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And let's start with what a diamond actually is.

with the physical object, not the myth.

Because it's actually interesting.

A diamond is made of carbon, the same as the graphite in this mechanical pencil.

Great mechanical pencil, by the way.

Zollner, in The Heartless Stone, says, and he writes so beautifully, "...diamonds are strangers to the surface of the earth.

Their true home is the iron silicate and magnesium soup of the mid-regions of the earth's interior known as the mantle." Pressures are enormous there.

At temperatures approaching 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, small grains of carbon that found their way here are pressed into something new.

He goes on, the carbon atoms of diamond share an extra electron with each of the four carbon atoms that surround it, and their bonds with each other form a tight cube.

This is the strongest linkage of atoms known to chemistry.

I've always had this impression, this sense of diamonds are unbreakable.

That's part of the myth that was, of course, created in the 20th century.

And it's not that diamonds are unbreakable.

They can actually quite easily be shattered.

You can take a diamond ring.

I could go take the diamond ring that I got from my wife and hit it with a hammer and it would shatter.

But what diamonds can't be done, what you can't do to a diamond, or actually you can, it's just very difficult, is scratch a diamond.

They are among the hardest naturally occurring elements.

A fun quote about the chemistry of diamonds from Zollner, the hellish foundry of the Earth's innards at depths approaching 120 miles is the only birthing place for a diamond.

which takes its name from the Greek, adamas, which means indomitable.

What we wear on our fingers and around our necks are the lucky survivors, the sperm that won the race.

Because these diamonds are jettisoned from the Earth's mantle out at more than 120 miles an hour, and it is only the ones that are not moving too fast and not moving too slow that make it to the surface.

where they are found on the surface or more commonly dug up in mines today.

I did not know before starting this research that the carat, that's C-A-R-A-T, is the metric we use to measure the size of a diamond.

And it actually comes from a seed.