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Comments on Femtosecond Laser Pulse Turns Metals Pitch Black
Remarkable process creates a perfectly black finish without paints or other coatings. (Read
the complete story)
| "I think you missed a science-fiction point: think Douglas Adams and 'The Restaurant at the End of the Universe' (Pan MacMillan, Jan. 1, 1980), the part where they steal the 'blacker than a black-hole' black ship from the parking garage of the restaurant. It belonged to a band named 'Disaster Area', and the ship absorbed so much light in such a way that 'your eyes simply slide right off it'." ( 12/3/2006 9:45:08 PM) |
| "I agree... when I read "absorbs 100% of incident light" the first thing I thought of was Adams' pitch black ship. " (Mr. Jip 12/3/2006 11:10:24 PM) |
| "I poked around in my library, and found my first edition copy; I hadn't read it since 1980. Here's the quote about the stuntship whose sole purpose was to fly into the sun to provide spectacular effects for a rock concert:
'It was a ship of classic, simple design, like a flattened salmon, twenty yards long, very clean, very sleek. There was just one remarkable thing about it. 'It's so... black!' said Ford Prefect. 'You can hardly make out it's shape... light just seems to fall into it!' The blackness of it was so extreme that it was almost impossible to tell how close you were standing to it...''" (Bill Christensen 12/4/2006 4:38:28 AM) |
| "The monoliths in Clarke's 2001 are also perfect absorbers of light." (Mark 12/8/2006 11:46:36 AM) |
| "By an odd coincidence, I happen to have that reference - 'The object before which the spacesuited man was posing was a vertical slab of jet-black material, about ten feet high and five feet wide: it reminded Floyd, somewhat ominously, of a giant tombstone. Perfectly sharp-edged and symmetrical, it was so black it seemed to have swallowed up the light falling upon it; there was no surface detail at all... (Read more about TMA-1 the Tycho Monolith)" (Bill Christensen 12/24/2006 3:35:10 PM) |
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