The Diamond Throwdown

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Suffs!

The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

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It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

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Playing the Orpheum Theater, October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.

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BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts.

You're about to listen to a brand new episode of Curious Cases.

Shows are going to be released weekly, wherever you get your podcasts, but if you're in the UK, you can listen to the latest episodes first on BBC Sounds.

I'm Hannah Fry.

And I'm Dara O'Brien.

And this is Curious Cases.

The show where we take your quirkiest questions, your crunchiest conundrums, and then we solve them with the power of science.

I mean, do we always solve them?

I mean, the hit rate's pretty low.

But it is with science.

It is with science.

We have some serious news here in Curious Cases.

Back in our first series,

your 27th,

we did an episode called Mirror and Mirror.

We're investigating the shiniest things in the world.

I remember it well.

Yeah, it's a a really, really fun episode.

And we briefly mentioned diamonds.

Yeah.

And I expressed the opinion, which I've said many times, that there is few things in life as beautiful as loose diamonds.

You love a bag of loose diamonds.

I love a bag of loose diamonds.

As

any good

bank robber.

Yeah.

It's not for their utility.

I think they just catch the light.

And you were

not in favor of it.

No, I mean, look, if I...

In terms of portable wealth, I'll admit that they pack a lot of density.

You get a lot of money per gram.

I'll accept accept that, but yeah, I think they're nonsense.

I think, I think they are way overpriced, and I just think there's other things that are better.

Okay, that was exactly what you said.

So, you're consistent in this, actually.

Oh, I'm not faking this, by the way.

I, to my core, think that they're nonsense.

Wow, okay.

But one listener was so upset that he got in touch to share his feelings about it.

So, my name is Dr.

Guy Stimpson and I studied diamonds at university for a few years and I just wanted to stand up for them after listening to the episode on what is the shiniest thing

because Hannah made the highly controversial comment that diamonds are nonsense and myself and a good 20 or 30 other people were in a small amount of shock when we heard Hannah say that they were nonsense and I really wanted to just stick up for them and make sure Hannah knows about how interesting and wonderful they are.

I would really like Curious Cases to investigate all the exciting, different and surprising applications of this really wonderful material.

Come at me if you want.

I am an immovable object on this.

Oh dear.

Well I'm going at you with the hardest substance in the world, you know, so Vencha will break you down.

That thing.

You brought this on yourself.

I mean maybe I did but like tiny violins, you know what I mean?

And we're playing in that sad music, that banging check.

changes it's just yeah i mean we very much have guided the mood there like guy seems actually perfectly fine about it but the um mostly i was happy that he said 20 or 30 of his colleagues were listening to your curious case yes that's nice apparently we're a very big deal in diamonds big shout out to the diamond community but i am bringing all the all the evidence in on this episode that will oh it's going to turn you around and this it's absolutely going to turn around we'll see we'll see

So let's start the journey to the wonder that is diamonds with the application most people associate with with them, which is jewellery, of course.

Sure.

It's also the one that I abhor the most.

Okay, fine, great.

Let's go straight into that, they are they the Supreme Jewel?

You would say no.

Joining us for the first part of the show, we have Charlie Bexfield.

Charlie deals in diamonds and also teaches at the Gemological Association of Great Britain.

Charlie, what have you brought in for us?

So I've got three stones for you each.

Okay.

Three each.

Yeah, how exciting.

You know, three for you.

Thank you.

And three for you.

Thank you.

So we have one is a diamond, a natural diamond,

one is a synthetic moissonite.

Right.

And one is a cubic zirconia.

So these are two diamond simulants.

So having a look at these then, so just like from the naked eye as it were, I mean one of them is bigger than the others.

Yes.

I reckon that's a big clue that it's the cheap one.

But that aside, when you do a direct comparison, it's maybe like when you as you look through it, it's maybe like a little greyer.

How much are we talking, by the way?

The diamond, the one that's the real diamond.

Yeah.

If I was buying a ring with that stone in it, probably about a hundred grand.

Oh,

and the other two are like 50 quid.

I reckon I know which one's which.

I love this.

Right, I reckon the big one, which is like much duller, much less fancy pants.

Yeah.

You know, you get it in kids' jewelry.

Right.

Right?

No.

Okay.

Okay, right.

This one, I reckon this is the kind of thing that you buy yourself for your 21st birthday.

Yeah.

And you feel pretty proud.

Very good.

And if it falls off, nobody cares too much for you.

Exactly.

Right, so I reckon that's that one.

One thing I do know about

is not how to pronounce it.

Is it moissonite?

Moissonite, synthetic moissonite.

Yeah, it's a silicon carbide.

One thing that I do know about moissonite is that isn't it sparklier than diamonds?

It has better dispersion.

So it splits light better into the spectral colours, which is one of the things that we prize diamond for.

Alright, but what I'm hearing here, though, is that one of the ways that you prize diamonds is the kind of colours that you get off it.

And

this one is more diamond-y than diamonds.

That's what that's.

Well, it's more dispersive, yes.

Okay, so I know which one I prefer.

Okay.

This one I think is the real diamond.

Okay.

And I think it's the real diamond just because

I think just it's a bit more reflective, it's a bit more translucent.

Okay.

Yes.

And this one is, I think that the colour is a bit more prominent in that one there.

Okay.

That's my guess.

And if if we went in terms of a hardness, for example.

So we use a scale called the Mohs scale of hardness.

One to ten, nice and simple.

Diamonds at the top, ten.

Talc at the bottom, one.

And then...

What's at the bottom?

Talc.

Oh, talcum.

Like talcom powder.

No, you're joking.

Yeah, talc is the bottom.

Yeah, yeah.

Anyway, so Mr.

Moe's decided to find ten common minerals that supposedly you could find anywhere was the idea.

The aim of the game is which one scratches what?

You do like a little round robin.

Yeah, basically.

You start from the softest, hopefully, and work the hardest.

Okay, but what about Moissonite though?

Moisenite's 9.25.

Right, take that.

Do you know what I mean?

Yeah.

A cheap 50 quid ring.

He sparkles more and he's as hard.

I don't think Moisonite's a bad stone if you want something that is exactly that cheap and you don't have to worry about it.

No, but you don't have to be, you don't feel concerned, do you?

You know, you can wear it, you can be on the tube, you can go on holiday, you can swim in the sea.

Worst case scenario, it falls off and it's easily replaceable.

So which one do you think switches?

I'm going for that one for the Moisonite.

Yes.

Okay.

I'm going for that for the actual diamond.

Okay.

And I'm going for this as the zirconia.

This is what I think is the diamond.

So you've both chosen the moissonite as your diamond.

Wow.

Yeah.

Okay, and this big beast of a thing.

So the big one is the diamond.

No.

Yes.

Can I have it back, please?

Of course you may.

That's one out of three.

That's almost a win.

Wow, that's really good.

I got mine all three wrong.

Can I say that in my defense, the reason I

didn't go for the big one is because it was the big one.

It was the big one.

And also because it was so sparkly that I thought all this talk about Moise Night being sparkly influenced me into thinking, oh, this is too sparkly.

A diamond is less showy than this.

A diamond reveals its secrets in a much more demure way than this tramp of a thing that I have in my hand.

Like, that's just that's basically putting on a show for nothing.

But this has gone from being a programme about crystals into a psychology examination of what we tell ourselves are the important things.

But this is what I mean, Mike.

You probably should be able to tell.

You know?

I know.

Why?

Because otherwise, the only thing that gives it value is that you know that it's expensive.

Well, no, hardly, because it's exceptionally rare.

Only one in a million diamonds is over a carat in size.

Whereas CZ, Moisenite, Moisenite, it is churned out of a factory by the kilo, by the ton.

So we shouldn't go into the diamond trade.

I think

if there's any summation to make from this, that we couldn't really tell at all what the difference is between them.

They are beautiful.

Yeah, you accept that at least.

Yes.

All three of them are beautiful.

Thank you so much for coming in.

Delightful.

And there's two back.

Okay.

Beautiful.

Thank you very much.

I think we'd say we're both quite giddy after that.

Do you know why?

I'll admit, it did have a frontend of excitement, Alan.

I'll give you that.

But our aggrieved guy really wanted to explore the many other applications of diamond.

And to help us with that, we have Mark Newton, Professor of Physics from the University of Warwick.

And we also have Julie McPherson, who is also a professor at Warwick.

Right, now, Julie,

this is more my language that we're talking.

I know you're an electrochemist.

Yes.

Tell me what that is and how does it relate to to diamonds?

Okay, so electrochemists like to use electricity and they use electricity to convert reactants to products and that could be used in a fuel cell for example.

So people are thinking about electrochemistry there or we could be making really useful chemicals.

So why am I as an electrochemist interested in diamond?

Because even at school most people will be taught that diamond is an excellent insulator and electrons, electricity cannot pass through this structure.

So what we have is a carbon atom and it's bonded to four others in a tetrahedral structure.

So you can actually, I've got this picture in front of me, or this prop, and actually you can see all this big tetrahedral network and you can press against it actually, it's very, very strong.

Yep, so that's where one of the...

That's a lattice model.

That's a lattice model, yeah.

So this the tetrahedron is like a like a triangle-based pyramid, right?

Yeah, kind of, yeah.

And that's particularly strong just because

the bonds are very rigid.

Yes, exactly all those strong covalent bonds are really keeping that in a very rigid structure right now all of the electrons in that lattice model are completely bound up in bonds okay so if i want to try and move those electrons around it's incredibly difficult because they're just so it's a fantastic electrical insulator so when mark as the real diamond scientist at warwick said to me julie i want you to start using diamond as an electrochemist i said but it doesn't conduct electricity mark so how on earth can i use this?

But I didn't realise that you can start to put impurities

into the diamond lattice, and that will start to change its electronic properties.

Okay, well, I think we're going to come onto that in a minute.

But just diamond on its own, that structure,

it's not the only thing that has that structure, right?

Doesn't ice also have a tetrahedral structure?

It does, but its bonding in ice is very different.

It has got a tetrahedral arrangement, but the nature of the bonds are very different.

And this structure has very strong covalent bonds, which have a high frequency of vibration.

And actually, one of the amazing properties of diamond, which people don't often know about, is these vibrating atoms can transfer heat extremely well.

Okay, so you hardly get any scattering or loss.

So it's actually the best thermal conductor of any material known.

Really?

Doesn't that mean when you touch it, if you had a big enough diamond, it would feel very, very cold to the touch?

Yes.

Okay, and so when you say it's it's the best thermal conduct, so doesn't conduct electricity, does conduct heat extremely well.

Exactly.

Does that, okay, apart from touching it to your lip, are there other things that you can do to demonstrate that?

Okay, yep.

So, what we've got is some ice cubes, and I am going to put in front of Hannah a pound coin.

Yep.

And I've got a piece of synthetic diamond of a similar size.

Okay.

I've noticed the jewellery ones were much better.

Were they much?

Were they much?

Yeah.

We really haven't done the science department, isn't he's probably had them cut and polished to look really sparkly that just looks like a dull disc yeah I mean this is when you believe that it's got carbon in it right it's like it's it's it's kind of you can it almost looks like something that's come out of the fire it has come out of the fire

it's come out of a um a plasma reactor where the diamond has been grown and deposited atom by atom layer by layer and you can see there there's lots of little sparkles and they're the little crystals of diamond that are all joined together to make this polycrystalline network.

But this, the thing that I'm holding now is diamond.

It's absolutely

diamond.

Chemically diamond.

Come in, check it out.

Okay, so we've got an ice cube in front of us.

I think what I would get you to do is take the pound coin

and just press into that ice cube and just see if you can make a dent in it at all.

Is it going through it?

It is a little.

Okay, and that's because the heat from my hand is going through that.

What we want to try and show is what happens when you do the diamond.

It should, because it's a much better thermal conductor be a much easier process does it feel yeah

so it just feels like a we talk about a knife slicing through butter that it's just it's just really it's quite a beautiful feeling isn't it it's one of these things if you're stressed in an evening just get a bit of diamond and push it against an ice cube and keep doing it wow i feel like i've got a superpower yeah

honestly honestly anything okay and now we'll take the dagger like no the diamond feels like this is like a two inches long hooked dagger it feels like it's a long way for that heat to travel as well.

Okay, so press that into the ice so the heat's going to transmit from you.

You are a massive heat source.

Thank you.

Just press in.

Oh my god, yeah.

Oh wow.

And it immediately gets freezing cold as well.

The best thermal conductor of any material.

What kind of straight is it?

What about that copper?

That's five times better than copper in terms of thermal conductivity, but because the heat capacity is lower, it's 25 times better as a thermal diffusivity.

So the speed the heat is traveling through the material, 25 times better.

So in future technologies, so one of the problems with electronics, AI and all the computing is heat.

You've got to be able to get heat out of your high-end chips.

The diamond is the solution because it can get the heat out really quickly.

So there's research going on in the UK and elsewhere where the semiconductor, the active device, be it silicon or gallium nitride, is grown on the diamond or connected to the diamond so the diamond can keep it cool.

Okay, if I wanted to have my own diamond dagger,

how do you do this?

You need to start with a source of carbon.

So, natural gas, methane, has lots of carbon, you know, one carbon, four hydrogens.

So, basically, you've got to strip the hydrogens off, and you do that by putting it in a plasma.

So, you heat it up, so about 4,000 degrees C, so the hydrogen atoms fall off the methane.

You actually add some more hydrogen to the process, so the carbon atoms rain down onto your substrate, your surface yeah and the hydrogen keeps the surface stable and atom by atom you can add layer by layer and grow the diamond so you make it from gas from gas from methane you make the hardest substance yes in nature from gas you can do it from anything that contains carbon whiskey

so

you can make diamond daggers from whiskey and and even with the high pressure high temperature process where you mimic what goes on deep in the earth, you can make diamond from peanut butter.

So anything with carbon in, if you get the conditions right for the bonding to take on this tetrahedral structure.

Sups!

The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be home!

Winner, best score!

We demand to be seen!

Winner, best book!

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs.

Playing the Orpheum Theater, October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.

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Can you tell the difference, though?

If you had one of these, I mean, this looks very different than the diamonds that we had earlier, but if you did decide to try and grow a live diamond in the form of the sort of jewelry, emerald cup, whatever it is, Could you tell the difference?

Yes, one of the best ways of telling the difference is looking at the luminescence from the diamond.

So, luminescence means that if I shine light onto the diamond, some of that energy is absorbed, and it's absorbed by the defects in the diamond,

moves electrons around from low-lying states to high-lying states, and as those electrons fall back at these defects, they emit light.

And the light they emit is specific to the type of defects that are in the diamond.

So we can make diamonds glow pink, and blue, and yellow, and any colour you like.

But it's the combination of defects in the diamonds that enable us to identify how it was grown, what impurities were there when it was grown, whether it sat in the earth for billions of years.

There's a famous professor at Bristol who said, diamonds are like people.

It's the defects that make them interesting.

And I like that so much.

Because those defects are like the story of its geological history of the earth exactly

losing you

so hannah i can there is a uh what you just described so that's a diamond grown in the lamp cut and polished it's half a carrot that one

water so that's my bad i've got my mobile phone yeah and i'm just going to switch the light on on my mobile phone and just leave it laying over the top of the diamond for a while yeah so that's pumping energy into the diamond, some of which is absorbed by the defects that are in the diamond.

What?

Yeah.

So now if you take it away and you just cup your hand because it's bright and hip.

How long has it gone, Hannah?

It's shining.

It's actually shining out.

Oh no,

I hate being wrong about things.

Wow, that's extraordinary.

Yeah, it is amazing.

So wait, what's the defect in that that's doing it?

So that diamond is grown by high pressure, high temperature.

So one of the solvents that's used for the carbon is nickel, and there are nickel complexes with nitrogen in there.

So what is the ratio?

I mean, how many perfections do you need in it to totally change or add new behaviour?

Why don't you have a guess?

One in a hundred?

Do you need

one in a million is a lot for what we do.

Right.

And diamonds that are produced in the UK as a real speciality can produce them with one in a thousand million.

Wow.

And that's all you need.

And that's all you need to change the properties and the behaviour of it.

Exactly.

It's phenomenal.

It's an amazing matrix for this host.

So for my applications as an electrochemist, I need to get this thing passing electrons through it.

So we go back to this impurities going into the lattice, and I'm going to put an impurity in that isn't this nitrogen that Mark's talked about.

I'm going to go for boron.

And I need a little bit more boron than Mark needs for his defects, so I'm going to go for one in a thousand.

So if I can replace one in a thousand I go from being a complete insulator to a good conductor which is phenomenal and the other thing that happens is my diamond changes colour.

So as I put more boron in it goes from kind of transparent to blue.

So if I look at a beautiful blue diamond it's actually a semiconductor.

As it goes black I've got a conductor.

Is that what you've got in your necklace?

I've got a blue semiconductor in my necklace actually.

So I had this because because it was a semiconductor.

This here is some black diamond.

So this is actually part of a wafer.

We can grow much bigger wafers.

So it's a slab of black diamond.

That whole thing is black diamond.

We've cut bits out of it.

And this now, if I wire it up to a battery, I can conduct electricity through that.

Wow, and it still has the same thermal conductivity.

Thermal conductivity, great.

It's still ultra strong.

As an electrode material, I can now apply, because this is an extremely strong material, potentials, voltages to that, where other electrode materials would simply fall apart.

What does that let you do, though?

Okay, so one of the big things we're really interested in is cleaning up dirty water, cleaning up wastewater.

And one of the big emerging pollutants at the moment is something called polyfluoral alcohol substances.

I don't know if you've, PFAS, if you've come across this.

These are molecules that have a carbon-fluorine bond in them, so you probably would think of Teflon.

They're in firefighting foams.

The problem with them is that it's incredibly difficult to break them down.

They persist.

So if they get into our water sources, as they get into our body, they're kind of toxins.

And the question is, how do you break them down?

And one of the ways to break them down is to try and oxidise them.

You need to apply very high potentials to an electrode if it's going to break these molecules down.

Diamond is one of the few that can sustain that potential you need to apply.

So now there's a massive big technology on trying to use these things to clean up our water sources of pollutants basically.

So, didn't you say though that

you can use any carbon source to grow more diamonds?

So, could you get like a sort of perpetual cycle going on?

Yep, sustainability.

Yeah, you can like whatever you're producing, bring it back and try and use that and make more diamonds.

So, that's the clever way to do it.

Yeah,

okay, all right.

I'm not going to lie, you guys, you are slightly winning me around, but there is a reason why I have long preferred other stones to diamonds.

And in particular, I really like white zircon.

Okay.

And it's a science reason why I really like it.

Because the thing about zircon is that it is incredibly stable, the structure of it, over time.

But also, it only ever formed at the beginning of the Earth, right?

So when the Earth was like this kind of blob of junk and then forming together under gravitational pull, that is when all of the zircon that you find in the ground was created.

And in that process, the way that the structure works is that there's no way that lead can get trapped inside right inside the crystal structure however uranium can i don't know why i'm telling these two scientists

sorry

sorry but um you i'm basically i'm just looking for when i make mistakes and you can correct me

so far so good so far so good okay but uh it ends up being like a cage which can trap

like single atoms of uranium inside.

Now the thing about uranium is that over time, over millions and millions of years, it decays radioactively into lead.

So if you dig down into the earth and you find a little bit of white zircon and then you look inside it and inside of the crystal structure, you find molecules of lead, you know for a fact they didn't get there when it was formed.

They got there because it was once uranium and then it decayed.

And that, my friend, is how they know how old the earth is.

I mean, that is, that's beautiful, no?

That is lovely.

That is absolutely lovely.

But I can top that yeah have you heard of super deep diamonds no yeah super dears can give zircon a run for his money listen to this

my name's professor graeme pearson at the university of alberta and my research topic and passion is super deep diamonds

normal diamonds form somewhere between about 150 and 200 kilometers deep in the earth These super deep diamonds form considerably deeper than that, between about 300 and as far as we know, about 700 kilometers depth in the Earth.

I mean these are the deepest bits of planet Earth that anybody is ever going to touch and put their hands on.

So they're totally unique archives that tell us information about the deep Earth that is just unavailable in any other way.

Any material sat at 700 kilometers in the interior Earth is under tremendous pressure.

and it exists in a different crystalline form to the crystalline form that you would find at the surface.

So we can make these things in the lab.

When we first started to discover these super deep diamonds, the mind-blowing thing is that they contain minerals that nobody had ever seen before in nature other than having cooked them up in the lab.

The beauty of these diamonds is that you were able for the first time to stare at one of these minerals that had only ever been synthesized before as a real piece of nature that was pristine, trapped the way it was when it was formed at huge pressures with inside the Earth.

What we know now is that diamonds are perfectly capable of giving us that insight into all that Earth history in just the same way that zircon can, and in fact, in more valuable ways because diamonds are able to probe way more of the Earth than zircons are.

Zircons are just sampling the little skin, or I'm a mantle geologist, so I call the crust the scum of the earth.

So everything comes from the deep interior of the earth, and diamonds tell you that story.

Scum of the earth.

I mean, I was editorializing slightly about where we exist and live our entire lives.

But yeah, I mean, you know, he's

coming from a all he cares about is a really, really deep stuff.

Really, what's going on up here?

Pointless.

But diamonds can do that.

Yeah.

And even the fact that it is the deepest parts of planet Earth that you can touch, because anything else brought up from those kind of depths just falls apart, doesn't it?

Because under the lack of pressure,

it doesn't hold its structure.

And Dara, if I may, it's even better than that because you want a bottle to bring this material up from these great depths to the surface or close to the surface where we can get it and sit.

You want a bottle?

I mean, what could you make that bottle out of?

Exactly.

And you want that bottle to be the hardest, the most impenetrable,

the highest atom density material you can to know that your sample you're studying inside is pristine.

That bottle has to be made out of diamonds.

Fine, you win!

You win, everyone!

So you can see

diamonds are cool.

I take it all back.

I'm sorry.

They're just a fantastic platform.

Make the audio imperfection in a million, and you get a totally different sensor.

You never get bored working with diamonds.

Every day, there's something new that's being discovered or thought about.

It's the most of, in my entire career, it's the most interesting material I've ever worked with.

And the best is yet to come because, in the last few years, we've made great advances in how we can make it and control the properties, tailor the surfaces.

So you're going to see diamond-based technologies coming in the future that are amazing.

Tell you what, though.

that 15 carrots, frayed up one on a ring, I would wear that to death.

We'll get one done for you.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Thank you to all of our guests, Charlie Bexfield, Julia McPherson, and Mark Newton.

I don't like being wrong.

But you're a big enough person that you can admit.

I have the intellectual humility to admit the diamonds are really, really, really cool.

Yeah, but I don't think we're expecting it to be quite as impressive as that i i do i do maintain that i i would rather walk

apart from the fact that it's so valuable i would rather walk away with the diamond dagger than the diamond yeah yeah yeah yeah

i still think they're overpriced yeah i think i think if you're showing off to people going look at this stone is one thing but watch me chop ice

live in front of you.

I think it depends on the kind of people you hang out with, but I know which ones

my people would be more impressed by.

I just like the fact that we built a whole episode about a thing you don't like.

That's nice.

And then they brought in loads of it to play with.

Yeah.

Should we say I don't like other things?

Yeah, dude, absolutely.

And then people will come in.

People just bring them to us.

I hate ice cream.

Yeah, I hate holidays in really, really fancy hotels.

Let's just prove that.

Hello, Curios.

I haven't used that word for a while.

You may have noticed in the last series, we didn't get the opportunity to do any curious correspondence.

But I have to tell you, by popular demand, you have been sending in your

letters, your poems, your, I mean, all sorts of stuff.

You sent it into curiouscases at bbc.co.uk.

And I think it's only fair that we share some of them, not least with the listeners, but also with you, Dara, because you haven't yet done it.

I've not been around for the correspondence thing at all.

You've not done the correspondence.

No.

It's very sweet.

I mean, what what i will say is this uh buckle up because they are a creative bunch

uh so remember that the episode that we did on synesthesia i do um the taste of words uh so uh there was quite quite a response from that so um there was this message from emma miller within the first six minutes of listening to curious cases yesterday at the grand old age of 51 uh i learned that i am a synesthete until i heard 11-year-old Esther describe how she visualizes the week.

I assumed everyone in the world

sees things this way.

How you got to 51?

After investigation, I realized I've always had sequence space synesthesia.

I visualise the yearly calendar all around me as if it were three dimensions.

I am genuinely blown away, sincerely thought this was how everybody else sees things.

I'm so proud of Emma, not least because she's realized this about herself, but that she walks around imagining a 3D calendar all the time.

And it's presumed we are all as cool we're not we're not and she's there like like in minority report moving dates around with her hands and swooping them filling things in and and she sees it as this living multi-dimensional grid and it's phenomenal it's phenomenal we don't live in that world i know i do not live in that world i've got scraps of scraps of paper with like imposed notes i mean barely

barely i mostly just wait for people to tell me where i'm supposed to be yeah yeah so we'll send me or complain when i'm not where i'm supposed to be yeah

We also got a poem.

Don't like to brag.

It is, here it is.

Should we take it in turns?

Read a little stanza each.

All right.

Okay.

All right.

There's something I spotted in the media, a condition known as synesthesia.

Where a person's senses are connected and work in concert when affected.

When feeling happy spawns a hue, like meeting a friend and seeing blue.

When she sees me, she gets a sensation.

There's me, I'm just a pigment of her imagination.

Cute.

That is cute.

I strongly strongly suspect they used AI to write that.

No, no, Phil is a real person, pigment of her imagination.

Pigment of imagination is very good.

AI wouldn't call it.

You know what?

You're absolutely right.

Well, thank you very much, everybody.

If we get more of these, maybe we'll reprise Curia over the week.

Yeah, honestly, I'm very impressed.

We just have badges and everything.

I mean, when he just didn't mock the week, we just got abuse from people.

There's that too.

We just don't read that one out.

Okay, fine, good.

Thanks, Kiros.

Thank you.

Hello, Russell Kane here.

I used to love British history.

Be proud of it.

Henry VIII, Queen Victoria, massive fan of stand-up comedians.

Obviously, Bill Hicks, Richard Pryor.

That has become much more challenging, for I am the host of BBC Radio 4's Evil Genius, the show where we take heroes and villains from history and try to work out were they evil or genius.

Do not catch up on BBC Sounds by searching Evil Genius if you don't want to see your heroes destroyed.

But if like me, you quite enjoy it, have a little search.

Listen to Evil Genius with me, Russell Kane.

Go to BBC Sounds and have your world destroyed.

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