Last night I woke to go to the bathroom and used my phones light so that I wouldn’t wake my partner.
The light from my phone shone through a green glass bottle and lit the wall up green.
Are light particles uncolored and just affected by the colored glass or do they have properties that are changed?
In: Planetary Science
White light is every color. A green bottle (or any colored object) absorbs every color of light except for green while the green part of the light is left to either bounce off the object or pass through it. So when your phone’s mostly-white light shines through the bottle, only green light is left to hit the wall, bounce off, and reach your eyes.
There’s no such thing as a “white light particle”. You can have blue, or green, orange, or just about any *color*, but white light *only* exists as a *combination* of colors.
So a green bottle soaks up the non-green colors, turning your mix of colors into just green.
Light particles do indeed have a color.
It’s just that “white” light is when a mix of all the various colors are hitting our eye at the same time, in about equal amounts. Our eye’s specifically pick up, red, green, and blue light and any other color is just a mix of those. (this is a bit of an over simplification, but broadly correct I can elaborate further if you want)
Any time you see a different color than white it’s because the light is actually lacking particles of a particular color. In your example, the white light went through the green glass. And it then absorbed all the non-green light (this slightly heats up the glass, btw. Leaving only the green light behind.
Photons (light particles) have a particular amount of energy, usually expressed as a wavelength. Depending on the specific amount of energy it has it’ll activate different sensors in your eye that your brain interpret as different colors. Lower energy levels look redder, higher energy levels look bluer. So if you want to change the color of a photon, chance how much energy it has.
In the case of your bottle, it’s acting as a filter. Your phone emits phone of all different energies, which looks white. But the bottle stops all of the ones that aren’t green, so only green photons hit the wall behind it.
1. Absorption. The green glass acted as a filter, absorbing the light that wasn’t green.
2. Fluorescence. Some substances can absorb light at one wavelength and re-emit it at a lower wavelength. E.g. soaking up blue and spitting green back out. This effect is most noticeable under UV light (“blacklight”), because you eye can’t see the UV that the object is absorbing, but it CAN see the visible light being re-emitted, so the object looks like it’s producing light, i.e. glowing.
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