Why can you see through H2O as both a liquid and a solid but you cannot see through something like Au (gold) in a solid state? Is this a matter of density?
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Pretty much all materials are transparent to some kinds of light, allowing a lot of it though. For example, your body allows a lot of x-rays though, except for your bones. (That’s how x-rays work: they shine a light that projects x-rays like the flash on a camera)
Water is transparent to some light, and blocks other kinds of light (it absorbs microwaves very well, for example). This is because different light has different wavelengths. Visible light mostly passes though water without being absorbed or reflected, but shorter and longer wavelenths don’t.
Our eyes evolved to take advantage of the sunlight that wasn’t absorbed in shallow water, so ‘light that isn’t absorbed by the earth’s atmosphere or water’ became our visual spectrum.
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