Gemstones

86 cards · Hard

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Gemstones

86 cards · Artist AI generated

The order these are in comes from a test invented in 1812. Friedrich Mohs arranged minerals by the only question that could be settled without equipment: which one scratches which. Talc scratches nothing, diamond scratches everything, and the eight steps between them are simply the order they line up in.

It is a ranking, not a measurement, which people forget. Ten is not twice five. Diamond at ten is something like four times harder than corundum at nine, a bigger jump than the whole distance from one to nine. What keeps the scale alive after two centuries is that a geologist can run it in a field with a fingernail, a copper coin, a knife blade and a scrap of quartz.

At the far end sits kyawthuite. A single stone of it has ever been found, 1.61 carats, out of Myanmar, and no second specimen has ever been confirmed anywhere on Earth. Any complete set of the world's gemstones has to finish on a thing that exists exactly once.

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