Gene Wolfe wrote a few very good books about a far future world in which the main character wore a ceremonial cloak made of fuligin. This wasn’t a substance, really – it was a color “darker than black” that absorbed all light. And now, according to the RD Mag blog, it’s made the leap from fiction to reality:
“Three things can happen to light when it hits a material,” says Boston College Physicist Willie J. Padilla. “It can be reflected, as in a mirror. It can be transmitted, as with window glass. Or it can be absorbed and turned into heat. This metamaterial has been engineered to ensure that all light is neither reflected nor transmitted, but is turned completely into heat and absorbed. It shows we can design a metamaterial so that at a specific frequency it can absorb all of the photons that fall onto its surface.”
None more black.