The following are excerpts (A passage or segment taken from a longer work, such as a literary or musical composition, a document, or a film) from a peer reviewed scientific journal on the details of how water is vibrationally coloured. The vibrations of which are photon (light) induced.
Charles L. Braun and Sergei N. Smirnov
Department of Chemistry
Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755
"Water owes its intrinsic blueness to selective absorption in the red part of its visible spectrum. The absorbed photons promote transitions to high overtone and combination states of the nuclear motions of the molecule, i.e. to highly excited vibrations. To our knowledge the intrinsic blueness of water is the only example from nature in which color originates from vibrational transitions. Other materials owe their colors to the interaction of visible light with the electrons of the substances. Their colors may originate from resonant interactions between photons and matter such as absorption, emission, and selective reflection or from non-resonant processes such as Rayleigh scattering, interference, diffraction, or refraction, but in each case, the photons interact primarily or exclusively with electrons."
"Laboratory observation of the vibrational transitions that give water its color requires only simple equipment. Figure 1 gives the visible and near IR spectrum of H2O at room temperature recorded using a Perkin Elmer Lambda 9 Spectrophotometer and a 10 cm quartz cell filled with "nanopure" water from an ion exchange apparatus manufactured by Barnstead. Lower purity, distilled water gave an almost identical spectrum. The absorption below 700 nm in wavelength contributes to the color of water. This absorption consists of the short wavelength tail of a band centered at 760 nm and two weaker bands at 660 and 605 nm. The vibrational origin of this visible absorption of H2O is demonstrated in Figure 1 by the spectrum of D2O recorded in the same 10 cm cell. D2O is colorless because all of its corresponding vibrational transitions are shifted to lower energy by the increase in isotope mass. For example the H2O band at 760 nm is shifted to approximately 1000 nm in D2O (See Fig. 1)."
***** side note: Deuterium is a stable isotope of hydrogen. The nucleus of deuterium, called a deuteron, contains one proton and one neutron, whereas the far more common hydrogen nucleus contains no neutrons.
"The blue color of water may be easily seen with the naked eye by looking through a long tube filled with purified water. We used a 3 m long by 4 cm diameter length of aluminum tubing with a Plexiglass window epoxied to one end of the tube. Ten or more observers each reported seeing a blue color when they looked through the tube and observed a sunlight-illuminated white paper placed below the vertically-suspended tube. This observation is in accord with the spectrum of H2O recorded in Fig. 1. For example, from the measured absorbance at 660 nm, the calculated transmission of a 3 m water-filled tube is 44% -- a loss of red intensity that should be perceptible. Light transmitted through the empty cell was white. The large tube volume and a limited budget precluded checking to see if light transmitted through a D2O filled tube was indeed white, as expected."
H2O tube on left D2O tube on right
I leave out all the details on the mechanism and their further tests due to the fact that I believe that less than 1% of the people here will be able to read and understand it. Conclusions should not be drawn from the previous excerpts of text unless you have reproduced the experiments and their results yourself.
