Suppose you were trying to invent a bright orange powder that could easily dye clothes and be hard to wash off. Using your knowledge of quantum mechanics you'd design this symmetrical molecule where an electron's wavefunction can vibrate back and forth along a chain of carbons at the frequency of green light. Absorbing green light makes it look orange! And this molecule doesn't dissolve in water.
Yes: you'd invent turmeric!
Or more precisely 'curcurmin', the molecule that gives turmeric its special properties.
The black atoms are carbons, the white are hydrogens and the red are oxygens.
Read on and check out what pure curcurmin looks like.
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Ain't it pretty? People extract curcumin from turmeric to use as a food coloring in curry powders, mustards, butters, cheeses, and prepared foods. It's also used in dietary supplements due to its unproven and dubious health benefits.
It doesn't dissolve well in water, but it does in alcohol. If you dissolve some curcurmin in vodka and shine a black light on it, you'll see it's fluorescent! That is: it absorbs the high-energy ultraviolet photons and emits lower-energy green photons... the same kind of light it usually likes to *absorb.* Due to the principle of reciprocity, if a substance is good at absorbing some frequency of light, it's also good at emitting that frequency.
Let's see that fluorescence! Check out my next post.
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@johncarlosbaez In Dutch turmeric is called either “kurkuma” (after the Sanskrit name, I guess the source of both the name of the genus and of “curcumin”), “geelwortel” (= yellowroot), or kunyit/koenjit (from Indonesian)
@shi@tech.lgbt@happydisciple @johncarlosbaez Same for Finnish, we also call it kurkuma. :)
(we're also one of the languages that aknowledge Peru as the origin of potatoes in it's name, we call them "peruna")