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'Whitest ever' paint reflects 98% of sunlight

bbc.com

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Re: 'Whitest ever' paint reflects 98% of sunlight

#4
Someone needs to compile a list of all this fringe tech that I see popping up in my feeds, almost daily now. I know there are techpress blogs that pump out articles like this, but there doesn't seem to be an authoritative compendium of such tech anywhere on the net. I could curate this by hand with 3 hours of free time and some Red Bull I suppose.

The reason I want this is because we seem to be swimming in innovation, but nobody to aggregate and make sense of it all, and `join-the-dots` of all this tech so we can make even bigger leaps with it. Also: A lot of these articles are great, but too quickly shoved into people's bookmarks and forgotten about, without any real action taken on them. Put simply: we are addicted to innovation, but with little action taken on this innovation!!

Re: 'Whitest ever' paint reflects 98% of sunlight

#7

How does black paint work anyway? What happens to the energy of the photons? (Will google, but perhaps someone here can explain?)

Absorbed, adding energy to the paint molecules, then reradiated at a lower wavelength (IR), heating up nearby things.

Re: 'Whitest ever' paint reflects 98% of sunlight

#8

How does black paint work anyway? What happens to the energy of the photons? (Will google, but perhaps someone here can explain?)

Some is conducted into the object that's painted, and some is radiated away as infrared. See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-body_radiation

Re: 'Whitest ever' paint reflects 98% of sunlight

#9

How does black paint work anyway? What happens to the energy of the photons? (Will google, but perhaps someone here can explain?)

It dissipates as heat into the paint and it's substrate, I assume. At least that's what I always thought we wore dark clothes in winter and bright ones in summer.
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