Hey
Okay maybe if I explain how I did my project then you will know what
sort of an answer i am looking for.

I got three plastic cups filled it up with soil and planted 10 radish
seedlings in each of them. On the first cup I covered it with blue
plastic, on the second cup I covered it with red plastic and on the
third cup I didnt cover it with anything because I wanted to test that
on normal sunlight. I did not use any different coloured light bulbs.I
set my project outside under the sun. I tested the radish seedlings out
over a three week period in the end I discovered that the blue plastic
covered cup the plant grew best in.
My teacher wants to know why that is she wants to know the scientific
idea behind my experiment... i told her, from my research that blue
light helps vegetables grow fastest...then she asks why, i tell her
that it has more of an effect on the plant than red light or norml
sunlight, because red light is better for flowering plants. she still
goes and asks me why...

So really the question that I want to ask you is why did the blue
covered cup help my plant grow at a faster rate.

Thanks

In article .com, "misswizz" wrote:
Hey
Okay maybe if I explain how I did my project then you will know what
sort of an answer i am looking for.

I got three plastic cups filled it up with soil and planted 10 radish
seedlings in each of them. On the first cup I covered it with blue
plastic, on the second cup I covered it with red plastic and on the
third cup I didnt cover it with anything because I wanted to test that
on normal sunlight. I did not use any different coloured light bulbs.I
set my project outside under the sun. I tested the radish seedlings out
over a three week period in the end I discovered that the blue plastic
covered cup the plant grew best in.
My teacher wants to know why that is she wants to know the scientific
idea behind my experiment... i told her, from my research that blue
light helps vegetables grow fastest...then she asks why, i tell her
that it has more of an effect on the plant than red light or norml
sunlight, because red light is better for flowering plants. she still
goes and asks me why...

So really the question that I want to ask you is why did the blue
covered cup help my plant grow at a faster rate.

More fertiliser?

Cheers, Phred.

--
LID

"misswizz" wrote in message
oups.com...
Hey
Okay maybe if I explain how I did my project then you will know what
sort of an answer i am looking for.

I got three plastic cups filled it up with soil and planted 10 radish
seedlings in each of them. On the first cup I covered it with blue
plastic, on the second cup I covered it with red plastic and on the
third cup I didnt cover it with anything because I wanted to test that
on normal sunlight. I did not use any different coloured light bulbs.I
set my project outside under the sun. I tested the radish seedlings out
over a three week period in the end I discovered that the blue plastic
covered cup the plant grew best in.
My teacher wants to know why that is she wants to know the scientific
idea behind my experiment... i told her, from my research that blue
light helps vegetables grow fastest...then she asks why, i tell her
that it has more of an effect on the plant than red light or norml
sunlight, because red light is better for flowering plants. she still
goes and asks me why...

So really the question that I want to ask you is why did the blue
covered cup help my plant grow at a faster rate.

We need more details of *how* you covered the seedlings with the blue
plastic. Did you cover these seedlings so that there was a free flow of air
(i.e.absolutely free flow) around them? Or did you cover the seedlings with
the blue plastic in such a way that the flow of air was hindered? If you did
the latter, you effectively placed these seedlings in a greenhouse, so that
they grew in a hotter environment than did the seedlings that were exposed
to direct sunlight without a plastic "greenhouse".

Even if you accept this idea, you would still need to explain why the
seedlings under the blue plastic grew better than the ones under the red
plastic. You have received many excellent suggestions to answer this point.
It is worth remarking that plant growth is not the only thing that depends
on the colour of the light. Photographers (in the old days of black and
white photography) used to work in darkrooms that were illuminated by a red
light. This was because the emulsion on the photographic paper was sensitive
to blue/green/yellow light, but not to red. Tanning of the skin, and skin
cancer, are both caused by ultra-violet light, but not (to any significant
extent) by red, green or blue light.

From a physicist's point of view, light arrives as a shower of millions of
"photons" - which are individual packets of light energy (much as an atom
is a individual packet of a given chemical element, or an electron is an
individual packet of electrical charge). The energy of each photon depends
on the wavelength of the light. The shorter the wavelength, the higher the
energy of each photon. Red light has a relatively long wavelength, and each
individual photon has a relatively low energy. To a large extent, therefore,
each photon of red light has insufficient energy to initiate a chemical
reaction. Because the wavelength of blue light is approximately half that of
red, each individual photon of blue light has twice the energy. This extra
energy is often sufficient to initiate a chemical reaction, such as
photosynthesis, but is relatively ineffective in tanning your skin or
causing skin cancer. Ultra-violet light is even shorter wavelength than
blue, has an even higher photon energy, and can cause the chemical reactions
of tanning and skin cancer. The energy of far-ultra-violet light may be so
high that plant leaves might experience more damage than beneficial
photosynthesis if exposed to it. Our eyes may also be damaged by exposure to
excessive ultra-violet light, again because of the high photon energy.

Richard Chambers Leeds UK.

How was plant growth measured in the experiment and what were the plant
data for the three treatments? Although often used by students, height
is often not the best measure of plant growth. Plants that grow tall
may be thinner and gain less weight than shorter plants. A better
measure of plant growth is shoot fresh weight or dry weight.

Covering a plant with colored plastic will significantly reduce the
amount of Photosynthetically Active Radiation (PAR) that a plant
receives. The rate of photosynthesis and plant growth is often directly
proportional to the amount of PAR the plant receives. PAR counts the
number of photons between 400 and 700 nanometers in wavelength, which
is visible light. In photosynthesis, the energy of a photon is not
important; basically a red photon is just as good as a blue photon.

Therefore, one would expect that a plant receiving full sunlight would
grow better than one receiving only the red or blue wavelengths in
sunlight. To fairly compare plant growth under different colors of
light would require using a PAR meter so that all plants received the
same amount of PAR. Unfortunately, PAR meters are expensive so are not
usually available for student projects.

I believe Dick Chambers has possibly the best explanation - that the
blue plastic covering the cup provided a better environment for the
plants than the uncovered plants that received full sunlight. The
plastic covering could have increased the temperature or retained more
water. The appropriate control treatment would have been a cup covered
with clear plastic.

Another possibility is that the results occurred just due to chance.
There should always be replication of three or more pots per treatment
in order to take into account the natural variability in plants and the
possibility of a plant dying or growing poorly in a treatment for
reasons unrelated to the experimental treatment.

Questions about projects like yours come up frequently at madsci.org -
http://madsci.org/circumnav/index.html
The MadSci.org botany archives can be searched for light color.

David R. Hershey

Thank you very much for your reply

I did indeed repeat my experiment overall 3 times. My results were
still the same.

"misswizz" wrote in message
ups.com...
Hey shaniya here.

Thank you vey much for your reply.

I was wondering if you could explain to me the difference between the
wavelengths of blue light and sunlight.
Answer to this question would be highly appreciated.
-----------------
I will try to do so, if you will explain to me what "Hey shaniya" means.

Sunlight is a mixture of colours, from ultra-violet (which you cannot see,
but which you can certainly detect and measure with the appropriate
instruments), through violet, blue, green, yellow, orange, red, and then to
infra-red. Infra-red is also invisible to the human eye, but (like
ultra-violet) can be detected and measured using the appropriate
instruments. The fact that white light is a mixture of all the main colours
explains why you see the various colours of the rainbow when a beam of white
light is passed through a prism. It is also the underlying reason why you
see "all the colours of the rainbow" when you look at a rainbow. Indirectly,
it also is part of the explanation of why the sky is blue, and the sunset
red.

Blue light is just one of the constituent colours of white light. The blue
plastic that you have put over one of your pots of radish seedlings has the
effect of blocking the red, yellow and much of the green light from the sun,
while it is transparent to the blue light. That is why you can still see
objects by looking through the plastic, but they all seem blue. Your radish
seedlings will receive all the blue-light constuent of the sunlight, but the
other colours will be blocked. Because the red and yellow light have been
blocked by the blue plastic, the seedlings in this pot are, in fact,
receiving less sunlight energy than the seedlings that you have exposed to
direct sunlight. Does this matter?

Red light has a wavelength of around 800nm, while blue light is around
400nm. The shorter the wavelength, the higher the energy of the individual
photon. An individual photon of blue light has approximately twice the amout
of energy that an individual photon of red light has. For some types of
photosynthesis in some types of plant, the red photon simply does not have
sufficient energy to initiate a chemical reaction, while the higher energy
of a blue photon does produce photosynthesis. If this is the case with
radishes (and I do not know whether it is), removing the red and yellow
light by use of your blue plastic should (theoretically) have no effect on
the growth of the seedlings. All that would matter in such a case is "how
much blue light the plant receives".

Richard Chambers Leeds UK.