The Science Of Darkness: Pigments, The Cosmos and Nanotechnology

The first color used by human beings to express themselves artistically was black. The pigment used to create man’s first art was charcoal. A pigment is a material that changes the color of reflected or transmitted light.
Unlike paints and inks which rely upon a pigment for color change, dyes chemically bond to the substrate it’s applied too. Early black vegetable based dyes were neither strong or stable and would quickly fade to brown and grey, especially when exposed to sunlight.
The obvious contrast offered by the color black would play a pivotal role in how humanity communicates non-verbally, via ink and the written word.
In the 15th century Johannes Gutenberg’s introduction of the printing press to Europe inherently required a new type of ink that would be compatible with the process.
These new durable inks paved the way for the mass dissemination of ideas through printed books and a new form of artistic expression, the engraved print. Even in the digital age of computer screens, this vestige remains one of the most common formats for presenting text. By the industrial era, organic colorants were beginning to be replaced by superior synthetic compounds. This led to black clothing gradually became the most popular color of business dress in the western world.
Our brains perceive color in response to electromagnetic radiation at combinations of the frequencies in the visual spectrum. What we perceive as the color black represents the experience of no visible light reaching our eyes. It’s important to note that black can only occur through absorption. From experiments going back to the 1800s, it was observed that all objects emit radiation but black objects in particular possess different radiant properties than reflective ones.
These observations led to a new understanding of the color black. Formalized by the Geman physicist Gustav Kirchhoff in 1860, a black body in its ideal form will absorb all electromagnetic radiation falling on it. In 1900, the British physicist Lord Rayleigh and Sir James Jeans presented the Rayleigh-Jeans law, which attempted to approximate this relationship. This rift between observation and prediction in classical physics was known as the ultraviolet catastrophe. The resolution to this dilemma came from German physicist Max Planck in the form of Planck's law.
With an understanding of how black objects absorb and reemit radiation, it became possible to measure temperature and other derived properties at a distance.
As black body radiation is emitted from deep within the star, it passes through its outer atmosphere. The only thing that is even closer to an ideal black body, and is in fact is the most perfect black-body radiator, and implicitly the blackest object ever observed in nature is the universe itself. The cosmic microwave background radiation as its observed today is the most flawless example of black-body radiation.
In the age of space exploration, materials darker than traditional black pigments would be required for increasing the performance of astronomical cameras, telescopes, and infrared scanning systems.
Gold back was one of the fist commonly used light absorbing nano structures. This causes the gold to form a nano-chains structure. These chains overlap on one another, joining together very loosely, resulting in a ‘fluffy’ porous structure that traps light. Gold black can absorb almost 99% of the light that falls on it.
The next level of high absorbing coatings would come from the National Physical Laboratory or NPL in the United Kingdom known as super black. Because the super black treatment is only a few microns thick it suffers from transparency in the infrared spectrum, making it only practical for visible light.
Taking its name from its structure, vertically aligned carbon nanotube arrays, vantablack absorbs 99.96% of the light that falls on it. Furthermore, vantablack suffered from far less outgassing and degradation making it more suitable for commercial applications.
MIT created a technique that produced a material 10 times darker than Vantablack, absorbing 99.995% of visible light from all angles. Though the general mechanism of its "blackness" is similar to Vantablack, the mechanics of why this substrate and technique produced such a dramatic increase in absorption performance remains a mystery.
The concept of black will always be intertwined with technological advancement and furthering an understanding of our world.
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