New Super-Black, Light-Absorbing Material Looks Like a Hole in Reality

independent.co.uk

25 points·sethbannon··7 comments

This story appeared a few times during the last days with different linkbait titles, like "Blackest: Scientists develop a material so dark that can't be seen"

This article is very interesting. This is the first article I saw that has a photograph of the new material, and not only some stock photos of black objects.

(I'm not ironic. I rally wanted to see a photo of this. Perhaps a spectrogram and some technical descriptions have more scientific information, but nevertheless I wanted to see it with "my" eyes.)

Back in 2009: http://www.wired.com/2009/03/ultrablack/

2008: http://www.reuters.com/article/2008/01/15/us-nano-black-idUS...

2007: http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2007/March/01030701.a...

2003: https://web.archive.org/web/20030219071652/http://www.ananov...

Of course the goalpost is moving, but we keep 'reinventing' this stuff...

Yeah, we covered this even though it's an old type of material. The news is actually an improved manufacturing technique.

What does the hole in the top image represent? Is that just a random hole in the material?

Would it be possible to make the "opposite" of this material? Something that reflects at near perfect efficiency? Would that just be a normal mirror?

Assuming you are referring to this image: http://www.independent.co.uk/incoming/article9603983.ece/alt...

What looks like a hole in the metal foil is the portion of the metal foil with the said material applied on it. It looks like a hole in spite of the metal foil having ridges and valleys as seen on the sides where the material is not applied.

No, the URL was changed after I posted that comment.

This is the image I was referring to: http://cdn.singularityhub.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/nas...

I assume it was just there to show how small carbon-nanotube fibers are.

From this page: http://singularityhub.com/2014/07/19/new-super-black-light-a...

A dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8030459.

(Before edit:

Url changed from http://singularityhub.com/2014/07/19/new-super-black-light-a..., which points to this.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com