‘Matryoshka’ diamonds unearthed in Siberia (2019) | Hacker News Reader

‘Matryoshka’ diamonds unearthed in Siberia (2019)

siberiantimes.com

105 pointsbryanrasmussen42 comments

Open articleView on HN

I think link to this story I posted 2.5 month ago goes into more details:

https://newatlas.com/materials/matroyoshka-diamond-inside-di...

Including a video, which makes it clear that the inside diamond really is disconnected.

>The inner diamond moves freely within the transparent outer one.

the second line of the linked article.

but the video is more interesting.

This was mined not far (at least by Siberian standards) from the Mir mine that hit the front-page [0] a couple weeks back. I started looking for anything mine-looking near Nyurba but couldn't find any likely candidates, I guess it's totally underground rather than strip-mined like Mir?

Also can't comment on a Russian diamond without bringing up the most oddly-named diamond I've ever found, the "26th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union"[1].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22034055

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/26th_Congress_of_the_Communist...

Edit: I believe I found the mine, 65°01'11.2"N 117°05'15.7"E

Diamond mines are pit mines simply because of how they’re created and pushed to the earths surface. Think of it as an underground explosion resulting in a cone shape with the flat part on the earths surface and the point somewhere underground.

Absolutely love the revolving quotes in the header. Regional news with real class and style!

A huge portion of that site’s stories seem to be about animals, and dogs (or dog like things) specifically.

I collect stones, rumor in certain circles has been circulating for a while that if it were to hit auction, it would easily command $75M. That would make it the most valuable gemstone per carat ever.

> ‘Due to the presence of the dissolved zone, one diamond began to move freely inside another on the principle of nesting dolls.’ Bravo, only in Russia!

A diamond that is actually rare and worth something? Say it ain't so.

A diamond is worth what people are willing to pay for it. Just cause you don’t think they should be expensive doesn’t mean other people agree with you.

A diamond is worth what someone is willing to pay minus the cost of selling it to them. That’s why used Diamonds have such a dramatic loss in value.

This is not true at all. The value of a new diamond is marketing. No one’s advertising for used diamonds. It’s not exclusive to the diamond industry either - the reason Coke is more expensive than generic is because of marketing.

But used coke is also worthless.

It might not be worth the effort but...

https://sciencing.com/make-phosphorus-4524329.html

This is excellent, thanks.

You’re confusing the wholesale price with the retail price. It’s not that used diamonds are inherently worth less, it’s the overhead of running a shop to sell them being a real cost. Walk by a jewelry store and you see both expensive inventory and people standing around waiting to sell to somebody, that’s a huge expense.

PS: Not to be confused with the third category of “wholesale” diamonds that’s simply retail with lower overhead.

"Have you ever tried to sell a diamond?" https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/02/have-yo...

Maybe they are talking about what it's worth to them. Just because other people don't agree with them doesn't mean they're wrong to have their own subjective idea of what something is worth.

There are good reasons to talk about the value of something in both a subjective and an objective way. The amount of money something is going for generally in the market is an important number for some purposes, and the amount of money you'd personally pay is also an important number for other purposes.

Just because any proportion of people think something or are willing to do something doesn't validate, justify, or excuse that thing.

If you respect other peoples decision making, then a large proportion of people thinking a thing absolutely does validate an idea. Justify and excuse maybe not, but validate absolutely. Diamonds may be artificially priced, sure, but people willingly pay the price daily. You are of course free to judge, but your judgement of value is not more or less valid than the judgements of others.

Valuation isn't objective, and it isn't a logic question that can be reduced. Value is subjective, and therefore the value anyone honestly pays for any object is _always valid_.

> respect other peoples decision making

That is absolutely not my default position. Respect of that sort requires earning and it's pretty rare anyone manages to do so.

> your judgement of value is not more or less valid than the judgements of others

Have you ever met humans? Never driven through a "Cash for Gold, Guns and Pawn" neighborhood? I am very confident that there is such a concept as value judgement systems being more or less useful to the folks that employ them.

> Valuation isn't subjective and and therefore the value anyone honestly pays for any object is _always valid_.

Im not sure what mistake(s) you are making in your life that you seek to justify through this belief system you've outlined here, but the fact that you do feel justified indicates to me that is of the flavor (majority-identity affluence) of owning a suit the price of which could feed a word-median-income family for a year or a luxury sedan for which you paid more than some folks' entire lifetime earning potential, which sure, man, you can do whatever you want because you have been blessed with the privilege and I don't really feel like arguing about that.

The fact of the matter (and you can use this to judge me however you feel like and dismiss the entire concept of having any responsibility for what you choose to value or accepting the consequence of other people being free to judge you for it) is that my mother doesn't cook, eat healthy meals, or have food in her fridge because she "has no money" because, while she makes quite a lot of money in global economy terms (and well above average even for her socioeconomic background in the US) she has a value system where she will value booze or drugs or fast food more than having cost effective and nutritious meal options or any amount of money sitting in any kind of liquid form. She doesn't go to the doctor when she should because despite having a really good government employee health benefits, she doesn't have the cash on hand to cover the (relative to her income) trivial copay amounts and because she values "not having to know how bad it is or do anything about it" more than "knowing what I need to do in order to be healthy". I will get to watch her suffer and die as a consequence of her value systems, powerless to help her without jeopardizing my own quality of life because of the ramifications of this assertion of yours here being false.

It's going to be interesting if and how you can put a price tag on this. It being the only case of this ever happening in nature, it could have an insane value for the right collector while being worthless to 99% of the world.

I wonder if probability theory comes into a valuation like that. Something like, what is the expected value of some whale collector’s valuation. I’d love to be a fly on the wall during whatever auction would be run.

Any pricing theory would fly out the window on something like this: it would purely be driven by the desire to win, for someone rich to have something they can hold against other rich people. It’s a status symbol. The auction would likely be a public English auction so that bidders can know the interest and who’s bidding.

In the case of something so unique, there's a strong argument for it being acquired by a museum so it can be enjoyed widely, and studied by geologists.

It's just a diamond, they are not very interesting unless you believe the TV commercials that tell you they are super important and special. Carbon is carbon.

I'm just laughing at 800 MILLION YEAR OLD ROCK. Like you know how old all the rocks are right?

Classic by now article a must read - “Diamonds are Bullshit”

Here that article was discussed at HN: (7 years ago, 1088 votes)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5403988

Umm, yes, they do. They know what layer of rock it was found in and can uranium date the surrounding rocks.

They might, perhaps, be able to date how long it's spent on the Earth, while making wild assumptions about pre-historic conditions that we (by definition) weren't around to observe.

I took it as "really, a rock that is old?!" rather than "they can't know that". But I might have misunderstood.

However this article is about a particularly interesting diamond. Trees aren’t rare, but people travel to see particularly interesting trees and forests.

I am very curious about the composition of the air inside, and what it could tell us to have such a perfectly isolated sample that is nearly a billion years old.

From the first picture, it seems to have holes, so the air should be the same as the outside. The text also talks about how whatever was filling that space probably got dissolved. For that to happen, it would need a way to escape the enclosure.

Warning: Blue sky thinking ahead..

I always wondered if a huge quantity of diamonds, arranged in a specific pattern, could be used to build a passive laser.

The energy input would come in from the sun, and it would refract the light to a second layer of diamonds. That second layer would accumulate enough luminous energy, before it discharges as a laser. Since a laser diode needs to reach a certain level of optical amplification before it discharges its beam.

So that makes one operational unit. And you have to assemble a bunch of them together, to fire off to a third layer, that has a bigger diamond, which requires a larger energy threshold before it fires off.

And you keep repeating that until you get enough energy to do useful work.

So the whole thing ends up looking like a giant inverted pyramid, of a Rube Goldberg machine.

The final result, is that the laser is used to do useful mechanical work, like boiling water to create steam, to move a generator, to create electricity. It can also be used as a giant death ray, but that’s not very useful, except for the emperor that wants to hold a planet hostage.

Why this setup? To build something solid state, and somewhat passive, that can be used to reliably generate electricity for thousands of years. And it’s not a radioactive nuclear reactor that will create deadly waste that lasts thousands of years.

And it can also be orbited in space to beam the laser down to earth. It should last longer than solar panels, which doesn’t seem to last very long.

And now that we can manufacture industrial diamonds that are more pure than a natural diamond (just add heat, energy, and pressure), that I wonder when we can make this cheaply enough.

The next trick would be to find that optimal arrangement of diamonds and design to make such a thing feasible.

Why make a laser when you could make a lens?

They do this already but they use mirrors. Mirrors are cheaper to produce, easier to shape and probably more effective than diamonds for this application.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_solar_power

CSP doesn’t work at night. I don’t think it really works in space. It’s not solid state.

Mirrors are passive and solid state, except for spinning mercury mirrors which are spinning and in the liquid state.

A mirror reflects light. The angle of incidence is equal to the angle of reflection.

I’m interested in a device that refracts light, in order to bend it in arbitrary ways.

Well, then you're on the right track. A diamond can refract light anywhere between 0 and 24 degrees, and an array of diamonds can bend light anywhere between 0 and 180 degrees with (I think) less than 20% intensity loss.

You'll make a wonderful Bond villain.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com