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Usually on Journey to the Microcosmos, we spend our time looking at living organisms,
things like insects, plants, and microbes that move and breathe and grow and die. But today,
for these first few moments, these are the only living organisms we’ll be showing you,
a montage of creatures whose bodies all share one very eye-catching trait: crystals.
Their purposes may vary, but the visual is the same. They adorn our microbial friends
from the inside, glittering as the light from our microscope shines through them.
But crystals aren’t exclusively found in the confines of other organisms.
They existed long before life itself, as our planet’s earliest ingredients stewed together.
In fact, if you’re looking at a natural diamond, you are looking at a crystal that was likely made
billions of years ago, deep beneath the surface of where we live now. Hundreds of miles into our
planet, the weight of rock combined with high temperatures to create the right combination of
pressure and heat that drives carbon atoms to link together in the rigid structure of a diamond.
And as volcanic eruptions deep in the planet drove those diamonds up to the surface,
those ancient crystals ended up in locations where humans could find them.
Like...on eBay, which is where James—our master of microscopes—bought the ones you’re looking at now,
the ultraviolet light revealing the colors that the impurities within them take on.
Now don’t get me wrong, it is very easy to distract me with shiny things. But there’s
something about the diamonds, beautiful as they may be, that feels so...static.
Looking at them and thinking back to our usual journey through the microcosmos,
the line between life and non-life feels clearer than ever. These are rocks. Gorgeous,
fascinating rocks with eons of history packed into them. But still...rocks.
But this...this feels different, doesn’t it? Not alive necessarily, but still its vibrancy is more
than just the flashy sheen across the surface. It’s the movement, the creeping extension of
technicolor lines that branch across the screen, each new addition a statement of its own presence.
This is what happens when your curious master of microscopes looks at some of the
things around him and wonders what would happen if he just mixed them together.
Things like old pills, effervescent tablets, plant fertilizer, and Red Bull.
To be honest, James wasn’t actually setting out to capture footage for an episode about
crystals. He just wanted to know what would happen if he mixed those random
ingredients together, put the concoction on a slide, and then turned on the microscope.
The answer is simple enough. What happens are crystals:
a color palette that feels inspired by Lisa Frank, projected onto a surreal pattern that
you could convince me is the product of an AI trained on old computer screensavers.
But because we weren’t exactly planning to make these crystals,
we don’t have a good sense of exactly what chemicals are responsible for the crystals
we’re watching. We suspect that the fertilizer is playing a big role, which would make sense
because one of the ingredients in fertilizer is monoammonium phosphate, a chemical that shows up
in a lot of those “grow your own crystal” kits. Those kits work in a way that’s similar to what
we’re watching happen in our own home-grown crystals. When James mixed his hodgepodge
of things together, molecules broke apart, releasing atoms into a solution. And when
he added that solution to a slide, the thin layer of liquid began to evaporate.
You can see the edges of those drops in the clips. And you might even be able to
see the way the crystals form along those edges, the atoms concentrating to the point
of saturation and then beyond it, at which point they grab onto anything they can.
That moment is called nucleation. It might be latching on to a speck of dust,
or maybe some other random thing. Whatever it is, it’s enough to seed the rest of the crystal,
with more atoms precipitating and adding themselves on to the structure that is assembling.
The way those atoms connect to each other depends in part on their own properties,
a function of charge and size that may be invisible to us,
but that decides where the atoms should be relative to each other and creates
a shape that will—with the addition of more atoms—repeat over and over again.
There are so many more ways to make crystals than what we’re talking about today,
and also many more types of crystals than the ones we’re showing. What they have in
common—the unifying premise of a crystal—is that their units, whatever they may be,
are arranged uniformly in a geometric way. But that makes it all sound so much more
rigid than things actually are, like it’s all—in some cases literally—set in stone.
And yet, unliving as they are and as organized as they may be, crystals are still messy. Take
diamonds, for example. They may be hard and rigid, but they’re simply one form of many
that carbon atoms can create together. But if you throw enough time and energy at them,
those carbons inside of diamonds shift into a new shape, becoming graphite in the process.
The ability to form these different shapes is called polymorphism, and it can happen in crystals
derived from all sorts of building blocks. And it can be the result of even simple things, like the
way you stir a reaction or the presence of some kind of impurity. It could even be happening in
our own home-grown crystals, though it’s hard to tell based simply on what we’re looking at
and our sparse understanding of our own methods. But if these polymorphisms exist in our crystal,
it means there are a multitude of identities buried within its austere appearance. Because
shape drives everything about how a crystal like ours interacts with the world and with us,
whether that’s how it feels against our skin or whether it twinkles to our eyes.
Our journey through the microcosmos takes us through life forms who can often reveal things
about our past, about what life might have looked like in its earliest days,
and the evolutionary forces that have shaped what life has looked like since.
But these crystals—they’re the function of something that feels so distinct from life itself.
Even if we’d never showed up on this planet, there would still have been diamonds buried
underneath its surface. There could still have been some crystal somewhere that looked
like the ones we’ve grown. And perhaps it would have changed and shifted into something else,
glowing somewhere even with no microscope to see it.
Thank you for coming on this journey with us as we explore the unseen world that surrounds us.
And thank you again to our amazing supporters over at Patreon.com/Journeytomicro. You’ll be seeing
some of their names on the screen pretty soon, and that’s because having your name added to that list
is one of the rewards for signing up to support this channel. We have both a $2 and an $8 tier,
and by signing up you can receive weekly digital wallpapers, our monthly hour long uncut videos,
and access to the Journey to the Microcosmos community Discord where other viewers hang
out and talk about microscopy, these videos, or just anything they want.
So, if you’d like to sign up to support this channel,
head on over to Patreon.com/journeytomicro. And speaking of that community, don’t forget
we have our Microcosmos community survey in the description below that you can fill out
to let us know a bit more about you and what you like about Journey to the Microcosmos.
And, hey look, those names I just mentioned. Thank you again to all of you for
supporting this channel through Patreon.
If you’d like to see more from our Master of Microscopes James Weiss,
make sure to check out Jam & Germs on Instagram,
and if you’d like to see more from us, there’s probably a Subscribe button somewhere nearby.