Evidence of earth's first rains found trapped within primordial crystals

sciencealert.com

74 points·MarlonPro··9 comments

I wonder if there are ancient crystalline structures that captured/entrained photons long ago. They could be named "Silmarils"...

I’m still learning about quantum field theory, so I am probably wrong, but I think this idea presupposes you can “trap” an excitation that arises in a quantum field.

Why not? We have reflective materials that these excitations bounce off, right?

As far as I understand, we have not managed to create perfectly reflective surfaces (and there are none in nature that we know of).

What purpose would that help? We do have CMB and a lot of light emitted from long ago from stars we get today. Are you specifically after the light from our sun from 4b years ago?

> Evidence of Earth's First Rains Found Trapped Within Primordial Crystals

Where can i buy a "Primordial Crystal" ? /s

From the article:

> The Jack Hills in Western Australia hold the oldest surviving material from the Earth's crust. For 4.4 billion years, the primordial minerals remained relatively unchanged by heat and pressure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Hills

Try buying some zircon nearby. Or perhaps there are small fragments in the river nearby (ask if it's legal to pick them).

I believe the Jack Hills site and anything downstream is now permanently closed to mining and collecting. There are a few sites claiming to sell specimens that predate the closure but I wouldn't trust them unless I had the equipment to validate their provenance.

https://www.treasurecrystals.com

I learned some time ago that there are crystal wholesalers. Someone I know got a crystal from here that had a drop of water contained in the center. It was pretty awesome. They are called enhydro crystals.

https://mymodernmet.com/enhydro-crystals/

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