Fellow Science Lovers,
Game update: I finally worked on the game again! Several bug fixes:
- Returning to the Research Deck spawns Mallory in the right place.
- Sometimes, the boss room door still stays shut after you die in the boss fight, but it happen much less often. This is proving the hardest bug to fix so far.
- There was a way to avoid the trigger volume to restart normal level music after leaving the boss tunnel. This should no longer be possible.
Once I’m done renewing an IT certification (AWS Associate Developer), I can devote time to building out the next big area of the game.
In Scribes Emerge, Mallory carves a diamond out of a cavern wall with her Sword. While cutting it, the diamond glows blue. The book doesn’t explain why this happens, but I will attempt to now.
Triboluminescence
When you rub, rip, scratch, crush, or pull apart crystals, this can create flashes of light. This effect is called triboluminescence, or “cold light”. I’ve read two explanations for why this happens:
1. When polar covalent bonds break, they release a lot of energy and create positive charges on one side of the break and negative charges on the other. Electrons then jump from the negative side to the positive side, generating a plasma in the surrounding gas, which glows. Kind of like a neon sign.
2. When these bonds break, electrons get excited into a higher energy level. When they fall back down to their original levels, they release energy in the form of light. This is similar to bioluminescence. See this older blog post.
I’m not sure which explanation is correct, or if a third one is better. Scientists are still undecided about how triboluminescence really works, though they do agree on the etymology of the word: the prefix comes from the Greek tribein, which means “to rub.” This root gives us the word diatribe. When a speaker delivers a diatribe, he wears down his audience with long arguments. How’s that for a visual?
Not just any crystal glows when rubbed, however. Usually, the crystalline structure must be asymmetric. Why? Again, we’re not entirely sure, but perhaps asymmetry makes it easier for ions to shift through the crystal lattice.
In the photo below, a nail dragged along the face of a sphalerite stone produces triboluminescence:
-Chris Clemens, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Nature’s Rainbow
Or maybe this is just someone waving a metal match around in the dark. The photo is a bit unclear.
Triboluminescence is surprisingly common. It happens when:
- pulling apart scotch tape
- chewing food
- skeletal joints grind against each other (if only your skin wasn’t blocking your view of this!)
- shaking some Native American rattles (cowhide filled with quartz pebbles–when shaken, the pebbles glow)
- breaking sugar crystals
- opening an envelope sealed with polymer glue
- possibly even between red blood cells during blood circulation (I couldn’t find a video of this online. You don’t want to know how long I spent searching for one.)
To see this glow in action, watch this video:
When I saw that chewing food on the list of causes, I immediately wanted to eat with my mouth open in the dark in front of a mirror. See if I could produce a light show. You know, eating for science. That would hard to explain to my family if they walked in on that, but I think they know me well enough by now. When the Bible says that we are the light of the world, I doubt this is what it had in mind. 
You may be inspired to try this. If you pull it off, please record it and send the footage to me! Apparently, Wint-O-Green lifesavers are known to glow when broken, but the same articles that call this triboluminescence then explain that this candy has fluorescent oil. If that’s so, then it makes me think this is fluorescence instead.
Then again, all hard sugar candies can exhibit triboluminescence when rubbed together–remember sugar is a crystal–so maybe the Wint-O-Greens exhibit both types of light.
Now you know why the diamond glowed when Mallory cut it out near the start of Scribes Emerge. There’s another place in that book where blue light is created, though I did give a brief reason for it. Reply and let me know if you found it.
Writing update: If you haven’t realized it by now: Scribes Emerge is finally out! I will take the next few months to work on Scribes’ Descent, the video game. Then I plan to start on the next 3 episodes of Emolecipation. I know you’ve been waiting almost 3 years for more moles.
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