Do Night Pearls Really Shine?

The pearl of the night is a diamond, because the diamond has a number of reflection and refraction angles after being polished, it can produce obvious reflection under the weak light, a large diamond can almost illuminate a room at night, but it is not a natural glow but a reflection.

Some of the other glowing gems are the situation mentioned downstairs, but none of them are explicitly called night pearls, they can only be called gems, and some can't even be called gems.

Although there are many records of self-luminous substances in ancient books, most of the records themselves do not stand up to scrutiny, or are mixed with too many mythological elements, and it is difficult to verify how much credible content is in them.

Moreover, according to scientific analysis, although there are self-luminous substances, the existence period cannot be as long as recorded in most ancient books, so it is difficult to say whether they exist.

What's more, none of these orbs have been found.

The pearl of the night only shines at night.

1 Animal and plant "Night Pearl": Everyone knows that there are luminous people in the animal kingdom, such as the famous firefly. In the Tang Dynasty, Su Jaw's "Du Yang Miscellaneous Edition" recorded the first year of the Tang Dynasty Zongbao calendar, and Nanchang presented "Ye Ming Rhino".

There are many luminous people in the plant world, such as the "Compendium of Materia Medica" records that the "Muwei Xizhi", "Ginseng Chengzhi", and "Qiming Jiuguang Zhi" in Ganoderma lucidum all fluoresce.

2. Mineral and gem-like night pearls: From the perspective of solid state physics, the matrix materials of mineral "night pearls" are activated crystalline phosphors in inorganic salt crystals.

The so-called activated crystalline phosphors refer to crystals that have the ability to "emit light" due to the distortion of the crystal lattice, and this distortion is mostly caused by some heavy metal impurities (activators) contained in the matrix. For example, ZNS can emit yellow-green phosphorescence with a small amount of Cu, which is called the substrate and CU is called the activator.

At present, there are more than 100 kinds of phosphors commonly used, and their chemical compositions are compounds of divalent metals (CA SR BA CD MG ZN) - sulfides, selenides, tellurides, silicates, aluminates, tungstatetes, phosphates and halogen phosphates, except for alkali metal halides.

Due to the different activators in the activated crystalline phosphor, the activated crystalline phosphor, that is, the "night pearl", can be divided into two categories:

Permanently luminous night pearl: It does not need to be excited by any external energy, but relies on its own activators, such as 14C 3H 147PM 226RA 232th and other radioactive isotopes, which can be excited by itself and emit light.

Long afterglow phosphorescent-type night pearl: The activator in the phosphor is not radioactive, and must be excited by external sunlight, ultraviolet rays and other light sources to emit light.

3. Several mineral night pearls.

The British historian Joseph Lee said in "The History of Science and Technology in China" that ancient China was especially fond of the "night pearl" produced in Syria, called "peacock warm jade" (actually fluorite). Many of the ancient Chinese "pearls of the night" came from Arabia or Persia. According to the "Essentials of Naturalism", the Yuan Dynasty sent officials to ancient Persia to buy back the gem night pearl (the red garnet family is silicate), and went to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to buy the night pearl "Zhaodian Hong" (that is, the red spinel is aluminate).