Diamonds

Sooner or later you have to tackle the problem. should you give a diamond ring to your GF to ask her to marry? but that's not what I want to talk about tonight... in fact, the question has come about between me and my lovely but never mind, we'll talk about this another time.

I was reading a book (Pandora's Star - P.F. Hamilton) and there it was cited the very high thermal conductivity of diamond. And it didn't make any sense to me. I mean, thermal conductivity is provided mostly by free electron flow. and of all materials, Diamond is the hardest one, i.e. the one with less available electron of them all... To fact check on this, I did ask a person who knows about diamond. A skype-friend of mine who's engineer in a diamond mine in namibia (yes I do meet some particularly interesting people over the net)
. Tpo no avail, however. She certainly knows how to get them out of the ground, but knows nothing about their characteristic. so i went to the (free) repository of all knowledge, wikipedia, and found out that what good Ol' Peter writes is absolutely true. But also what I say it's true. In fact, diamond's "highest than everything else" conductivity is caused not by free electrons, but by phonons, which because of the very regular 3D structure of the crystal lattice can propagate very efficiently. This is SO COOL!!! Oh God I do love science. And on this diamond bombshell, it's time to say goodnight!!!