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Come, my beloved, let us embrace
and generate a new son who will not resemble his parents.
Chemistry? Well, it may not seem much like it but that's what it is.
Any 17th century alchemist would tell you that.
And they weren't just messing around,
there was a serious intent behind all of this.
Usually greed and power.
To make sense of it, as with chemistry today,
you need an understanding of the vocabulary and symbols being used.
The symbol of one element which features large
in stories of power and transformation.
In its various forms it has been sought after, hoarded, stolen
and fashioned by chemists.
It's carbon.
This can contains 10kg of diamond.
That's 10,000g or 50,000 carats.
It's worth $150,000.
And what's even more amazing is we made every bit of it.
Imagine being able to make anything in the world.
What would you make?
Diamonds?
Emeralds? Gold?
Imagine the power and the glory.
But imagine the enemies you could make.
Multinational cartels that control the supply
and price of these commodities,
not to mention the governments that rely on income
from their country's national resources.
So where could you start?
No-one knows quite how nature did it
but we do know that it took enormous heat and pressure
to crystallise carbon into diamond.
It probably happened far below the surface of the Earth
in the molten rock and magma.
The quest to make diamond required similar heat and pressure
to be generated in the laboratory.
The force builds up and up and up.
The General Electric Company in the United States
were the first to achieve synthesis in 1954.
The carbon reacts with the metal catalyst discs,
its structure begins to change.
This is the region where diamond grows.
General Electric weren't trying to make jewellery,
they had an eye on the other big market for diamonds -
as the hardest material on Earth,
it's the best cutting edge you can buy.
Mining of manmade diamonds begins.
Tiny diamond crystals glitter in the light.
To make diamond all you need is a source of carbon.
We use graphite, but you could use paper or peanut butter.
I've even made diamond out of Jack Daniel's.
These are all different sources of carbon.
Hypothetically, you could even make diamond out of me or you.
Chemistry isn't alchemy.
You can only push the comparison so far.
But neither is chemistry just about Bunsen burners,
white coats and test tubes.
All of the boundaries within science are becoming more and more diffused,
such that today's alchemists have to know about chemistry,
physics and computing.
A whole body of knowledge to make new, ever-more magical materials.
So can we go one better than nature
and produce a synthetic material even harder than diamond?
Marvin Cohen of the University of California, Berkeley, thinks we can.
Trouble is, the only place anyone's sure it exists is inside a computer,
Cohen's virtual laboratory.
Once we have a model we can use this model
to explore the limits on the properties of materials.
For example, diamond is the hardest known material on our planet.
One question you can ask
is whether or not it's possible to make something harder than diamond.
We explored this problem and came up with a material, beta carbon nitrite.
This material is composed of carbon and nitrogen
and we think it could be as hard as, or even harder than diamond.
We've produced the material on the computer
but it remains to be synthesised in a laboratory.
So we pose this as a challenge to the experimentalist
to synthesise carbon nitrite and to measure its hardness.
One group in the race to make C3N4
is at Northwestern University just outside Chicago.
The problem here is that they don't quite know
whether they've made it or not.
It's possible that we may have made a material
but the amount may be very small.
This particular image was taken at a magnification of a million
and in some places we can see really tiny, tiny crystallites
with a size on the order of 100 angstroms.
What are these crystallites made of? Are they C3N4?
We do know that these crystallites contain carbon and nitrogen
but their structure at this point is still unknown
and we need to do more work on this area.
Some of the most expensive chemicals.
Crocetin - from the reproductive organs of the crocus flower.
It's what makes saffron yellow, used by only the very best cooks.
Rhodium - with its great resistance to corrosion
and the beauty of its jewellery, it's twice as expensive as gold.
Meteorites - coming all the way from outer space.
They'll cost you the earth.
Alpha irone - from the root of an iris,
it makes the sweetest perfume smell.
And at around the same price,
3 benzoyloxy 8 methyl 8 azabicyclo
321 octane 2 carboxylate acid methyl ester.
***.
Carbon - making all the rest pale in comparison.
A rare red diamond sold in New York in 1987 for $880,000.
That's six expensive chemicals.