08-047
Edinburgh University's Professor Malcolm McMahon, of the Centre for Science
and Extreme Conditions, recently stated he could turn peanut butter into
diamonds. While this is much more creative than anything I ever did with peanut
butter, it also seems to be understating the accomplishment. What conditions
are more extreme than those that turn peanut butter into diamonds? McMahon
explained the trick is to squeeze the peanut butter between two diamond tips --
so it's lucky there are non-peanut-butter based diamonds already or we'd be in
a fix -- to pressures higher than those at the center of the Earth, which
peanut butter infrequently reaches by itself.
Yet it makes sense this should work, since diamonds are made of carbon, and
carbon is part of peanut butter. If you take the non-carbon parts out of some
peanut butter you're almost done already. What I missed is how peanut butter
got on the diamond tips originally. It sounds like somebody didn't wash up
after lunch. But lucky accidents are the breath of science.
We have penicillin because Sir Alexander Fleming ate a chocolate sprinkle
doughnut at work and didn't notice loose sprinkles in his agar, as who would?
Thomas Edison would never have invented the Linotype type-setting machine if he
hadn't thrown a Diet Cherry Coke at George Westinghouse one chilly morning in
May 1873, and in fact he didn't. Imagine if Margaret Yong hadn't dropped hush
puppies into a particle accelerator, leading to her invention of teleporters,
back in 1982. Say, that's a vivid imagination you have!
I guess the next step is seeing what other foods will become when they're
crushed by five million atmospheres of pressure, other than smaller. Imagine
crushing an entire pizza into an olive-and-onion-flavored diamond chip. Could
you set it in a necklace? How about a wedding ring featuring sparkling
compacted Brussels sprouts? But I like Brussels sprouts, so could we make it
string beans instead? And can it work on inedible things?
What if you crushed an oak desk? What if you crushed a plastic desk with
simulated wood grain? Would that produce cubic zirconia? Would your employer be
angry you didn't ask before crushing your desk? Where would you put your office
trinkets after your desk-crushing?
All this diamond-making is good fun, but can they reverse the process? It
would be a sad world indeed if we were diamond-rich and didn't have enough
peanut butter for a single peanut butter cup. Perhaps we could change only some
of the peanut butter in the world into diamonds.
We need a sensible balance, and would we know what to do if we got one?
There are no answers to these questions from the Centre for Science and Extreme
Conditions, but their answers probably wouldn't be as cozy as the answers I
make up myself (making up your own answers is a fine hobby; see page B-8 for
instructions) out of my own peanut butter.