THE BLACKEST PAINT ON EARTH (Vantablack/Black3.0 Science)

what is darkness well a simple definition would be the absence of light but certain materials can have a darkness all their own can't they an object that absorbed or otherwise trapped visible light would be very dark indeed the more photons you trap the blacker something gets at least that's how the blackest material on earth does it now entering the facility unlike what I would usually do in a lab like this use lasers to create light and such today what I want to do is to create darkness thankfully it's not all that hard to keep quanta in quarantine observe a shoebox inside of this shoebox I have taped a white piece of paper so that it's nice and bright and reflective just like you'd expect but I've also cut a hole in the shoebox now look at what happens when I close this very wide shoebox it is now jet black inside even though you are looking directly at a white very white piece of paper why is this happening well light is still entering the shoebox through this hole but it's bouncing around inside and not finding its way back out to your eye so it's as though no light is coming from the box at all and therefore it appears black this is a very interesting little phenomenon but we can do a lot better in terms of darkness than a shoebox a lot better yeah white is very small the flavor of visible radiation that you observe with your optic orbs is on the order of nanometers or billionths of a meter as a comparison if you suddenly found yourself the size of a single grain of sand which is rough and coarse and gets everywhere light the least visible light would still be less than an inch long to you so if you wanted to get on the same wavelength as light to trap it then you would want to be on the nano scale and that's exactly what the technology known as vantablack does sorry vantablack developed by sri nanosystems this vantablack technology is actually an acronym for vertically nano two arrays vanta these are little fourths of carbon nanotubes standing straight up and very close together in this orientation vantablack is exceedingly good at taking in light radiation but not letting it go back out kind of like our shoebox but to the extreme it can absorb 99.9 plus percent of visible light radiation coming into and because of this when you apply vantablack to a surface the effect is phenomenal it's replacing shadows and contours that you expect on three-dimensional objects and makes them look like two-dimensional objects like it's pure void but you can't buy pure vantablack and the gas depositing system at the facility isn't quite unlined it and I'm still on my quest for darkness that's okay because I got my hands on something else vantablack is a bizarre and surely awesome material but like a lot of small-scale physics it's really hard to visualize what the vantablack is actually doing at those very small scales but don't worry I have one of these a men's urinal splash guard that prevents drops of pee from getting everywhere that's nasty it's fine it's just a demonstration think about how one of these actually works when the colored water here falls on the urinal splash guard it has some amount of energy on structures not designed to trap the droplets water gets everywhere is that energy takes those droplets and rebounds them when the water encounters the guards with the vertical spokes though the majority of the droplets energy is dissipated during those many collisions and so it doesn't have the energy to ricochet back out and all over yourself almost the exact same thing happens with light in the carbon nanotube forests of vantablack just replace the water here with photons of light and the lack of splash with the lack of reflection in vantablack and replace the carbon nanotubes themselves with plastic peep holes and one more thing this isn't really a conversation to have with other people in the bathroom they're not interested I find this is black 3.0 technically the black is paint on the planet it was created by an artist known as Stuart Semple and as many collaborators in an effort to spite the guy who bought the rights to the vantablack paint and wouldn't share it with the artistic community no really you can buy this paint online just like I did very easily as long as you can prove that you're not that guy again really now I'm not totally sure on the chemical composition of this paint or the structure of it but I do know that when it dries if you apply it in the right way the effect can be rather striking like vantablack at home so I painted a number of objects for you and I want to share the results with you now now where were there he's been really excited to show you these like all day of course I'm excited by computing companion because look at this quarter that I painted with black 3.0 it it looks like a glitch in the matrix when I move it around you're not getting any reflectivity no depth even when I turn the quarter it's hard to tell what it is ooh Oh oh this is even better you don't even know how long he's been talking about this with a matte black paint that dries into some kind of analog of the nanoscale structures that make vantablack so impressive you can paint a playing card and make it look just unworldly just just like it's an absolute void it looks like those black bars that TV editors put on screen when someone says something bad oh wait wait wait wait wait wait wait what the black 3.0 absorbs up to 99% of incoming visible radiation and I think there's an even better more sciency way to show you what this kind of stuff can do here I have the same painted objects on some nice white paper and I'm gonna shine a laser on them using eye protection of course we will start with a standard 5 milli watt green laser the human eye is much more sensitive to green than red so you should be able to see it all bright and laser II so here's the green laser pointer as you'd expect nice and bright but once it gets to the black watch what happens wow the physics involved here drastically reduce the reflected light you can see even near the edge of the mask here there should be reflection should be what you expect and then right when it encounters it it's like a significant portion of the light just disappears into the void how about something a bit more powerful this is a big scary laser that I own that is 200 times more powerful than anything you can buy off the shelf and it's only legal here at the facility let's see how it interacts with our blacker than black objects I hope it looks good because I'm not even gonna look at this here we go remember I'm not even looking did I miss the quarter I probably hit the quarter didn't I nailed it I also painted a mess with black 3.0 without the usual separation of light in the contrast that your brain is expecting to see it is much much harder to infer depth and orientation and all of that stuff and vantablack and it's analog seem very high-tech but as it often does nature actually beat us to this kind of technology by a few million years observe the Gaboon pit viper objectively the coolest snake don't add me it is not only does this viper have the longest fangs of any snake not only does it deposit more venom per bite and not only is it the chunky estoy for its length look at those scales they can seem almost blacker than black and that's because in 2013 scientists discovered that the scales that break up the snakes outline in the undergrowth have similar nanoscale structures as vantablack therefore achieving a similar effect I guess you could call this color of black Viper black which sounds so much cooler I don't have any Viper DNA I have a question for you we know that the blackest of black materials are very good at absorbing the light that we can see but what about absorbing the light that we can't in a moment I'm gonna show you an image that I took of a relatively hot object that I painted some black 3.0 on my question for you is will this splotch of paint be brighter darker or the same brightness in infrared light as this hot object you take a second to think about it I have some things I have to attend to I'm on my way yeah I'll be there in a moment separating the high energy physics lab from the Biosciences wing was a great idea but this field scout Henderson even know about neutron activation and how it interacts with biology nothing that's what nothing this is really affecting our timeline sorry I had to make something abundantly clear to someone now back to our question what do you think we will see when we look at the blackest black with a thermal camera well let's take a look okay so the painted object that we are going to be using is just a tea pot with some hot water in it we want to be using something relatively hot because we need a large temperature to suss out all the little temperature differences so if we look at the teapot short and stout and you can see that it is quite hot relative to the surroundings and relative to me and if you look closely you can even see my heat reflection in the metal of the teapot now what do you think will happen when we turn this around and we see our dab of black 3.0 well let's find out okay this is our dab of black 3.0 as you can see it is much hotter than my hand it's hotter than surrounding it's hotter than the metal of the teapot why is this the case well it's because our paint is acting like what physicists call a blackbody an object or system that can almost perfectly absorb incoming radiation and then radiate it back out according to its temperature stars are near perfect black bodies for example and blackbody radiation gives them their colors at room temperature here and with the temperature of this teapot being the same for both the teapot and the dab of paint the down paint is brighter because it can emit infrared radiation a lot better than the metal can and has a better in miss civet e as physicists call it interesting isn't it ah thermal cameras there can be so much more science than you think in just a little drop of paint radiation emissivity human perception nanoscale structures I think I found what I was looking for today true darkness and I hope that you did too until next time not wearing a watch Aria can you turn the lights off thank you so much to the facilities very nerdy faculty for being the main source of revenue for creating these videos and directly supporting them this time I want to thank research assistant Lee Elliot and visiting scholar Peter Hendry if you want to join the facility especially our discord and our patreon where right now literally hundreds of nerds are talking with each other sharing what they know and naming my face you can go to patreon.com/scishow oh there's more you this done [Music] science videos today for a nerdier tomorrow

Channel: Kyle Hill

Views: 520,976

Rating: 4.9530334 out of 5

Keywords: science, physics, learning, stem, education, kyle hill, paint, painting, art, vantablack, black 3.0, blackest black, black 2.0, because science, engineering, math, the facility

Id: feEetOpux0s

Length: 13min 4sec (784 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 24 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/BloodyPommelStudio]

I think it would have made for a better demonstration if he showed the difference between regular "black" paint and BLK3.0