Red Light Flower Blue Light Veg, But Why?

my best guess for the reason why plants use more red in flower and more blue in veg is because of hubble. the telescope.

see they found when you refracted light into a prism (to seperate it into individual colors) the colors are more blue when the light is coming tward you and more red when the light is going away from you.

now i know i'm not a scientist, but this logically denotes to me that plants use more red in flower because we are traveling away from the sun, thus the light is more red. and the other half of the year we are traveling tward the sun, thus more blue.

now i might be wrong on the prism colors of motion. i mean it might be opposite of what i am remembering (marijauna effect the memory). so it might be light is more red when it is coming tward you and more blue when it is going away. but i'm pretty sure its blue=tward and red=away because blue light has a small wavelength (like its crunched together from the forward motion) and red light has a larger wavelength (like its seperating because of away motion.

make any sense?

well it's a good stoner idea any way.

l8r

not sure if you are right but that is some pretty high IQ shit. you probably are right though. i never thought of it that way.

the red light simulates the higher red light levels of the autumn due to the fact the sun is lower in the horizon ( that refraction thing) this stimulates blooming.

lol my 9th grade science teacher used to say "Let's red shift on outta here" when it was time to leave class. I'll always remember that red shift=away and blue shift=towards.

The kind of red/blue shift we observe in space involves heavenly bodies moving at such tremendous speeds they actually bend the relative wavelengths of light, speeds that are not even close to the same speed as the Earth's orbit around the sun. It's like the difference between mach 2 versus going at a snail's pace.

Very interesting idea though. Definitely takes an open mind to consider that plants might be sensitive to something we can't even see with our naked eyes. But frmrboi's answer is the right one.

Yeah, it's a neat idea based in genuine post relativity physics, but I think another poster is correct. I simply believe a lot of the blue is filtered out of the suns rays as it passes through more of the atmosphere for much of the day in autumn. Just like when the moon is close to the horizon, it not only looks bigger but has a yellowy orangey red colour to it.

It's called Rayleigh scattering, wherein lights is scattered by particles in the atmosphere (eg. oxygen, nitrogen, etc.). The shorter the wavelength of light (eg. blue) the more it's scattered (well technically the shorter the wavelength the smaller the particle size required to scatter it, so more particles participate in scattering) and its why the sky is blue.

As has been touched on by someone already, in Autumn the incident angle of light penetrating the atmosphere is less (in his words 'lower in the horizon'), and thus the light has far less 'head-on' collisions with particles that scatter it. This means the relative amount of blue light that's scattered is reduced, increasing the ratio of scattered red to blue light.

Its not due to the redshift of the universe, but by the affects of particles on the direction of incident light as described by the inverse proportionality of photon quanta wavelength (LIGHT) to the particle cross section with which it is permitted to interact (or so says the technical definition of Rayleigh scattering).

Anyways, there's your scientific explanation for the environmental reason as to why plants veg with more blue, fruit with more red (biochemical causes are a bit different), says I, Dr. Guitarguy10 (I am actually a Ph.D. Biochemist for real, so there is some legitimacy in my words ... I am NO botanist though as i'm sure some of you have come to know, and am ever vigilant in getting better at growing plants!!!)