New material pushes the boundary of blackness

I object. What number can you multiply 5 by to get 1? Ans. 0.2 How in the world anyone can say that is 5 times anything.

TIMES means multiply. (at least in grade school) :-)

The only practical way to denote the idea to the educationally challenged is to say it's "one fifth" as big. To the slightly more advanced you could say it's "twenty percent" as big.

Back to the "black body". Does he mean the tubes are 1/400 the diameter of a hair? And which "color" of hair? RCH? :-) ...lew...

I'm with you Paul. How did you miss "The most unique" ? :-) ...lew...

No it isn't.

Saying that a 5" bolt is five times smaller than a 9" bolt is correct when referencing a 10" bolt though...

Mark Rand RTFM

I think most people understand "five times smaller" to mean "divide by five".

Chris

He's half white, or half black, depending on your viewpoint.

That's 100% black isn't it?

Actually, I doubt it. Look at a black monitor in the dark and you'll see that it still gives out a bit of light.

Chris

yep

Do you have a CRT monitor? Anyway, a monitor is not made of those nanotubes and would reflect and emit some light even if the pixels are 100% certified black 0x0000.

No, and even if it was true, that's not what you said.

Yes I do. One of those big Sun/Sony ones.

Chris

Like car paint that will absorb all radar from the highway patrol lurking behind the billboard.

That would have quite a market, all right.

-- Ed Huntress

That is because you have the "brightness" set too high. :-) ...lew...

That is a bit too pessimistic. I found black paints generally around the five percent mark, and a paint product called "Back Velvet" around

However, it is indeed hard to get a black much lower than 1%, so that is indeed quite an accomplishment. I worked on blacks for sunshades on satellites and it provided some interesting work.

Camera manufacturers have long needed something better than Black Velvet.

O, man, people using fractions instead of decimals cannot complain about awkwardness! :)

No, that is not correct. You do not know nothing about other dimensions. And you do not even know was OP referring to the diameter or length. You did an assumption - could be right, could be wrong.

Oh, what school did you attend? Then what would it be - 5 times bigger then -20 inches?

Let's face something right off: only a small fraction of people are comfortable with decimal percentages or decimal multiples. Most people would say those people are very weird people. That's us.

So if you're writing a popular article you have to write for your real audience, not for the audience you'd like to have. It's a problem I've faced all of my working life, as a magazine writer and advertising writer.

The way I would write this point is to reconstruct the whole thing and say something like, "a human hair is 400 times thicker than these nanotubes."

It exist - or at least it existed at 70-s (with those years generation of radar guns). My company did a through research on it. Unfortunately this paint happened to be 1/2 inch thick layer of road tar with different additives. New radar guns are very sofisticated and selective so possible it should be one foot layer now.

Small percentage? Do you mean the rest of the world outside of US? Last time I checked it was 30 times bigger :( By the way, what this '' thing in your post means?