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Chemicals and Light

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Chemicals for Life and Living
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Abstract

We have five senses: touching, seeing, hearing, smelling, and tasting. All these senses are chemical in their operations. Chemicals will bind some receptors on the surface of tongue to cause “bitter” or “sweet” sensation. Smelling is caused by similar mechanisms. Hearing is more mechanical in its cause, but relayed to the brain through chemical processes in the nerve systems. Seeing is perhaps the most important sense. It is caused by light hitting the eyes. That light comes from or through a filter of substance. Light does something to the substance (a chemical) and it is changed as a result. This is a very general phenomenon and has a wide-ranging implication to the everyday life. We will see how light and chemicals interact with each other.

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Correspondence to Eiichiro Ochiai .

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© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Ochiai, E. (2011). Chemicals and Light. In: Chemicals for Life and Living. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-20273-5_20

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