Diamonds are a girl’s best friend
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Diamonds are a girl's best friend
Diamond Girls
Download film (right-click)Adult , Artistic/Creative , Award Nominees , Chemistry , Explanation , Physics
Turning carbon into diamond, using only a gigantic laboratory press.
Director's Notes:
A short story of how to make diamonds from burnt toast!
We’re both post-doc researchers at the Centre for Science at Extreme Conditions, University of Edinburgh and we wanted to showcase one of the techniques that we use. The large press in the film is used on a day-to-day basis by students and researchers to reach extreme temperatures and pressures for synthesis of exotic materials.
Nominee, Judges’ Special Awards, 2010
SciCast Notes:
Cheese-tastic!
One of the things I love about SciCast is that we’re not a competition solely for schools: families, special-interest groups, and working scientists are welcome to enter too. Anybody, in fact.
Most of our publicity effort goes on schools, though, so I’m always delighted to receive a film from a professional lab. I’m particularly delighted when it’s as silly as this one. Making short films can be a huge giggle, and I don’t see why the fun should be limited to under-18s.
So this is lovely. It’s plain ridiculous, the music choice is inspired, and it’s nicely shot. OK, so the camera appears to be mostly on its side, but even that works rather better than I’d expected. Plus, when you’ve got a 60,000 atmosphere press kicking around in the lab, you might as well use it.
Complaints? Much as I love the set-up, what I really want to see is a diamond made out of toast. That would be incredible… but that’s not quite what we see, I fear. To be honest, I’d rather have had a film that showed the press in more detail, and gave an idea of what it’s used for.
But maybe I’m just being grumpy because I didn’t get an invite to the ball.
— Jonathan.