Why don diamond gems turn into graphite (or burst into flames)?
If carbon atoms would rather be arranged as the graphite structure rather than diamond, why don’t these priceless gems discolor and crumble into low value graphite powder? Examine Figure 4.2. In order to trace from diamond and graphite one moves from right to left on the diagram. Notice that a high energy barrier (like a hill) must be passed over. The top of this barrier is called the transition state. The transition state represents the highest energy structure involved in a reaction. It is intrinsically unstable and can’t be isolated. What might the transition state for the diamond to graphite conversion look like? We might imagine that it is a structure in which the some of the C-C bonds are stretched and the carbon atoms are beginning to arrange into the planes of graphite. At the transition state these planes will be buckled due to stretched bonds between the ultimately non-bonded planes of carbon atoms of graphite. As a result the stabilization afforded by four single C-C bonds a
