
Scientists have developed a material so dark that it can't be seen - davidbarker
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/blackest-is-the-new-black-scientists-have-developed-a-material-so-dark-that-you-cant-see-it-9602504.html
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qwerta
We researched dark coating for astronomical telescope.

0.00035 albedo is pretty impressive. It does not reflect any light, nothing
human eye could focus on, so it is impossible to judge distance and details.
It is practically invisible and alien. So wall out of this material would
appear as 'dark hole' and we would practically walk into it.

We did also experiment by covering room walls with dark cloth, so it would not
reflect any light. It was strangely claustrophobic, you could only see light
bulb filament and nothing else. Something like this picture:

[https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikijunior:How_Things_Work/Lig...](https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikijunior:How_Things_Work/Light_Bulb#mediaviewer/File:LightbulbGlow.jpg)

It would be fashion revolution, If they turn it into practical material safe
for humans and weather resistent.

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malkia
What if the "World's Quietest Room" is colored like this... Just wonder :)

~~~
qwerta
Place nobody wants to be longer than 10 minutes.

~~~
PavlovsCat
Floating in water in such a room might be usable as a lot less scary sensory
deprivation tank.

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Gygash
Some digging reveals Surrey NanoSystems as the claimed creators.

Their website:
[http://www.surreynanosystems.com/](http://www.surreynanosystems.com/)

Press release for VantaBlack:
[http://www.surreynanosystems.com/news/19/](http://www.surreynanosystems.com/news/19/)

Mid-2013 press releases [1][2] talk about using "vertically-aligned carbon
nanotube (VANTA) arrays" and cite similar absorption rates as the linked
article.

Okay, now I'm interested.

1:
[http://www.surreynanosystems.com/news/17/](http://www.surreynanosystems.com/news/17/)

2:
[http://www.surreynanosystems.com/news/16/](http://www.surreynanosystems.com/news/16/)

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ghshephard
A lot of funny claims in this article,

"Vantablack's practical uses include calibrating cameras used to take
photographs of the oldest objects in the universe. This has to be done by
pointing the camera at something as black as possible."

Just covering with a lens cap would seem to be a simpler way of accomplishing
that,

and:

Stephen Westland, professor of colour science and technology at Leeds
University, said traditional black was actually a colour of light and
scientists were now pushing it to something out of this world.

"Many people think black is the absence of light. I totally disagree with
that.

Really? I can't think of any better way of describing black.

~~~
jerf
"Really? I can't think of any better way of describing black."

I suspect the quote got mangled to suit the article. He was probably referring
to the fact that since "black" is generally still reflective, it therefore
must have some color. We may not be able to see it, but it has something. I'm
sure we've all had the experience of seeing something that was "black" become
"navy blue" in the sunlight or something.

This substance is much closer to "black", and given the mechanism by which it
is working it is plausible that the remaining light is essentially reflected
without preference, in which case it would technically be a black mirror,
which could not be said to have a color in the usual sense of the term.
(While, again, I'm sure we've all seen shaded mirrors, we do not tend to call
perfect mirrors "white".)

~~~
mnw21cam
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_body](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_body)

If something is perfectly black, then that means that the radiation it is
emitting is a perfect black body spectrum, unadorned with spectral emission
and absorption lines. If you were to raise its temperature to 4000K or so, it
would emit white light, but it would still be "black".

This feature would indeed make it useful for calibrating equipment, as the
radiation emitted from it would be very predictable, depending on its
temperature.

~~~
jerf
I'm talking about color strictly from the human eye perspective, which I may
not have spelled out but ought to be clear. Black body emissions into the
visible spectrum at room temperature are insignificant. If that were not the
case, nature would probably have chosen a different "visible spectrum".

~~~
mnw21cam
Not necessarily. I can imagine it would be a remarkably useful trait for an
organism to be able to see far infra-red, where everything is glowing. See in
the dark!

~~~
jerf
Aren't you just the argumentative one?

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nathell
In homage to Gene Wolfe's "The Book of the New Sun", I propose it be called
"fuligin."

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rlpb
This article cites the Independent as its source.

The Independent's article is:
[http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/blackest-is-the-
ne...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/blackest-is-the-new-black-
scientists-have-developed-a-material-so-dark-that-you-cant-see-
it-9602504.html)

------
awjr
Out of curiosity, can this approach be used to other wavelengths?

~~~
moron4hire
"black" is not a wavelength of light. It's the absence of light.

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Cthulhu_
What I think the question is, is whether it's possible to create a surface of
light that reflects only a very specific (range of) wavelengths; that would be
quite interesting actually. Highly accurate colors and such.

~~~
femto
A Dichroic Filter is an example of what you describe.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dichroic_filter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dichroic_filter)

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drabiega
I've seen a few references to this today, but this is certainly the most link-
baity of the bunch.

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slurry
[http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/cs.aspx](http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/cs.aspx)

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rootbear
It makes me think of Larry Niven's hyperspace "blind spot", which the human
brain has so much trouble perceiving that it can cause madness.

~~~
PavlovsCat
I know I shouldn't, but I have to think of that bit in HGttG when Ford and
Zaphod are looking for a spaceship to steal:

 _FORD: No. Oh, wait a minute, wait a minute! That one there.

ZAPHOD: Hey-yeah! Now that is really bad for the eyes!

FORD: I mean it’s so black! You can hardly even make out its shape. Light just
falls into it._

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michaelfeathers
I wish I could find the short story 'Absolute Ebony' by Felice Picano online.
I always think of it when these breakthroughs happen.

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tgb
Is there a lower bound on albedo caused by black body radiation? If so, what
is it?

~~~
ghkbrew
I think that sort of depends on how you define your terms. Generally albedo is
how much of the light which hits an object is reflected. A perfect black body,
by definition doesn't _reflect_ any light: all of it is absorbed and converted
into thermal energy. It does however _emit_ light with a frequency spectrum
dependent on its temperature.

So if you wanted to, you could calculate a pseudo-albedo as incident light
over emitted light for various conditions, but it wouldn't be an intrinsic
property of your material like albedo is usually considered

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wink
Never has a purely #000000 colored symbolic image been put to better use
albeit being slightly incorrect.

~~~
athenot
#000000 is in the device-dependent RGB colorspace. Its correlation to a
device-independent colorspace depends on—you guessed it—the device.

This (absence of a) color can be represented in L* a* b* coordinates as L* =
0. (a* and b* are then irrelevant)

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moron4hire
If the human eye can't see it, then it makes no sense to call it a color.

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rvkennedy
But this colour already has a name. It's called "black".

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z3t4
What is it in hexadecimal?

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gpvos
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