If you read our article on What is Color?, you might have questioned: Why can we see black objects if they are absorbing all the light? Great question. The answer is, they’re not truly black, meaning they’re not absorbing all the light. Most black objects are still reflecting a small amount of light, and they are really dark shades of grey, not actually black.
So is there a material that absorbs all color, showing us true black? Yes, we’ve come pretty close! Scientists have made a material, using nanotechnology, called Vantablack which is as close to true black as we have ever come (I’ll be doing an article on Vantablack in the near future so stay tuned). It absorbs 99.98% of light. It is so black that it doesn’t look right when we look at it. It looks more like a hole Photoshopped out of your vision. And it looks like that because it is, our eyes are literally not getting any information from the object in terms of visible light.
Here is an image of a brass face side by side with the same cast brass face painted with Vantablack:
The Vantablack side just looks like it was cut out of the image, and from a color/vision point of view… it was.
One of the many amazing technologies that are coming out of the Nanotechnology and Material Science Engineering world. Stay tuned for more technologies. +