Noticing All the Green That Colors Our World
處處有綠色 裝點這個世界
By Natalie Angier

Nero’s favorite color was green. Goethe praised green as the “soothing” marriage of the chromatic opposites yellow and blue. George Washington called green “grateful to the eye.”
尼祿（編按：羅馬帝國朱里亞．克勞狄王朝最後一任皇帝，西元54年－68年在位。）最喜歡的顏色是綠色。歌德（18、19世紀德國詩人、科學家、文藝理論家兼政治家，魏瑪古典主義最著名的代表）讚美綠色是對比色黃色和藍色「撫慰人心」的結合。喬治．華盛頓（美國國父）稱綠色「宜眼」。

Scientists, too, appreciate green: Chlorophyll, the pigment that makes plants green, lies at the heart of photosynthesis, the fundamental electrochemical enterprise that continues to dazzle the scientists who study it, and who say it should dazzle us, too. Not only does photosynthesis spin sunlight and water into the sugars we eat, it spawns the oxygen we breathe. “There would be no higher life on Earth without it,” said Petra Fromme of Arizona State University.
科學家也欣賞綠色：葉綠素，讓植物變綠的色素，是光合作用的心臟，這個基本的電化複雜計畫繼續讓研究它的科學家讚嘆不已，而且他們說，它應該也會讓我們讚嘆。光合作用不僅把陽光和水合成我們吃的糖，它也產生我們吸取的氧。亞利桑納州立大學的佩特拉．佛洛姆說：「少了它，地球上不會有較高等生物。」

Scientists have found that the oxygen-making photosynthesis may be much older than suspected. The greening and aerating of Earth, the scientists say, could well have begun soon after the earliest living cells appeared.
科學家發現，製造氧的光合作用源起也許遠比原先推測的早。科學家說，地球的綠化和充滿空氣，可能在最早的活細胞出現後不久就已開始。

Their results offer support to recent proposals that oxygen-making photosynthesis arose some billion years earlier than the well-accepted date of 2.4 billion years ago.
他們的研究結果支持最近提出的一些看法：製造氧的光合作用出現的時間，比已被廣為接受的24億年前，還要早個幾十億年。

Other researchers are seeking to better understand why plants are green in the first place – why chlorophyll rejects much of the sunlight that falls on a leaf’s surface rather than using it all, a presumably more efficient approach to energy harvesting.
其他研究人員想要更了解為何植物從一開始就是綠色─為何葉綠素拒絕了落在一片葉子表面上的大部分陽光，而不是利用全部的陽光，後者理論上是取得能源的更有效方法。

Why does chlorophyll reflect back not only some of the green portions of the solar spectrum, but also most of the abundant nonvisible wavelengths, in the ultraviolet and infrared? Some researchers are trying to modify chlorophyll and related photosynthetic players to expand their range of light absorption, manipulations that could be applied to building better photovoltaic cells or creating fast-growing plants to feed a fast-growing world.
為何葉綠素不僅把太陽光譜上的一部分綠色反射回去，而且也反射紫外線和紅外線中大量不可見波長的大部分？一些研究人員試圖修改葉綠素和相關的光合作用要素，以擴大它們能夠吸收的光的範圍，這些操控可用於建造更好的太陽能電池或創造生長快速的植物，來餵飽快速成長的世界人口。

Robert Blankenship, a professor of biology and chemistry who studies photosynthesis at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, said plants were not really averse to green solar radiation: They generate other pigment molecules that absorb as much as 90 percent of green light from the sun. But that 10 percent reflection rate, compared with virtually 0 percent for blue and red visible light, makes all the difference to our eyes.
在密蘇里州聖路易市華盛頓大學研究光合作用的生物和化學教授羅伯特．布蘭肯西普說，植物不是真正不接受太陽光中的綠輻射，它們產生其他顏色分子，吸收太陽綠色光的九成。比起實際上零反射率的藍色和紅色可見光，這一成的反射率對我們的眼睛來說，就造成了極大的差別。

“We’re very sensitive in the green region,” Dr. Blankenship said, “so we see the little bit the plant doesn’t absorb.”
布蘭肯西普說：「我們對綠色這個區塊非常敏感，因此我們看到植物沒有吸收的一點點綠。」

Neuroscientists are also impressed by our green sensitivity. “Green is the part of the spectrum that is brightest to us,” Bevil Conway, an associate professor at Wellesley College, in Massachusetts. “Our visual machinery, our photoreceptors are optimized for the middle part of the spectrum, the greens and yellows.”
我們對綠色的敏感度也令神經學家印象深刻。麻州衛斯理學院的副教授貝維爾．康威說：「對我們來說，綠色是光譜中最鮮明的部分。我們的視覺機器、我們的光感受器對光譜的中間部分，綠色和黃色，感受力最強。」

On international surveys of favorite colors, green typically ranks second only to blue. We’re drawn to green as a sign of nature, and research has shown that the addition of only two trees and a patch of grass to a concrete-dominated housing project can improve health, mood and school performance.
有關最喜愛顏色的國際調查，綠色通常排第二，僅次於藍色。我們被綠色吸引，視為自然的象徵，研究顯示，在以混凝土為主的國民住宅社區中，只需加上兩棵樹、一塊草地，就能改善健康、心情和學校課業表現。

On the other hand, we often ignore green as a backdrop. Painters use it when they want to make objects visually recede. Green has relatively little “stickiness”: It fades quickly from memory.
在另一方面，我們經常忽略綠色是背景色。畫家想要讓物體在視覺上向後退，就用綠色。相較之下，綠色幾乎沒有「黏性」，很快就從記憶中消退。

Reporting in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, Christof Kuhbandner of the University of Regensburg in Germany wrote that when shown a series of drawings with objects like chairs, cars and clothing rendered in blue, red, green or yellow, people were least likely to remember the color of the green objects.
德國雷根斯堡大學的克里斯托夫．庫班德納在「心理學前線」期刊上發表報告寫到，給人們看一連串的畫，畫裡有一些物件，像是椅子、汽車和衣服，畫成藍色、紅色、綠色和黃色，人們最不記得綠色物件的顏色。

As the historian Michel Pastoureau of the Sorbonne argues in his study, “Green: The History of a Color,” the combinatorial and often unstable nature of many preindustrial green dyes and paints, their derivation from the mixing of yellow and blue pigments, may explain some of green’s less happy associations.
索邦大學的歷史學家米歇爾．巴斯德在他的研究「綠色：一種顏色的歷史」中主張，許多工業革命前的綠色染料和顏料的組合和經常不穩定的特性，源自於它們是以黃色和藍色混合而成，這或可解釋何以綠色給予人們一些較不快樂的聯想。

Green was changeable, capricious, as uncontrollable as fate, no more to be trusted than a green-skinned goblin or sprite. “From the 16th century on,” Mr. Pastoureau writes, “gaming tables were covered with green baize, the color symbolizing chance, the stakes, the ante, and the money to be won or lost.”
綠色是可變的、反覆無常的，與命運一樣不可控制，和綠皮膚的小妖精和精靈一樣不可信任。巴斯德寫到：「賭桌鋪上綠色的毯子，這個顏色象徵機運、風險、賭注和將要贏或輸的錢。」

Later, chemists invented far more stable green dyes, including the dichromium trioxide ink that put the green in bank notes beginning in the 1860s. The green ink can’t be destroyed by acid or base or other chemical agent, it’s resistant to fading, and it’s extremely difficult to counterfeit.
後來，化學家發明了一些穩定得多的綠色染料，包括從1860年代開始把綠色印在鈔票上的三氧化二鉻油墨。這種綠色的油墨不會被酸、固定劑或其他化學藥劑摧毀，它也不會褪色，而且極難偽造。

原文參照：
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/21/science/our-world-ever-green.html

2015-05-12聯合報/G5版/UNITED DAILY NEWS 田思怡譯 原文參見紐時週報十版上