ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Beer-Lambert law

Okay kiddo, so you know how we see different colors in the world, like the blue sky or green grass? Well, when we look at those things, we’re seeing light that’s been absorbed and reflected by them.

Now, when we talk about beer-lambert law, we’re talking about how light is absorbed by something specific: a liquid or gas that has some kind of substance in it that we want to measure.

Let’s say we have a glass of grape juice (yum!). Grape juice has some substances in it that absorb light in a certain way. Now, if we shine a light through that glass of grape juice, some of the light will get absorbed by the grape juice substances and some will go through to the other side.

The beer-lambert law helps us understand how much of that light got absorbed by the grape juice by giving us an equation that tells us how light is absorbed as it goes through the liquid. It’s kind of like a recipe for how to figure out how much of the light got absorbed by the grape juice.

We can use the beer-lambert law to measure things like the concentration of a particular compound in a liquid or gas. If we know how much light is absorbed by that particular compound, we can figure out how much of it is present in the liquid or gas.

So, that’s the beer-lambert law in a nutshell: it helps us figure out how much of a certain substance is present in a liquid or gas by measuring how much light gets absorbed as it passes through. Pretty cool, huh?