Have you ever heard of Shakyamuni Buddha's tooth? In fact, there were two of them - these artifacts were discovered by researchers in 1974. What these things are - no one can say so, why they call them teeth - is also incomprehensible.
As for me, they look like teeth in the very last place. According to legend, they belonged to Buddha Shakyamuni, who lived on our planet more than 2.5 thousand years ago. In the distant past, these were sacred relics of Buddhism.
In general, it is surprising how they have survived to our time - the Chinese communists could well have destroyed them. If I am not mistaken, then in total about seven such "teeth" have been found in the world. The finds greatly interested the researchers, and the teeth went to a laboratory in Belgium.
And what is interesting - after analyzing both teeth, the researchers found that one of them contains a substance that is not found on our planet. In Buddhism, this substance is called sarira. In addition to teeth, it was found in the ashes of cremated Buddhist spiritual leaders.
Researchers have found that it is not destroyed by cremation. Its color is different, but in appearance it resembles either pearls or pieces of glass. The results of one of the experiments greatly surprised scientists. The experiment was carried out in several stages:
1) First, the researchers took one of the teeth and lowered it into the water, after which they tried to draw a line on it with a pencil. However, they never succeeded.
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2) After that, the pencil was dipped in ink and continued to try to draw a line on the tooth without pulling it out with water. And at that moment one of the researchers, who was following the process through a microscope, saw many small spherical pearls under the ink lines left.
3) Using a powerful microscope, the researchers enlarged the image a thousand times and saw something very similar to four small Buddha figures sitting around a large Buddha figure.
Despite the fact that the tooth itself was given about 2.5 thousand years, the pieces of sarira contained in it are several billion years old. What kind of substance is this - no one can understand. They also decided to investigate it. And the first thing that surprised scientists was a very high thermal conductivity of 1000-2600W / (m * K).
What substance on our planet has the highest thermal conductivity? Of course, a diamond. Here are just a sign of thermal conductivity does not exceed 1000 units. And here it comes to 2600.
After that, they decided to test the sarira differently - it was compressed with a 2000 ton hydraulic press, but the particles of the material did not collapse. It turns out that sarira is not only the most thermally conductive, but also the toughest material ever found by mankind.
It simply cannot be destroyed with modern equipment. How did she end up on our planet? According to researchers, it could have been brought here by meteorites.
For example, in the last century, another meteorite fell in Arizona, in which the researcher Dame Kathleen Lonsdale discovered a new type of diamond with an unusual structure. The diamond was named lonsdaleite.
And the most interesting thing is that the structure of this diamond is similar to the structure of the sarira. Also striking is the very high content of inorganic carbon in the diamond - over 99.98%.
If humanity ever learns to work with such a tough material, it will be able to make a huge breakthrough in its technological development.
It's even hard for me to imagine how much this sarira can cost - the figure there is clearly cosmic. Another separate question is where to get it in large quantities. And how did she end up in one of the Buddhist relics?
