Why can plants use sunlight and certain lamps to photosynthesize, but not other forms of light?
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Light comes in different colors called “frequencies”. It’s fairly broad, there are hundreds of frequencies we’d call “blue” or “red”. Plants generally contain three different chemicals that they use create sugar, called Chlorophyll A, B, and C. Each type of chlorophyll will only produce sugar if it receives a certain light frequency, like a specific key only works on a specific lock.
In the case of the Chlorophylls, they have a spread that allows a plant to absorb most frequencies of light in the visible range, the big exception being Green, plants can’t use green light. So they end up reflecting it and that’s why leaves look Green, it’s the only color left that plants aren’t using.
Plant use a small portion of the spectrum, visible light ranges from low blue to far-red light and is described as the wavelengths between 380 nm and 750 nm. UV also helps in the production of oils.
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