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this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2025
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I don't get it, but I do have deuteranopia.
I see what you did there. You red that right.
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
I shall edit that to say they can't absorb all of the green. Indeed some plants are very close to black
And the green end of the spectrum is the highest energy end. Our solar panels out perform plants in energy production partly because they can tolerate much, much more of the higher energy frequencies
wow what's it like living with two anopias?