Why Things Have Color Run the applet . Classroom uses for the applet.
Love is Suicide.
This interactive figure demonstrates how an abstract concept can be made accessible in an introductory course by putting it in the proper context. It ties together simple ideas such as the color of material being the complement of that absorbed, with more sophisticated ideas relating to which molecular motions give rise to absorption in different parts of the spectrum. In this applet, white light entering from the left is dispersed with a prism, passes through the material and is recombined in the second prism. If the material, as modeled by a particle in a box, is absorbing light of a certain color, say green, the transition arrow is green and the spectrum leaving the material has the green removed. The color of the recombined light is the complement of that being absorbed.