Why Precious Jewels and Expensive Stone Are So Valuable
I have always found it ironic that our money represents gold. Essentially this means that whenever we make a purchase, or sell something of ours, we are making that purchase using lumps of rock that we really have no purpose for. Sure, gold is easy on the eye and a very solid material, but if you just had a lump of it what would you really do with it? Likewise I’ve often struggled to see how a diamond can be worth thousands of dollars (putting me at odds with my girlfriend) when once again it is really just a shiny rock. It doesn’t really do much, so why is it so expensive?
Fortunately this is a mystery that can be answered rather satisfactorily by science. If you understand the physics behind the materials then it’s much easier to see just why they’re so incredible and how they have come to be so valuable. Here we will look at why previous stones are as valuable as they are.
Scarcity
The first thing that makes gold so valuable and such a good candidate for the basis of currency is how incredibly rare it actually is. If you’re wearing a gold ring then that is a portion of only 161,000 tons of gold that has been mined throughout history. To put this in perspective that’s just enough to fill 1-3 Olympic sized swimming pools (depending on who you ask) – and two thirds of that gold goes towards jewelry.
Features
Of course the attractive appearance of gold doesn’t do any harm and neither does its weight or toughness. The real winner in terms of hardness though is diamond which is a perfect ’10’ on the hardness scale. Diamond is actually the hardest material on Earth meaning that nothing else can cut it – the only way to shape a diamond is to use another diamond.
Formation
The other good thing about gold and diamond is that they can’t really be synthesized (synthetic diamond is slightly different from real diamond). The formation of diamonds is actually something that takes place deep underground at incredibly high pressures and temperatures over the course of several thousand years.
Diamond begins life though as simple carbon – which is also what we happen to be made of and what the plants and animals are made of too. Diamond then is really an organic matter that has been compressed and heated to the point where it becomes incredibly hard and beautiful. That means that if you’re wearing a diamond ring right now it may once have been part of an animal, plant or dinosaur even.
And in fact it may even have once been part of an alien. Sound impossible? Well if you think that carbon is a heavy chemical element and that the only way such an element can be created is from the heat and pressure found at the heart of a dying star… then you know for a fact that any carbon has had to travel millions of light years across the galaxy to get to Earth. Who knows where it might have stopped off, what it might have seen along the way?
Author Byline:
The author of today’s guest post, John Lowrie, resorts to blogging and shares his opinions and experiences with readers. He works for Payday Angels as a financial journalist and his Twitter id is j_lowrie.
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Category: Family Finances
