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.

(1/n)

@johncarlosbaez

Nope. I'd make an azo dye of the most hideous orange that would permanently stain my lab coat.

Organic chemistry at work. 😉

Turmeric can be removed with a washing additive. Azo dye can't.

@canusfeminacanis - okay, you're an actual chemist! So I should have added an extra requirement: you can cook with it.

@johncarlosbaez

Nope, but I was one of three students who didn't leave an explosion on the lab ceiling. 😆
Sometimes successes are the better teachers.

Still have the lab coat with the orange dye, though.

That said, if you'd specified 'must be able to cook with it, I would have understood turmeric to be THE answer. 😉

@canusfeminacanis
Azo is toxic, careful.

@simmagolda

Yeah, we learned that in chemistry class, too.