Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Vantablack

Episode Date: January 27, 2021

How black is vantablack? About as black as you could imagine. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck out over there and Jerry's hanging

around somewhere. And this is short stuff about Vantablack, which is pretty cool. It is. And it's funny, I never really thought about variations of black until a couple of years ago when we finally were able to professionally renovate our house and not just have me do it poorly. Because I wanted my upstairs office to be black, because it's got lots of windows and tons of light. And so it wouldn't have that, you know, dungeon like feel, even if it were black. Right. And I didn't know how many blacks there were to choose from until I started looking. It was really interesting. Yeah, there's a ton. And actually, if you wanted to go super-duper black, Chuck, it would have cost you a pretty penny had you been like,

I'm going to paint this whole thing in Vantablack because that's some expensive stuff. Yeah, I don't think you can buy it, can you? I don't know. I think there is something called VBX2, which is a bit of a paint, like an actual paint that you could spray on. But yeah, I don't get the impression that you could buy it. And as a matter of fact, I guess if you would buy it or tried to buy it, you would be running a fowl of a license held by an artist named Anish Kapoor, who supposedly is the only person legally allowed to buy Vantablack. So who knows in this crazy world. But a lot of people are probably like, what are you guys talking about? What's so great about this Vantablack that it would

it would war in its own short stuff episode. And I say to those people, kick back and listen up, because Vantablack is pretty interesting stuff. That's right. If you would be interested in having a really, really, really deep black, oh, let's say one that absorbs, I don't know, 99.965% of light, then Vantablack is for you. I remember when this came out, I think it was about six or seven years ago from Surrey Nano Systems, they very much were proud of the fact that they set a world record for their vertically aligned nanotube array black, which is what it stands for, as being the blackest black of all time. Right. And it's called vertically aligned nanotube array black because it's actually made up of nanotubes. I was looking into it, I was like, well, how would that create

a black pigment? Yeah. And it's pretty interesting. These tubes are super, super tall. And so they're vertically oriented, so they're standing up on end. And apparently the ratio between their width or diameter and their length is like one to one million. So for, say, every nanometer that they are around, they're a million nanometers tall, and they're really tightly crowded together. So there's like a billion nanotubes per square centimeter of whatever's painted in a black, and they actually capture light. The light goes into these nanotubes and can't find its way out and eventually just dissipates its heat, which means that the reflectiveness of anything painted in Vantablack or with nanocarbon tubes, you just don't see anything. There's no

ridges, there's no depth, there's no anything. It's just basically like you're looking at a void, and all you can see is the silhouette of that thing that's painted Vantablack, which makes it pretty awesome. All right, how about we take a break? That's a great cliffhanger. And we'll talk a little bit about why anyone cares, because it is kind of cool right after this. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael,

and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular, and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying

to tell me to stop running and pay attention, because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you ever see Spinal Tap? I think you did, right?

Yes. Do you remember the None More Black joke? No. It's when they came out with their black album and they said, look at the cover. How black is that or something like that? And he goes, it could be None More Black. And there's a very subtle joke in that scene, which I didn't pick up on until about my 30th viewing, which is they have a record store release signing for their black album and they're sitting there holding black sharpies. That's awesome. But they don't draw attention to it. That's great. Those are usually the best kinds of jokes where you just have to pick up on it. It's pretty great. We teased you with why would anyone care about having something that black.

The original purpose of Vantablack was for space travel or maybe an application on something to improve visibility of something in the very far distance. So think if you have a telescope or something, coating the inside and maybe even outside of that with Vantablack, it would absorb all of that light coming in that really just takes away any glare that you could think of. Right. Exactly. So there's a lot of scientific applications to it. But if you say the black is black that doesn't really let light escape, it tends to also capture the attention of artists and designers. Of course. And designers qualify as artists, but we like to separate them out here there. And I just did. And in fact, some car designers from BMW said, hey, we want to use

Vantablack to basically paint a BMW X6 so that we can look at the silhouettes and not have to worry about any kind of glare or anything like that. They basically used it. I think they really did it as a publicity stunt. They ostensibly did it so that they could study the shapes of the cars without being distracted by glare or reflection in there. And if you look at this BMW X6, it is pretty cool to look at. It's awesome. And I'm not even a car guy, but I looked at that and I was like, that's pretty sweet. Yeah. Because again, when you look at something like this head on, it's letting such a little amount of light escape that there's no perspective or any angles or anything in it. It's just the silhouette of it, ideally. So it is pretty cool to look at. But I

saw a watch by H. Moser and company. They released a $75,000 Vantablack watch. And the minute and hour hands are just hovering in the middle of this chasm, this void. That's the watch face, which has been painted Vantablack. That's pretty cool. It's very cool to see, as a matter of fact. So it's really hard to come by, but every once in a while, people use it to a pretty great effect. I'll spring for a slide whistle for you. You're not getting that watch. Okay. All right. For now, give us a few more years, hopefully. But I did research and get you the best slide whistle there is. It's a good slide whistle. And I will eventually break down. No, I know. I know. We're going to hear it. I like building the suspense. Yeah. Yeah. That's

where showmen, if anything. For that BMW, though, they couldn't use the original Vantablack. They had to use different arrangements of the carbon nanotubes to even get something that you could apply as like a car paint. So they had to kind of rearrange things a little bit. They eventually, and also something that doesn't have to be grown in a CVD reactor, which is problematic if you want to paint a car. And they eventually did come up with that. And like you said, the thing looks really nice. And it's kind of like you should, when you get a safe place to look this thing up, you really need to put your eyes on it to kind of see what you mean. But it is interesting to see a car. I mean, obviously, you see a car, they use words like

it disappears and it's invisible. And it's not invisible, but the details are a bit invisible. Yeah. And I mean, I don't know if we've said it or not, but the original Vantablack was clocked in at absorbing 99.965% of visible light. Yeah, we led with that. Oh, we did. Okay. I'm sorry, I didn't catch that. But so that was kind of like the trend that was there, the benchmark that was set. But apparently some other people have said, we can do better than that. And I guess in September of 2019, Chuck, a group from MIT did just that. They came up with a type of black that's actually blacker than Vantablack. And it uses the same technology of carbon nanotubes. And it captures 99.995% of visible light, which makes it officially blacker than Vantablack. And like I was saying,

this kind of stuff captures the attention of artists and designers. And there was an artist named... Oh, what was her name? She's a German artist named Demet Streb, S-T-R-E-B-E. Did I say that correctly? I might say Streba, but I don't know. Okay, that's way better. She took a diamond, a $2 million diamond, and had it coated with this new blacker black. So it's like a void, a diamond void. It's just amazing stuff to see. It just takes over this thing and basically plunges it into a black hole no matter what you coat it with. Yeah, and if you are redoing your house and you want to have a black office like me, I chose one that now that I look at it, it definitely looks black, but you could argue that there's a little bit of gray to it. If you do want something

super black though, there's an artist named Stuart Simple S-E-M-P-L-E that made two matte black acrylic paints, black 2.0 and black 3.0, which are apparently really, really black. Yeah, they are. And so I mentioned earlier the artist Anish Kapoor. Well, Anish Kapoor and Stuart Simple are in an art war, a good old-fashioned art showdown, because Stuart Simple is not very happy that Anish Kapoor has the market cornered legally on Vantablack. So Stuart Simple makes his own pigments and sells them. And if you go buy them, Yumi went and bought a tube of this black 3.0 today. Oh, yeah. And yeah, and in it, when you're buying it, you have to say, I affirm that I'm not Anish Kapoor, that I'm not an associate of Anish Kapoor. This is not going to get into the

hands of Anish Kapoor. I'm not buying it for him. You have to click that box that says all that before you can actually purchase this stuff, which is pretty great. And I was like, Anish Kapoor sounds kind of familiar. And it turns out we've actually seen his work. Yumi and I, I don't think you and I have ever seen his work together at the Hirshhorn Museum in DC. And he has these like giant eggs and the inside is painted Vantablack. Oh, cool. And it's one of the coolest things I've ever seen in my life because it really is like you're looking into a black hole. Like, if you stuck your hand in, it would just keep going into another dimension is what it looks like. That's awesome. It really is. I think that the Stuart Simple Anish Kapoor feud should warn its

own short stuff one day. And let's hope it doesn't end in bloodshed. Yes, let's hope. And well, since we hoped against bloodshed, I think that means we've reached the end of short stuff. Don't you, Chuck? Does that mean we're out? Short stuff out. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.