Week 2: Botany - The great plant adventure

To a scientist, it is difficult to tame a simple stroll through beautiful bright wildflowers and lush greenery without thinking about science. There is an explanation and a reason why we see such beautiful colors, but this explanation is never an easy one to relay to our young adventurers. In fact, it can be quite difficult to explain to anyone (let alone a 6-year-old!) what color actually is.

Yes, color can be pretty, bland, cold and warm, but what makes that purple flower purple? Why do we see that leaf as green and not blue? Why are rocks brown and not red? Who made up these rules anyway?!

To a 5-year-old, an adequate answer is a simple one: light. When the sun comes up, we are able to see all the color around us. When there is absolutely no light (including the moon and stars), we can no longer see color. This is an 100% accurate explanation and one you shouldn't feel bad about explaining to the little ones.

To an 8-year-old this answer is not quite good enough. How is light color? *Cue looking at the sun and burning eyeballs.*

Picture your run-of-the-mill drawing of a sun. Generally it is composed of a big yellow ball and lots of yellow squiggly lines emanating outwards. In reality, the sun emits many of these squiggly lines called "waves" and these waves come in all different sizes... they're invisible except for the waves we see as color. For example, green-sized waves travel from the sun, reflect off a leaf, travel to your eye, and finally to your brain which tells you "yes, that leaf if green."

What happens when a green-sized wave hits a flower that is supposed to be pink? That green-sized wave is absorbed by the flower. Only pink-sized waves reflect off of that pink flower.

In class this morning we made an optical illusion meant to trick our brains into thinking an entire rainbow of color is actually white. It takes some practice and patience, but it's a neat project. If you would like to reproduce this project at home, use the link below.

http://www.stevespanglerscience.com/lab/experiments/disappearing-color-wheel

Of course to test our hypothesis about color we just had to do more tie-dye.