Coal is made up of different, overlapping structures where diamond is made of single, box-like structures. Coal is brittle because these overlapping structures can easily slide past each other. It is easy to create a tiny fracture in this pattern. This fracture will become the bigger break.
Diamond is strong because the structures are arranged like a builder arranging bricks. The structures, when hit, stay intact because the structures are giving each other support and helping them stay intact. See the diagram below to see the differences between coal and diamond.
As we all know, coal is common to find and diamonds are rare. Miners also have to dig deeper to find diamonds. All the diamonds dug out in human history would only fill two Olympic size swimming pools. It is this almost vanishing scarcity that makes diamond so valuable and precious.
Here is my proposal for a futuristic way of changing coal to diamond. We could use the power of AFMs (atomic force microscopes) to view and change the structure of coal atoms to form diamonds. AFMs use the power of the second force, electromagnetism, to view and change the structure of atoms to form other substances.
Thank you!
The End
