Quote Originally Posted by tdb View Post
Since we're getting all sciency here, I'd like to point out that even if you simulate true blackness within the game's graphics engine, what reaches your eyes is still not true black because your monitor is incapable of producing that. LCD panels have a fairly substantial amount of light bleeding through "black" pixels. OLED is better and can actually turn its pixels off completely, but there's still reflections from the environment.

What actually matters here is how the color is perceived. And the human senses can be fooled in many ways. For instance the screen in my home theater is actually closer to white when observed in normal lighting. But when I turn off the lights and start a movie, I perceive black parts of the image as black because they're so much darker than the bright parts. I can see that the velvet lining around the screen is an even darker black, but that doesn't prevent me from perceiving parts of the image as black.
To add further, I don't think we could create true black anymore than we could achieve absolute zero in temperature. Though the latter is a condition (or lack of them), true black is a perception. It's absolute nothingness. Much like how your eyes perceive your home theater screen, the mountains by where I live disappear everyday with the setting of the sun. Mountains as we all know, are enormous. They are full of life and color, and as the sun sets, they become a silhouette of their former selves, and eventually they fade away completely as if they are not there at all. But they are there, they did not vanish into thin air; it's just that my eyes can no longer perceive them, and the image 'fades to black'. When you think about black in this manner, it really makes you wonder what is out there in the deepness of the oceans, and the vastness of outer space.

The pool example you quoted is also interesting. I am not a science guru, and you already took things beyond my own comprehension, but I do wonder about if we painted the entire bottom of an Olympic-sized pool as close to black as we could get, exactly how much energy would it absorb from the sun? This is of course before it is filled with water, but the blacker it is, the hotter it is going to get; eventually becoming a giant frying pan. At a certain point and ignoring any leidenfrost effect, it would become increasingly difficult to even put water into the pool without instantly vaporizing it. The water that can remain would come to a boil pretty close to immediately.