this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2025
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I don't get it, but I do have deuteranopia.
You have probably heard that plants are green. They are green because they reflect green light
They reflect green light because they can't absorb all of it
Nope! Plants do absorb green light, but since the sun is green, it would be too intense to do it all at once, so they reflect it back as to not overheat, and to let other parts of the plants to absorb it.
Now, you may be asking me, "What do you mean the sun is green?" The sun isn't yellow, it's white, but blue gets stripped out by Rayleigh scattering. "But then how is it green?" White is green as an even temperature white light has a dominant wavelength in green, but a large bandwidth into blue and red. Same reason we use green materials like silver, aluminum, and soda lime glass.
This is actually old wisdom, at least as to why plants are green. There was a discovery a couple years back that green light alone actually can cause water to evaporate well above the thermal limit. Since evolution is best modeled as an energy minimization problem, the fact that the least energy required to retain moisture is accomplished by being green is why chlorophyll is green.
https://news.mit.edu/2023/surprising-finding-light-makes-water-evaporate-without-heat-1031