The crazy part is the exact science behind why plants reflect green specifically is still debated. One theory is that, because much of the sun's energy is released on that wavelength, controlling for it specifically allows the plant to better manage energy fluctuations (highly simplified but you get the idea)

“Incandescent rage” is one of those phrases I have pocketed for a future conversation.

Purple leaves are a thing.

That's from plants that get their air mostly from the shade and sunsets, so obviously they'd be less yellow and more dark and red.

I know this is a joke, but to be fair: the scientific consensus (now) is that the purple pigmentation acts as a sort of sunscreen against too much sunlight.

Whinging about a fact being wrong without providing a correction is worse than the one being wrong.

The thing is it's kinda right, just lacking detail

Very interesting, thanks for the info!

So why are some plants purple?

Anthocyanins!.

Which curiously enough, can also photosynthesize, and more readily absorb energy from green light than chlorophyll!

Makes me wonder what could be achieved with some careful engineering...

Cab you help explain it? I thought that the sky was blue because it reflects the ocean and because of rayleigh scattering, but do either of these affect the color of plants?

Except the sun isn't yellow, it's white with a slight bias towards green.

Want to check, put something white outside, it looks white, not yellow.

Wish I knew lol

That's why I never developed super powers.

You've got it partially backwards. The sky is blue because of Rayleigh scattering, but it doesn't reflect the ocean; the ocean is blue because it reflects the sky.

Incidentally, I've heard it said (I think it was xkcd) that we use the term "Rayleigh scattering" because it sounds silly to say that the air is blue (via the mechanism of Rayleigh scattering); so maybe that's part of it?

Plants are green because they absorb all other wavelengths of light. And bounce the green into your eye. In actual fact, color only exists in your brain as a way to understand the world around us. Our eyes are just sensors that detect light. And color is how we process it. We could have evolved into understanding it in different ways too, like smell. Therefore color doesnt even exist in the natural world. Green is just an illusion of our mind.

lemmy poster here. both of these people are annoying, unfunny fucks.

bet you didn't see that one coming!

btw i have a masters degree in internet posting.

Lemme guess, reddit transplant?

Neither water is blue

They take us for absolute fools

This is kinda away from the other replies to your comment. But I took that meme as saying plants get CO2 from the air (blue - scattering) and use sunlight (yellow - not really but meh) to produce many things with it, including chlorophyll which is the green pigment in plants.

The reason the sun appears to be yellow is the same reason that the sky appears to be blue.

Blue light is scattered more by the air in the atmosphere than other wavelengths. Remove blue from white light and you get yellow. So the light coming from the sun that isn't scattered and dispersed through the sky (making the sky look blue) is yellow.

The bit about the ocean being blue because it reflects the sky is unfortunately mostly wrong. Water is slightly more blue than ozone, so the more of it there is (big water in big ocean) the more blue it will look. The fact that it's also reflecting the blue sky adds to the color, but on a cloudy day the ocean is still blue.

Wow, wrong, Do some research, but I will help if needed (seriously, DM me or whatever) but why not do it publicly, You're asking the right questions and that counts for a lot.

Reflecting the ocean is not a thing, but rayleigh scattering is a real reason for blue sky.

Science rocks.

I'm about a kilometer from the ocean right now (I'm standing in front of the window through which I can see it), and it's a partly cloudy day. When the sky is clear (as it was five minutes ago), the ocean is a rich, saturated blue or even teal. When it's cloudy (as it is currently), I can see that it's a cool gray color. I might call it a very dark, desaturated cyan at most. So from my observation it has to be the opposite: the relative blueness of the ozone and the water must be the less dependent factor, and the color of the sky the more dependent one.

It's tricky, though. I guess I might be in a place with weird salinity or plankton or something.

Isn't everybody?

I liked a version of this (I believe) XKCD said once.

A perfectly valid response to the question, "why is the sky blue?" is simply, "because air is blue."

Yes, you can give a lot of explanation about refractive index and Rayleigh scattering. But all this does is provide details of how light interacts with air. And the same reason anything is the color that it is is due to the way it reflects, transmits, or absorbs light. You're citing real scientific principles, but you're ultimately just explaining why air is blue.

https://theonion.com/after-obama-victory-shrieking-white-hot-sphere-of-pure-1819595330/

Deeper, I would simply say that the sky is blue because air is blue. You cite Rayleigh scattering, but you're just describing how light interacts with air. The only reason any material has any color is because how it interacts with light.

Air is blue. You can explain its blueness just like you can the physics origin of any other object's color. But ultimately the sky is blue because air is blue.

As is purple rain.

They never got the update.

Never really used Reddit, I came here from mastodon. Never used Twitter either.

This is indeed a valid theory, but not very powerful since it can only explain the color of green plants and not for example the color of non green plants or animals.

More powerful theories have been developed which can work on a much broader range of applications. For example the theory that plants are the color they are because God painted them that way.

But it's an incomplete answer.

"air is invisible at short distances, blue at longer distances, and takes on red green and orange at sunset" would be better

There's also an extremely tiny percent of plants that are entirely white, they don't get their energy through photosynthesis but instead a parasitic relationship of fungi and other plants.

"Don't breathe air, it has sharks in it! BLUE HAS SHARKS IN IT!" -The funny purple man

I'm still not following. What part of "blue air" imparts chlorophyll with its color? I get the sun. I understand how light works (reflection, refraction, and scattering). I understand our perception of light on a neuological level (including post-processing) to an extent that most people haven't studied. Why "blue" air make green plant?

The same is true for all colors. Tell me the color of a single atom.

Yes, air can be colors other than blue at unusual light conditions, like sunset. But the same is true for any material.

You're stuck on the urge to explain. You call "the air is blue" incomplete. But all answers are incomplete. When someone asks what color an object is, they mean under ordinary distances and conditions. Air is blue even in an ordinary room. It just takes miles worth of air for its slight blue color to be noticeable.

“Don’t breathe air, it has sharks in it! BLUE HAS SHARKS IN IT

???

Mix blue and yellow paint and you end up with green paint.

It's a very good relevant XKCD.

The title text is more directly applicable: If you ask "why are leaves green?" the usual answer is "because they're full of chlorophyll, and chlorophyll is green," even though "why does chlorophyll scatter green light?" is a great question too.

It's a two minute comedy bit.

https://youtu.be/hc73pgg5RGU?is=2ZxFKDcomzbk5ujm

Mycoheterotrophs! Love them, such bizarre little plants

Maybe not the water you drink (chugs Gatorade frost)

I was so disappointed when I learned how hard (I mean I haven't actually tried it) to culture them, but it makes sense given how they occur.

Yeah I wouldn't try that in a million years, you need, like, an actual functioning ecosystem for them to flourish

Cold nights while growing.

First if all: don't name your kid brayden.

My guess would be that plants optimize also for absorbing a significant amount of the light they receive from the blue sky, so they still get some when direct sunlight isn't available.

Plants look green because the green spectrum has a lot of energy, and to stop over heating and leaf burning and messing with the delicate photosynthesis, plants reflect or let green mostly pass through and only use about 20% of green soecturm energy, while mostly use all of red end and blue end.. At least that's what I heard on a science show.

I mean, technically they weren't wrong.