To Electra.
A poem by Robert Herrick (1591-1674)
More white than whitest
lilies far,
Or snow, or whitest swans you are:
More white than
are the whitest creams,
Or moonlight tinselling the streams:
More
white than pearls, or Juno's thigh,
Or Pelops' arm of ivory.
True,
I confess, such whites as these
May me delight, not fully
please;
Till like Ixion's cloud you be
White, warm, and soft to
lie with me.
Notes:
Juno, in marble sculpture:
In Roman religion, Juno was the chief goddess and female counterpart of Jupiter, closely resembling the Greek Hera, with whom she was identified. With Jupiter and Minerva, she was a member of the Capitoline triad of deities traditionally introduced by the Etruscan kings.
Greek mythology. Pelops:
Pelops' father was Tantalus, king at Mount Sipylus in Anatolia. Wanting to make an offering to the Olympians, Tantalus cut Pelops into pieces and made his flesh into a stew, then served it to the gods. Demeter, deep in grief after the abduction of her daughter Persephone by Hades, absentmindedly accepted the offering and ate the left shoulder. The other gods sensed the plot, however, and held off from eating of the boy's body. While Tantalus was banished to Tartarus, Pelops was ritually reassembled and brought back to life, his shoulder replaced with one of ivory made for him by Hephaestus.
Greek mythology: Ixion's cloud:
Ixion was the son either of the god Ares or of Phlegyas, king of the Lapiths in Thessaly. He murdered his father-in-law and could find no one to purify him until Zeus did so and admitted him as a guest to Olympus. Ixion abused his pardon by trying to seduce Zeus’s wife, Hera. Zeus substituted for her a cloud, by which Ixion became the father of Centaurus, who fathered the Centaurs by the mares of Mount Pelion. Zeus, to punish him, bound him on a fiery wheel, which rolled unceasingly through the air or, according to the more common tradition, in the underworld.
Ixion Embracing the Cloud, Carlo Maratta (1625-1713).
“To Electra” is one of many poems Herrick wrote to a woman he calls “Electra,” whose appearance he compares, in another poem, to “broad day throughout the east.” What is the whitest white? Marble, ivory, a cloud, or something else? A new discovery may help answer that age old question.
Scientists at Purdue University in Indiana say they’ve created a new paint that’s so ultra-white, it could do away with the need for air conditioning – while helping to fight climate change. The white paint can keep surfaces up to 18 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than their ambient surroundings – almost like a refrigerator does, but without consuming energy.
(Xiangyu Li, Joseph Peoples, Zhifeng Huang, Zixuan Zhao, Jun Qiu, and Xiulin Ruan. “Full Daytime Sub-ambient Radiative Cooling in Commercial-like Paints with High Figure of Merit.” Purdue University News. October 21, 2020.)
According to the researchers, the paint would replace the need for air conditioning by absorbing nearly no solar energy and sending heat away from the building. Without the building heating up, air conditioning wouldn’t have to kick on.
This paint could help solve climate change and literally make a better and safer world. With global temperatures rising, more and more people are relying on cooling to stay safe and comfortable. The International Energy Agency projects that energy demand from air conditioners will triple by 2050 – equivalent to adding 10 new air conditioners every second for the next 30 years.
(Victoria Masterson. “How ultra-white paint could help fight climate change.” World Economic Forum. April 27, 2021.)
The power needed to keep air conditioners and electric fans running accounts for 20% of global electricity use, according to the IEA’s Future of Cooling report.
“If you were to use this paint to cover a roof area of about 1,000 square feet, we estimate that you could get a cooling power of 10 kilowatts,” said Xiulin Ruan, a Purdue professor of mechanical engineering and one of the study’s co-authors. “That’s more powerful than the central air conditioners used by most houses.”
According to the researchers’ cost estimates, this paint would be both cheaper to produce than its commercial alternative and could save about a dollar per day that would have been spent on air conditioning for a one-story house of approximately 1,076 square feet.
(Victoria Masterson. “How ultra-white paint could help fight climate change.” World Economic Forum. April 27, 2021.)
Typical commercial white “heat rejecting paints” get warmer rather than cooler. Purdue says its product repels infrared heat from a surface and reflects up to 98.1% of sunlight. This outperforms 80%-90% of comparable products and beats the 95.5% of sunlight reflected by the researchers’ previous ultra-white paint.
In an outdoor demonstration, the team showed the paint was able to keep surfaces 19° Fahrenheit (10.5C) cooler than the ambient surroundings at night. It can also cool surfaces by 8° Fahrenheit (4.4C) under strong sunlight during noon hours.
What Makes the Paint “Whiter Than White”?
Since the paint is very reflective it also resulted in being really white. The researchers explained that there is a very high concentration of barium sulfate, a chemical that is used in photo paper and cosmetics. There are different particle sizes of barium sulfate in the paint and the wider range of sizes help scatter more of the light spectrum from the sun.
Although painting walls and roofs white to deflect heat has been done for centuries, since the 1970s, scientists have attempted to develop radiative cooling paint as a workable alternative to traditional air conditioners. This new paint is the result of six years of research.
“It’s very counterintuitive for a surface in direct sunlight to be cooler than the temperature your local weather station reports for that area, but we’ve shown this to be possible,” said Ruan.
Do you want proof already in practice? In Los Angeles, California, some streets and pavements have been painted with a white coating called CoolSeal to help reduce temperatures in the city. This resulted in the streets being 10 to 15 degrees Fahrenheit (5.5C - 8.3C) cooler on average than others, according to the city’s Bureau of Street Services.
Where would the heat go? Scientists say the paint would not only send heat away from a surface, but also away from Earth into deep space where heat travels indefinitely at the speed of light. This way, heat doesn’t get trapped within the atmosphere and contribute to global warming.
“We’re not moving heat from the surface to the atmosphere. We’re just dumping it all out into the universe, which is an infinite heat sink,” said Xiangyu Li, a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who worked on this project as a Ph.D. student in Ruan’s lab.
Earth’s surface would actually get cooler with this technology if the paint were applied to a variety of surfaces including roads, rooftops and cars all over the world, the researchers said.
“Your air conditioning kicks on mainly due to sunlight heating up the roof and walls and making the inside of your house feel warmer. This paint is basically creating free air conditioning by reflecting that sunlight and offsetting those heat gains from inside your house,” said Joseph Peoples, a Purdue Ph.D. student in mechanical engineering and a co-author of the work.
This study was supported by the Cooling Technologies Research Center at Purdue University and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research through the Defense University Research Instrumentation Program (grant no. FA9550-17-1-0368).
(Xiangyu Li, Joseph Peoples, Zhifeng Huang, Zixuan Zhao, Jun Qiu, and Xiulin Ruan. “Full Daytime Sub-ambient Radiative Cooling in Commercial-like Paints with High Figure of Merit.” Purdue University News. October 21, 2020.)
Implications
Can you imagine that something as simple as a new whiter-than-white paint could benefit the human race so much?
Creating cool roofs also has the added benefit of reducing the amount of water used for irrigation in cities. Based on regional climate simulations of 18 California counties, Berkeley Lab researchers Pouya Vahmani and Andrew Jones found that widespread cool roof adoption could reduce outdoor water consumption by as much as 9 percent.
“You might not do cool roofs just to save water, but it’s another previously unrecognized benefit of having cool roofs. And from a water management standpoint, it’s an entirely different way of thinking – to manipulate the local climate in order to manipulate water demand.”
(Pouya Vahmani & Andrew D. Jones. “Water conservation benefits of urban heat mitigation.” Nature Communications volume 8, Article number: 1072. 2017.)
Using statistical modeling, the researchers estimated that their ultra-white paint could reduce air conditioning use by up to 70 percent in hot cities like Reno, Nevada, and Phoenix, Arizona. In a rather extreme model, they also found that covering 0.5 to 1 percent of the Earth’s surface—buildings, roads, unused land, just about everything—with the ultra-white paint would be enough to stop the global warming trend.
“It’s a lot of area, but if one day we need to use this approach to help reverse the warming trend, it’s still affordable—the paint is not expensive,” said Ruan.
(Sarah Kuta. “This Ultra-White Paint May Someday Replace Air Conditioning.” Smithsonian. April 21, 2021.)
The researchers have applied for a patent, and they’re doing additional testing to understand the paint’s long-term durability and reliability outdoors as they work toward making the paint available to consumers. They haven’t yet determined an exact price for the paint, but Ruan says he expects the paint to be similar to those on the market now – roughly $30 to $40 per gallon.
Remarkable.
Yet, there is always a price to pay. In this case, it is also a natural cost.
On the flip side, digging up raw barite ore to produce and process the barium sulphite that makes up nearly 60% of the paint means it has a huge carbon footprint. And using the paint widely would mean a dramatic increase in the mining of barium.
But take heart, folks. Andrew Parnell, research fellow in physics and astronomy at the University of Sheffield, says barium sulphite-based paint is just one way to improve the reflectivity of buildings. Nature may provide us with other useful techniques. Parnell explains …
“The wings of one intensely white beetle species called Lepidiota stigma appear a strikingly bright white thanks to nanostructures in their scales, which are very good at scattering incoming light. This natural light-scattering property can be used to design even better paints: for example, by using recycled plastic to create white paint containing similar nanostructures with a far lower carbon footprint. When it comes to taking inspiration from nature, the sky’s the limit.”
(Andrew Parnell. “The World’s New ‘Whitest’ Paint Has a Darker Side.” Science: The Wire. September 22, 2021.)
Humankind may discover some design in nature to help save itself from destruction. God provides such miraculous remedies, and scientists discover their restorative powers seemingly every day.
To close, white is symbolic as we all know. Another poem comes to mind. In 1922, Robert Frost described a simple scene from nature in a poem – a spider on a flower (known as a heal-all) is holding a moth that it has captured as its prey. But Frost's description is filled with gothic imagery, including the fact that all three elements – the spider, the flower and the moth – are white, which here seems to embody, not purity and goodness, but deathly pallor. Ironically, it serves to remind us that nature has a larger design.
Frost was known for this kind of thing. Here is what a Time magazine article, titled "Books: The Poet Laureate (Robert Frost)" said about him in 1962:
"Many of his poems are half wisdom and half whimsy, and Frost often seems to be sharing a sly, private joke with God. In fact, one couplet in In the Clearing (poetry collection) offers God a bargain: 'Forgive, 0 Lord, my little jokes on Thee And I'll forgive Thy great big one on me.'"
The whitest white – arms of ivory, thighs of marble, paint, beetles, and spiders. We still have a lot to learn as we walk toward the light and seek the true designs that govern our pale existence.
Design
by Robert Frost
I found a dimpled
spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like
a white piece of rigid satin cloth—
Assorted characters of death
and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the
ingredients of a witches’ broth—
A snow-drop spider, a flower
like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.
What
had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and
innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that
height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What
but design of darkness to appall?--
If design govern in a thing so
small.
Postscript “Spiritual White”
The shrapnel entered through the armhole of Steve Price’s bulletproof vest just as he was firing his rifle, and a mortar fragment pierced his lung. When the medics finally reached him, they airlifted the 24-year-old Marine from the Vietnamese jungle to a military hospital in the Philippines for surgery.
Doctor Greyson, said, “The burly, heavily tattooed, self-described schoolyard bully became tearful when he described to me what happened during the operation.”
Here is what Steve Price said:
“'Suddenly I realized I was up near the ceiling, looking down at my body. A brilliant white light embraced and encompassed me. It took me in. I felt such warmth and peace and was bathed in the most peaceful, joyous feeling imaginable.
“I found myself in a place like the Garden of Eden. I didn’t say the word God for a long time, but now I can say that the light was God. It was like the most loving mother embracing her infant, only a million times more than that. On the other side of a stream bubbling through the garden was my long-dead grandfather. I went to move toward him, but it was over.'”
(Bruce Greyson, M.D. “A Doctor’s Surprising Findings on Near-Death Experiences.” Saturday Evening Post. December 13, 2021.)
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