US researchers invent fuligin: ‘none more black’
Admirers of Gene Wolfe’s epic fantasy of the far future The Book of the New Sun will recall the guild cloak worn by the central character and narrator, the torturer Severian: not black but fuligin, the colour darker than black. ‘I’ve never seen such black - so dark you can’t see folds in it. It makes my hand look as though it’s disappeared’. Then there’s Spinal Tap’s Smell the Glove album with its all-black cover: ‘How much more black could this be? And the answer is none. None more black’. And we musn’t forget what Father Ted taught us about the special blackness of priest’s socks, which are blacker than any other type of socks. ‘Sometimes you see lay people wear what look like black socks but if you look closely you’ll see they’re very, very, very, very, very, very, very dark blue’.
Anyway, the point of this is that fuligin has now been invented; a substance of which ‘none more black’ can honestly be said has arrived; the truly, perfectly black priest’s sock is now possible at last. Researchers from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, have used carbon nanotubes to create ‘the darkest man-made material ever’. According to Imperial College theoretical physicist Sir John Pendry, ‘they’ve made the blackest material known to science’. Next stop: superdark materials. Which are apparently even darker.
