalpolicy.org], certainly more than Bush/Ascroft would like you to beleive.

  • Read! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dave1g ( 680091 ) on Tuesday August 12, 2003 @08:11PM (#6681559) Journal
    I read this story earlier today, and i can already tell that 90% of the above posters havent read it.

    If they did they would know that these are manufactured diamonds using relativly new processes that allow for some large diamonds.

    Being manufactured they are rather cheap. The jewel grade stones will be sold at about half fo what debeers is selling thier diamonds for.

    The big falacy about diamonds is that they are scare. They are, in fact, in great abundance but most of the world's supply is controlled by Debeers. They trickle diamonds onto the market keeping the price artificially high.

    To summarize.

    1. We can now make great looking diamonds for cheap. (2 different methods of doing so)
    2. They can be formed into anything from gemstones to about 4 inch wide(so far) diamond wafers.
    3. There are 2 forms of doping in the process of creating the diamonds that allows for + and - parts (couldnt think of the word) that means we now have the building blocks of logic for diamond based chips.

    • nitpick (Score:3, Informative)

      by LDoggg_ ( 659725 )
      2. They can be formed into anything from gemstones to about 4 inch wide(so far) diamond wafers.

      Nope. 10 millimeters so far.
      From page 4 of the article:
      At the moment, the company is producing 10-millimeter wafers but predicts it will reach an inch square by year's end and 4 inches in five years.

  • Excellent heat conductivity (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Hanzie ( 16075 ) on Tuesday August 12, 2003 @08:14PM (#6681568)
    The big point behind putting chips on diamonds is that diamonds are the best known conductors of heat. That means that the chip can be severely cranked up without melting.

    The idea is to sell gemstones until they can start making semiconductor blanks. The diamonds will be comparatively cheap, since the vast majority of the cost to produce the diamonds is fixed.

    As to DeBeers, I'm sure they'll come up with some marketing angle. Personally, after taking a university honors course in gemology, I learned that the way to tell the difference twixt 'real' and 'fake' gemstones was the 'real' ones were full of crap. The very most expensive of the 'reals' merely approached the purity of the 'fakes'.

    Of course, it isn't true love unless you've spent thousands on the rock. The composition of the rock itself doesn't matter (except for the all-important crap to show it's 'real'), it's how much debt you're willing to incurr to show your love.

    • Re:Excellent heat conductivity (Score:5, Funny)

      by Prior Restraint ( 179698 ) on Tuesday August 12, 2003 @10:21PM (#6682298)

      Of course, it isn't true love unless you've spent thousands on the rock. The composition of the rock itself doesn't matter (except for the all-important crap to show it's 'real'), it's how much debt you're willing to incurr to show your love.

      Please tell me you're joking: "Hi, I've no concept of fiscal responsibility. I've thrown away thousands of dollars on a bauble. Would you like to tie your economic future to mine?"

  • I knew this was coming (Score:5, Interesting)

    by core plexus ( 599119 ) on Tuesday August 12, 2003 @08:15PM (#6681583) Homepage
    As a geologist working for a company that explores mostly for metals, I recently worked on a diamond project here in Alaska. I've known for a long time that the whole diamond scam (see DeBeers) would come crashing down eventually, and have been warning that we (the company) should not be getting too excited about diamond finds, because unlike metals, diamonds are controlled by a monopoly and are useful for few applications. Not to mention the fact that diamonds aren't as rare as the DeBeers Cartel would like everyone to believe. This might finally put a crimp on the so-called 'blood diamonds', and I'll look for emeralds, gold, and platinum-group metals instead.

    -cp-

    • Re:I knew this was coming (Score:4, Interesting)

      by toxic666 ( 529648 ) on Tuesday August 12, 2003 @08:56PM (#6681807)
      I wouldn't put too much effort into emeralds. They've been manufacturing them for a long time and have gotten good enough to make very nice carbanaceous inclusions just like the naturals. It's now really to to spot the artificials.

      Gimme a nice large pegmatite full of beryl, and I'd be happy. Chromian beryl (emerald) doesn't excite me as a money-making mine, though.

  • where are the advantages (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 12, 2003 @08:18PM (#6681596)
    It is unclear, at best, whether or not diamond has any advantages for mainstream processing. Just because diamond has higher thermal conductivity doesn't mean that it can magically solve all of our problems...without knowing what kind of carrier mobilities can be acheived you can't conclude anything. It might turn out that diamonds are actually far worse than silicon for processing applications. And then there are all of the potential fabrication problems. The lack of good dopants. The lack of a stable native oxide (instead of silicon dioxide, you have carbon dioxide...). How are you going to etch 10nm features into diamond? The article talks of a lack of interest from mainstream companies like Intel. I would take this as a very bad sign for diamond processors...with the scope of Intel/IBM/AMDs research efforts, if they're not looking into something, then its probably not worth researching. Diamonds might have some very useful applications in optical devices...but don't expect to see them inside your desktop computer.
    • Well, if you read the article you would know that
      the doping issues seem resolved, and that diamond
      without doping is an insulator. So that takes care
      of most concerns. On the other hand, the article
      does not say what "k" dielectric pure diamond is.
      It might not be very good. And mobility issues
      are real. See e.g. Science. 2002 Sep 6;297(5587):1657-8.
      for more info, but it looks promising.

  • Everyone has missed the obvious joke! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Peter Cooper ( 660482 ) on Tuesday August 12, 2003 @08:18PM (#6681597) Homepage Journal
    *starts singing* A kiss on the RAM might be quite unconventional, but diamonds are a geek's best friend!

  • Of course. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by man_ls ( 248470 ) on Tuesday August 12, 2003 @08:32PM (#6681676)
    Look at the periodic table.

    Silicon is in the same family as Carbon (same column)

    As indicated by Mendeleev, the creator of the periodic table, elements in the same family share the same properties.

    Carbon and Silicon share the ability to form chains of arbitrary length...this property gets weaker as you travel down the family, from infinite chains (Carbon) to max of 10 (silicon)

    It only follows, naturally, that if silicon is an "okay" semiconductor, just as it is at forming repeating chains, that carbon, which forms better chains, would also be a better semiconductor.

    Diamonds are just a pure carbon with a special crystal structure...so, of course, they should be semiconducting. Graphite may be also, following the same logic.

  • Diamonds = Love, pah! (Score:4, Funny)

    by retro128 ( 318602 ) on Tuesday August 12, 2003 @08:43PM (#6681745)
    Wrong, says Jef Van Royen, a senior scientist at the Diamond High Council, the official representative of the diamond industry in Belgium. "If people really love each other, then they give each other the real stone," he says, during an interview at council headquarters on the Hoveniersstraat in Antwerp. "It is not a symbol of eternal love if it is something that was created last week."

    I invite Mr Van Royen to visit his local pawn shop.

  • I'd buy them even if I knew they were fake (Score:3, Troll)

    by umrgregg ( 192838 ) on Tuesday August 12, 2003 @08:45PM (#6681753) Homepage
    It sure beats the hell out of buying the real deal from DeBeers. I'm not really into the whole child labor and enslavement of whole towns that DeBeers doesn't seem to want to stop. I hope their market crashes down around them--it'll serve 'em right for sure.

  • cubic zirconium (Score:5, Funny)

    by frankmu ( 68782 ) on Tuesday August 12, 2003 @08:48PM (#6681762) Homepage
    now i'll have to make sure the cpu is really a diamond before i can overclock it?

  • The South African economy? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by wytcld ( 179112 ) on Tuesday August 12, 2003 @08:50PM (#6681773) Homepage
    Granted that deBeers should be out of business, what would that do to the South African economy? The conflict diamonds farther north, if devalued, will be a great blessing to the populations there. But in South Africa being a diamond miner is actually a relatively high-paying job, in the most Westernized black-majority democracy in the world. What portion of South Africa's economy - both employment and foreign income - currently depends on deBeers? This could be the equivalent of somebody foreign coming up with something that would obsolete the American auto industry. Thus it may not just be deBeers' own agents to watch out for - there's a strong national interest about to be trampled here. Not that I'd advise or expect the synthetics makers to pull back ... yet friends in high military positions may be just what they need.

    • Re:The South African economy? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by eht ( 8912 ) on Tuesday August 12, 2003 @09:06PM (#6681856)
      The same thing that is done to any economy that is no longer needed, in the past the area where I live was the buggy whip making capital of the world, boohoo, they all got put out of work when the evil car companies started making horseless carriages.

  • I remember seeing this before (Score:3, Informative)

    by poity ( 465672 ) on Tuesday August 12, 2003 @08:58PM (#6681820)

    on NOVA [pbs.org] a few years back..

    It dealt with the technology behind these diamond presses.

    As I remember, they were still having trouble with microscopic CO2 bubbles being trapped in the formed diamonds, which made the product pretty much worthless.

    Pretty cool how much the process has improved.

  • HEY, AMD! (Score:4, Funny)

    by TitaniumFox ( 467977 ) * on Tuesday August 12, 2003 @09:11PM (#6681887) Journal
    Gone would be the days of chipping your Athlon core because of those damn huge thermaltake orbs!

  • Hardass American Businessman (Score:4, Interesting)

    by DrWho520 ( 655973 ) on Tuesday August 12, 2003 @09:15PM (#6681916) Journal
    Carter Clarke, 75, has been retired from the Army for nearly 30 years, but he never lost the air of command. When he walks into Gemesis - the company he founded in 1996 to make diamonds - the staff stands at attention to greet him. It just feels like the right thing to do. Particularly since "the General," as he's known, continually salutes them as if they were troops heading into battle. "I was in combat in Korea and 'Nam," he says after greeting me with a salute in the office lobby. "You better believe I can handle the diamond business."

    Call me a patriot, but I am impressed by the hardass, American businessman standing up to the entrenched, monopoly vendors. Here is free market at its best, with visionaires taking risk on new technologies, betting the farm on being the first in a new market. It will be interesting to see if both companies can co-exist, if one will knock the other out, or if DeBeers will call out Leon [imdb.com] on both of them.

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday August 12, 2003 @09:29PM (#6681973)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • PBS information (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mesterha ( 110796 ) <{moc.liamg} {ta} {mrahretsem.sirhc}> on Tuesday August 12, 2003 @09:31PM (#6681977) Homepage

    PBS had a special on this back in 2000. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/diamond/ [pbs.org]

    It looks like the big breakthrough is the CVD technique. The old Russian design had the problem of letting in too much nitrogen and creating only yellow diamonds. They have improved the technique but it is still harder to make clear diamonds. I read that they were going after the colored market since colored natural diamonds are more expensive. Plus it must be easier to add color with new elements than remove all the yellow. (They can add different elements to get different colors.) Expect the market in colored diamonds (especially yellow) to get cheap. (Kobe should have waited...) Of course the real volume is in clear diamonds. Hopefully the CVD technique can make cheap clear diamonds. I know they said $5 a carat, but I wouldn't trust Wired.

  • Doing a bit of digging, it appears the most accessible bit of De Beers ownership is the 45% stake owned by Anglo American, a UK-listed mining giant. According to their latest annual report, diamonds have been very profitable for them over the last year, going from 20% of profits to 29% of profits.

    I wonder whether some options trading to take advantage of a (hopefully) impending crash in the diamond market is appropriate here. I suppose it'll take a few years, which AFAICT is beyond the horizon of most options trading, isn't it?

  • CVD Diamond- I do this. (Score:4, Informative)

    by jennygerbi ( 263473 ) on Tuesday August 12, 2003 @10:02PM (#6682145)

    Interesting article, but it's missing some of the point. There are two issues here: fabricating substitute "gem" diamonds for jewelry, or fabricating diamond for the semiconductor industry..., or diamond coatings for wear resistance, biocompatible implants, etc. These are an entirely different beast.

    CVD diamond, even in with the best of reactors, is limited by growth rates. Working with thin films is, at the moment, the only way to go. You can also only get single crystal diamond by growing on a previously obtained single crystal diamond- as they mention in the article. This is seriously limiting, and they don't mention the growth rates in the article. 5$ a carat is such a BS guess it's not even funny.

    CVD diamond grown primarly on Si wafers, and on some specially coated Si wafers, is the way diamond (which is polycrystalline, with different grain sizes giving very different diamond properties) is going to be used in the near to far future. Our group just got a RD 100 award (not that I give that much creedence to those, but it's recognition) for coating 4" wafers with diamond, and we're going up to 8" next year.

    The biggest problem is with the electronic properties of the diamond. Sure, it's a great thermal conductor. But... ahem.. it also needs to be a great electical conductor- and have decent mobilities- to be used in actual electronic devices. You can dope diamond with boron to make it p-type, but the conductivity isn't all that high, and the mobility even less, in polycrystalline diamond due to defects and grain boundaries, etc. We've made n-type nanocrystalline diamond with nitrogen, which shouldn't work, but does, and we're still trying to figure out the conduction mechanism.

    Thin film diamond is really going to shine for a few particular uses- MEMS (it has extremely low friction/stiction/wear), bio-devices, chemically resistant devices, etc. In all of these cases, even conductive MEMS driven by diamond electronics, borderline and not great electronic properties are fine. (Think Si TFT's for your comptuer display- it's not single crystal Si, obviously, but still has a great potental for other uses.)

    There is no way to dope single crystal n-type. People are trying very hard to do this. Some people think they have gotten phosphorous to work slightly, but the growth is very difficult, and the work hard to reproduce. (our doping probably occurs in the grain boundaries, and we think we have actual grain boundary conduction vs. traditional doping processes.) That is a far bigger barrier than just growing BIG DIAMONDS. This article is just some PR spin press release that doesn't really say anything. (As I get more jaded, I see that that is all they really ever are). Just because you can't make Intel processors out of diamond doesn't mean you can't utilize diamond for a large number of exciting applications.

    Remember: bigger is not better. Although I personally do like the idea of freaking out DeBeers.

    Pull me a diamond boule, and I"ll be impressed.

    -j, postdoc at your favorite national lab.

    • Re:CVD Diamond- I do this. (Score:5, Informative)

      by BabyP ( 93869 ) on Wednesday August 13, 2003 @12:56AM (#6683120)
      RTFA...or, to save you the trouble, from the fifth page of the article:

      The third big challenge has been the most daunting for materials scientists: To form microchip circuits, positive and negative conductors are needed. Diamond is an inherent insulator - it doesn't conduct electricity. But both Gemesis and Apollo have been able to inject boron into the lattice, which creates a positive charge. Until now, though, no one had been able to manufacture a negatively charged, or n-type, diamond with sufficient conductivity. When I visit Butler in Washington, he can barely contain his glee. "There's been a major breakthrough," he tells me. In June, together with scientists from Israel and France, he announced a novel way of inverting boron's natural conductivity to form a boron-doped n-type diamond. "We now have a p-n junction," Butler says. "Which means that we have a diamond semiconductor that really works. I can now see an Intel diamond Pentium chip on the horizon."

    • Re:CVD Diamond- I do this. (Score:5, Informative)

      by pavera ( 320634 ) on Wednesday August 13, 2003 @01:46AM (#6683305) Homepage Journal
      In the last page of the article they mention that the CVD process grows the diamond "brick" at .5 millimeters a day, if thats not a growth rate what is?

  • Hmmm... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by DoraLives ( 622001 ) on Tuesday August 12, 2003 @10:36PM (#6682408)
    Among all the other interesting fallout that may come from el cheapo diamond by the kilo, I kind of wonder what optical instruments (telescopes in particular) might wind up turning into?

    Diamond has a very high index of refractivity. It's also pretty hard.

    A rucksack 'scope with uncoated optics that I could safely clean the objective lens using sandpaper sounds pretty cool. Rugged as all hell and tack sharp in the visual department. I like it!

  • The Heat Issue (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Bruha ( 412869 ) on Tuesday August 12, 2003 @11:07PM (#6682617) Homepage Journal
    My question here is, that you have this chip that will now run at 2k instead of 200 degrees but what the hell are you going to do with the heat? For home users are we going to start seeing dryer vents with firewall protection through the walls to the outside of the house?

    I'm running 2 AMD XP 2000+ processors in a 12x12 room and shut the doors and it can be 100 degrees in there quickly. I'm sure it creates enough heat to raise my power bill some also but I have yet come up with a solution. I have planned on venting them out the Window but I have to handle the bug and security problem there at the same time.

  • Japanese research? (Score:3, Informative)

    by flyingroc ( 30196 ) on Tuesday August 12, 2003 @11:11PM (#6682644)

    A bit of googling turned out this page [sei.co.jp] with pictures of artificial diamond gems, and wafers. Seems like Sumitomo Electric has some wafers larger than the few milimiters mentioned in the article.

    I wonder how far along the Japanese are in this research...

  • There's more to diamond than CPUs and rings (Score:3, Informative)

    by Angst Badger ( 8636 ) on Wednesday August 13, 2003 @01:51AM (#6683328)
    Oddly absent -- though perhaps not so considering the source is Wired -- is any consideration of the significance of cheap diamond for optics. Diamond has a substantially higher refractive index than glass and is less subject to thermal and mechanical deformation than glass. What that would mean in practice would require a deeper knowledge of optics than I have, but it sure would be interesting to see what kind of lenses and prisms could be made out of it for cameras, telescopes, and microscopes.

  • Excellent news.... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by xA40D ( 180522 ) on Wednesday August 13, 2003 @03:24AM (#6683644) Homepage
    I love diamonds. I really do. Staring into a diamond is like standing in a room full of mirrors. Even uncut diamonds are beautiful - I've got a nice uncut diamond brought back from Africa by a relative generations ago.

    But it's always irritated me that the price of diamond has been kept artificially high by DeBeers. Given a choice between an artificial diamonds and an artificial price.... I'll take the artificial diamond.

    Besides, it's not as if I'd ever be able tell the differance. Unless of course DeBeers starts supplying a fourier transform infrared spectrometer free with every diamond. Which, as I'm a techie who likes technical toys, is the only thing that would make me cough up the DeBeers premium.

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