This box is the darkest place on Earth*

today i want you to imagine something perfect darkness absolutely pristine void it wouldn't look like anything it's a complete absence of light and you won't find this special condition anywhere on earth not at the bottom of the deepest ocean or tucked away in the darkest cave but with the help of the material that's lining the very box that you see behind me i might be able to show you something that gets pretty darn close now entering the facility by now i'm sure you've heard of the amazing advances in the field of so-called super black materials materials engineered to have surfaces so dark they don't even look right the most famous of these materials is so-called vantablack which i'm sure you've heard of and we've even messed around with some of the darkest paint ever created on planet earth here on this very program but today i want to do something a little bit different with the help of a company called horizon black which makes the baddest blackest most accessible super black objects on the market i'm going to try to make what i think will technically be one of the darkest places in the known universe i'm going to show you and some of my friends the result and if you want to pick up one of these amazing display cases from horizon black and go to their kickstarter and get you one right now they are oh so dark but before we attempt to make some cool stuff with that cool stuff ask yourself what makes something black well if everything that you see has some flavor of the visible light spectrum to it then any object that appears black is either not emitting light or not reflecting light back to your eye my t-shirt for example absorbs most of the wavelengths of the visible light spectrum and so it appears black but appears you know really cool black because it's made of a classified material it's just cotton sh i'm trying to sound cool but what does it take to make something super black from black well you have to change the way the surface of the material interacts with light itself as we said a black material doesn't reflect light or very little of it that's in contrast to something like a mirror which reflects a lot of light a mirror does this with very smooth materials that interact with light in an orderly way off of its surface but look at the nanoscopic view of a super black material surface every single one of those impossibly thin strands that you see are little atomic structures like a forest a billionth of a meter tall this in effect increases the surface area of these materials by an unimaginable amount to the point where individual photons of light can get trapped in this forest and never reflect back to your eyes super black objects use these structures then to absorb more than 99.9 percent of incoming light and look the way that they do of course making structures the size of your dna is incredibly difficult but researchers at a company like horizon black do so with a highly technical process called chemical vapor deposition for example horizon black introduces specific chemicals into a vacuum chamber containing thin aluminum sheets by controlling different parameters like temperature and pressure they can then control how the chemicals in these various gases are laid down on the aluminum at an atomic level the end result is a completely non-toxic material with a uniformly unthinkable amount of surface area that is capable of immense light absorption chemical vapor deposition is the closest we've come to making practical voids and as you can see many smart people have gotten very good at doing so but before we try to make our own void with this stuff ask yourself what will be better than just a very good void what would a theoretically perfect void be i don't know your soul a few years ago i was lucky enough to visit what is actually the quietest place on earth it's a large anechoic chamber at orfield labs in minnesota with an ambient sound level below the threshold of human hearing if you want to know what it sounds like it's like trying to hear someone's wristwatch tick away from across the room it's below your threshold it's it's impossible to even think about it gets that quiet because it has an assortment of materials and certain shapes and orientations which cancel out almost every single possible echo of any sound wave which is why they call it an anechoic chamber it's as though the room is mathematically infinitely large that the room has walls that are infinitely far away so that any sound wave would never reflect off a wall and make it back to your ear a perfect black void would be the same thing it would be a room that's infinitely large so that any light within would never bounce off of anything to be reflected back to your eye and look like something that just sounds like space well that does sound like space robot wife but space isn't quite as black as you think there's a fog of light from early galaxies and stars throughout their lifetime that permeates all of space and time it's a background radiation that astronomers and other scientists can see so all that is to say that it should not be impossible to make something blacker than even space and we're going to try to do that right now so horizon black sent me 10 sheets of pristine super black material i want to be very very careful with it because if you touch the surface it actually destroys some of that nanoscopic engineering so i'm not even taking it out of the protective sheets just yet but you'll see just how black this stuff actually is it's amazing my goal today is to line some sort of box that i'll be creating out of foam core like adam savage would line that box to create literally one of the darkest places in the universe now before you ask me all these questions no i cannot just line an entire room out of this stuff i only i only have 10 sheets because it's very expensive to fabricate who do you think i am mr beast no i wouldn't be caught dead on camera in sandals and yes this will be better than other enclosures other videos have done with something like super black paint because this is again nanoscopic fabrication on aluminum sheets we'll be doing a little bit of build for the next little bit i'll be measuring cutting with exacto knives and taping foam core to make a box with the correct measurements so i'm using the maximum amount of surface area here and there's a little wrinkle to that i don't want to cut any of these sheets i want to keep them as pristine as possible again because i don't want to touch them any more than i have to i will adhere them to the inside of the box and then we will take some readings inside of the box to make sure that it is as black as possible uh let's try a little adam savage impression huh let's get to it i'm going to start by cutting out from foam core like this start cutting out foam core at least at least six inside panels so inside of a cube there's six sides and the outside of the cube has six sides so i wanna make some sort of cube that you can look in it's gonna be more rectangular if i have enough pieces of this foam core but i want to make each one of the panels the same size as my horizon black panels again because i don't want to be cutting them to fit what i have here i want to fit what i have here to them so i don't have to touch the material that i don't have to so i'm going to start my first cut here and we're going to slowly cut one side making sure we're watching where our fingers are when i make this cut when i make these cuts i want to make sure that my thumb isn't directly behind where i'm going to be pulling because if i pull too hard the blade comes out like that i don't want to slice my thumb wide open like a big dum-dum kyle are you even paying attention are you cutting through the cloth on your table no that would be a rookie mistake to make sure that i'm not doing that i'll be putting some adam will be proud i'll be putting some foam core underneath the foam cord that i want to cut just so i don't do that again okay and just like that we have our first sheet now i'm gonna do this at least eight more times so that i can be uh because i have enough panels to line these uh foam core sheets i'm gonna do this at least eight more times so i can create some sort of longer more rectangular box that you can look down in to try to get some serious voidness out of it so let's keep going you know why don't we just speed this along with some movie magic here are some cuts that i have now made off camera because it'd be a big boring process now the next step is to adhere the horizon black sheets to them this is where the rubber meets the road so to speak because if i mess up these sheets uh there's no going back on that so i'm kind of scared of this part but if this works we'll be on our way to making a black hole box i'm gonna leave the plastic covering over here remember i'm being really careful um keeping my hands on the sides of it if i can because remember there's nanoscopic structure here that i will destroy if i'm not careful peel that off oh oddly satisfying whoa okay so oh it's it is it's aluminum so it it feels like metal is this feels really really cool oh and it's super sticky all right this is our first our first sheet on our foam core here and i'm going to leave man i know i shouldn't be touching it but how else am i going to try to touch the edges if anything i suppose just got to do the rest of them and then we will start assembling okay so i have eight interior panels for the black hole box and i have this end panel now the next step which will be the final step is final assembly as adam would say um so i'm going to put these foam core black hole sheets together just with some simple tape in a rectangular construction and we'll see uh if we can see anything in the place where i said you shouldn't be able to see anything here we go taking off the protective sheeting for the first time i haven't actually looked at this yet without the shooting because i was afraid to damage it so let's see whoa whoa what's really fascinating just looking at this like that is that even though a bunch of lights are hitting this at the right angle you can see some uh bends and folds but once it's not lit from that way and i'm just looking at it straight on it all evaporates like it there's no it has no texture or surface whatsoever oh that's so cool okay let's keep going now yeah so i might have to go back in before the final assembly with some ultra black paint which kind of gets on my nerves a little bit but uh you know we're talking about very expensive highly technical nano-engineered material of course it couldn't have been could have had a perfect perfect measurement on everything especially when i'm a kind of a newbie when it comes to constructing and measuring and all that jazz so i'm gonna stabilize this a little bit more make sure everything's sturdy and then uh we'll ramp or cut to the end part of the box and uh we'll see if it works all right okay so we fast forwarded a little bit in the construction process because uh it turned out to be way harder than i thought it was going to be because i didn't cut all these strips exactly right i had to go in with my ultra black paint and paint the edges such that they would meet in an ultra black part when i made the box i'm covered in this stuff thankfully i still had some from a previous episode of the facility i needed to affix the entire thing to itself with some black duct tape that i just happen to have so it was sturdy couldn't touch anything some of it was crumpling i really sliced my finger open with an x-acto knife kids practice blade safety i got i got reckless i got careless i was annoyed with all the tape and the paint getting everywhere so i recklessly just tried to slice at the tape it went right through the tape and then right through my finger so to be honest i'm pretty frustrated but you know i'm not frustrated with the black hole box yes this is it in its final form so i have all the ultra black horizon black sheets lining the interior of this i lined all of the edges anywhere light could get in with this black duct tape and i hastily made a little neck sleeve so you could put your head in and look in without any ambient light coming in from behind your head to get in and mess up your view of the void so to speak so the next thing i'm gonna do and i haven't looked at it yet is i'm gonna check it out this is gonna look totally normal whoa whoa okay so it's weird because i can see light coming in through the fabric but then you are just faced with nothingness wow that is so cool that okay before i show you what it looks like because it might just look like pure nothingness if i did it right why don't i show you what some of my sciencey friends thought of it so you can get a better idea of this kind of nothingness okay aria what i want you to do i want you to put your head in the neck sleeve and you lift up the box you look into the blackness put your head in the sleeve put the sleeve over your head oh this is the better version of pyramid head rectangle head rectangular prism head what does it look like in there um it looks dark i'm gonna go on record does it look dark in a cool way it looks very dark it looks concerningly dark because i like i was trying to turn my head around and see if light would come in from any direction and it doesn't it's dark put your head in the box hold it put the sleeve over your head no don't put your head you can grab it grab it yeah sure so you can look straight into it what does it look like what does it look like nothing it's the void can you see any light whatsoever out of the corner of my eyes coming in from the back of where the bag is but it gets extremely extremely dark in the center and it looks like there's a black hole in there it looks like there's a black hole in the center there's like a little bit of light and then it gets darker and darker and darker and then it looks like you're looking into a black hole i'm going back in no no get back get out let's stick my head in the box hopefully hopefully you can find i want to come over to your house hey hey derek put your head in this box nothing bad is going to happen to you i swear great what a guy yeah okay go for it i'ma look in the box it also smells interesting i can see the light coming in around the fabric but now that i've like i'm in the box location and it uh it does smell i can i can uh yeah uh it is pitch black it is totally pitch black in here uh this is being this is like being in the world's quietest room yes where they locked me in there and they turned out the lights and there was absolutely no source of light that's what i that's uh i earlier in this episode i drew the exact same analog i was like this is as though it's an infinitely large room with no reflection i can say you know perfectly honestly that having your head in there is kind of like you can't tell whether your eyes are open or closed right there is no difference yeah i'm blinking and i'm like nope it's it's just like no input yeah if how many photons are in the box yeah like exactly exactly if if uh if like money were no issue a whole room of that an amazing woman would probably be amazing just like because i need to sleep at night i need like you know everything really disorienting or that yeah yeah that's what you're thinking about well that you bring up the photons thing i how many photons are in the box i wonder do the calculation kyle that could be one of the darkest places on earth i believe it right i believe it it may be one of the darkest cavities in the world because obviously if there's a whole bunch of like rock like and you're under you know you're under 50 tons of rock are you down on mine exactly are you glad that i showed you what's in the box i'm delighted to have seen in the box that was life-changing in a way yeah the time has come i'm gonna bring you in i have this 4k gopro right here all set up and ready to go and prepare to witness the void here we go we're going inside and what you should see now i'm i'm at the beginning of the void i'm moving you all the way through to the end of the box and all the way through the back of the box this is what pure nothingness looks like and i assure you that i am not just cutting to a black screen with some movie magic no that would be too easy easy instead trust me i wouldn't do that i sliced my finger just for this how cool is that right and as just one final measure of the efficacy of this void i bought myself a light meter so the ambient light reading says 65.8 so now hopefully i'm going to get basically 0.0 once i put it into the void let's try it and then i'll hit hold the hold button it's inside let it stabilize hit hold bring it back out from the 60 or 50 or 60 lux it was on the outside it goes to 0.0 significant figures right there it shows you that inside of this all the photons that are possibly bouncing around are being lost in the nanoscopic forest of the horizon black construction it's an absolutely amazing little object i think and technically technically this inside of this box is one of the darkest places in the known universe thanks to the nano scale engineering of the surfaces thanks to absorbing all the photons the photons themselves getting lost in this billionth of a meter maze this will be a perfect little trinket to put with the rest of mine at the facility from my impossibly colored toucan to my kugel blitz lamp thanks for watching until next time it was worth it now exiting the facility thank you so much to the very nerdy staff at the facility for their direct and substantial support in the creation of this here video today especially i want to recognize research assistant js and visiting scholar leonardo alcala if you want to join the facility if you want to drape on a silky white lab coat c videos early get private members only live streams with me not like that join our discord to talk with me every day on the internet you can go to patreon.com kyle hill and join the facility staff today and hey if you support our work just enough you get your name on aria here each and every week and as you can see there's literally hundreds and hundreds of you so i have no idea how i'm gonna pass the time as this goes thanks again to horizon black for sending me that awesome material i only sliced my finger a little bit dealing with it but it's so cool and i can't wait to display these super black materials in the facility forever i mentioned that uh the surface of super black materials the color of it or the absence of color of it it's due to the structure and not any pigment in this way super black materials are like butterfly wings in case you didn't know butterfly wings if you look on a microscopic scale they have scales microscopically they it's not a pigment on butterfly wings like these blue morpho wings here you can see how they beautifully shimmer and shine like that that's because the structure at the microscopic scale that's what's interacting with the light and giving them this iridescent blue loveliness it has nothing to do with pigment so once again native nature beat us to the punch natis i'm not redoing it the take thanks for watching aren't they pretty

Channel: Kyle Hill

Views: 348,585

Keywords: because science, engineering, kyle hill, learning, math, physics, science, stem, the facility, black 3.0, super black, ultra black, vantablack, horizon black, blackest black, black 2.0, science thor, vanta black, the action lab, action lab

Id: E7_WyB-GMnk

Length: 23min 0sec (1380 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 03 2021