Scientists Create Carbon Nanotubes (Vantablack): Materials that Absorb so Much Light one Sees Nothingness upon Looking at Them

Scientists Create Carbon Nanotubes (Vantablack): Materials that Absorb so Much Light one Sees Nothingness upon Looking at Them

Carbon Nanotubes are often seen as though they are the next generation after silicon of tech instruments to hit the market, however that is not the only thing they are apparently good at. Apparently, there is a British company called Surrey NanoSystems which deals with nano tech and states that it has come up with the 'darkest matter' yet. The exact details of how it is supposedly made it still purposefully a mystery due to intellectual property and so forth, but the company has shared some details on the process itself.

Vantablack as it is called is created by layering aluminum foil with carbon nanotubes. The material is so stealthy that when light hits the surface, the photons are trapped by the nanotubes which are cylinders that are made entirely of carbon at the microscopic level and the light photons bounce around unable to escape. Therefore, no light bounces back to the eye to view the image of the material. That makes Vantablack the least reflective material presently on the earth's surface. This is quite interesting as the lack of information to be processed by the eye while trying to view the Vantablack makes it look like an abyss out of nowhere. If one was to view Vantablack, among an array of materials the eye would not be able to understand what it is not seeing and thus the brain would interpret it as a complete blank or blindspot among the rest of the things that it was seeing.

The Leeds professor of science color and technology, Stephen Westland was right in saying that a lot of people think that the absence of light is represented as black. These are assumptions that our brains make to fill in the blank because we have never encountered that situation where absence of light appears in the middle of light itself; and from all of the space movies that depict black holes as a seething blackness that sucks everything in. however, unless one has viewed a black hole in real time, there are no documented events where someone has seen something without any light.

 

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