this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2025
447 points (98.9% liked)

Science Memes

11808 readers
84 users here now

Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!

A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.

Rules

  1. Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
  2. Keep it rooted (on topic).
  3. No spam.
  4. Infographics welcome, get schooled.

This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.

Research Committee

Other Mander Communities

Science and Research

Biology and Life Sciences

Physical Sciences

Humanities and Social Sciences

Practical and Applied Sciences

Memes

Miscellaneous

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
447
GTFO (mander.xyz)
submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
23 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago (3 children)

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.

[–] Adalast 1 points 5 days ago

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

I shall edit that to say they can't absorb all of the green. Indeed some plants are very close to black

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

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