I understand the underlying basic concept of colours from my Biology/Chemistry classes. “Things” absorb some wavelengths, or emit other wavelengths (something like that).
But like, why and how? For instance, what makes a wood chair white and a wood table red? Aren’t both atom’s composition the same? How can they emit different colors at all?
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> what makes a wood chair white and a wood table red?
1. Wood stain exists
2. Wood sealant exists
3. There is more than one kind of wood because there is more than one kind of tree
> Aren’t both atom’s composition the same?
Well, the atomic scale is way too small for the effect you’re thinking of anyway; the wavelengths of light reflected vs. absorbed is more a function of the *entire* molecule. It’s not like “oxygen atoms reflect red light but nitrogen reflects blue”, it’s more like “how many double bonds in a row are there”.
But anyway, the main component in any kind of wood is cellulose, but pure cellulose is colorless anyway. The color of unstained wood mainly comes from “polyphenols”, which are these absolute rats’ nests of aromatic rings and oxygen atoms slapped together almost at random (e.g. [tannic acid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tannic_acid)). It’s *almost* random, but it’s still performed by enzymes, which have to be coded for in DNA, and different tree species have different DNA while trees of the same species have mostly the same DNA, which is how color correlates with the kind of tree.
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