Darkness

Stand outside on a clear night and the sky is mostly black. This is stranger than it looks. Suppose the universe were infinite and eternal, with stars scattered evenly through it forever. Then every line of sight you could draw, continued far enough, would eventually end on the surface of a star. There would be no gaps anywhere. The entire sky would blaze, in every direction, as bright as the face of the sun.

It doesn’t. The puzzle is older than its name — Kepler worried at it in 1610, and Heinrich Olbers gave it its sharpest form in 1823 — and the answer turns out to be one of the deepest facts we know. The night is dark because the universe is young. Light travels at a finite speed, the cosmos has a finite age, and the light from most of the stars that should fill those gaps has not yet had time to reach you.

The first person to reason his way to that answer was not an astronomer. It was Edgar Allan Poe, in an 1848 prose poem called Eureka, written the year before he died.

Vantablack is not a paint. It is a forest. Grown in 2014 by the British firm Surrey NanoSystems, it is a dense pile of carbon nanotubes standing on end; light that lands on it slips between the stalks, ricochets, and almost never finds its way back out. An object coated in it stops looking like an object. Crumple a sheet of Vantablack foil and the wrinkles vanish; you see a shape with no surface, no depth, no features — a hole cut into the world.

Then, in 2016, the sculptor Anish Kapoor bought the exclusive right to use it in art. One man owned the blackest black. The art world revolted.

The retaliation came from the artist Stuart Semple. He formulated the world’s pinkest pink — a pigment so saturated it looks radioactive — and sold it to anyone on Earth who was not Anish Kapoor. Every buyer must legally attest to exactly that. Kapoor’s reply was to obtain some anyway and post a photograph of his middle finger plunged to the knuckle in the pink. Semple kept building: Black 2.0, then Black 3.0, a matte acrylic nearly as devouring as Vantablack, sold cheap to hundreds of thousands of people — all of them except one. The feud is conducted in the language of a contract, over a question the law had somehow never been asked: can a person own a darkness?

Light is the anomaly. The universe began dark and will end dark and is more than nine-tenths dark in between; the lit interval we call “everything” is a sliver. Your eye cannot show you black — it hands you the gray of its own noise and quietly subtracts the rest. The largest living space on the planet went dark, and the animals in it lit themselves. A fish in a cave kept the organ that feels the dark and discarded the two that see. We poured light on the night until a third of us lost the galaxy. And a poet, looking up at the ordinary black between the stars, read there the one thing the daylight had never told him: that all of it began. Darkness was never the absence of the show. It is the theater, the house lights, and very nearly the whole length of the run.