TheNavigator said:
What does light transform to then?
Light is composed of an electric and magnetic wave that moves through space. When a photon (the particle of light) is absorbed, these waves transfer their energy to whatever absorbs them and the photon is no more. It no longer exists, but to say it is destroyed is kind of a bad description in my opinion.
As an analogy, consider a swimming pool filled with water. When Big Jimmy cannonballs into the pool and causes a near tidal wave, afterwards the pool is filled with water waves. Eventually these die down and disappear. Why does that happen? Because the energy that caused the waves and is carried by them is transferred to the sides of the pool, the air, Big Jimmy, and Tiny Tim who nearly drowned from the cannonball. No energy is lost or created here, it is simply transferred to somewhere else.
The key here is to understand that the electric and magnetic fields that made up the light are not physical objects. You cannot make a baseball disappear simply by hitting it with a bat. However a baseball is made up of tiny composite particles called atoms. These are made up of Protons, Neutrons, and Electrons. All three of these particles are charged and emit electric fields, although in the neutrons case it is made up of oppositely charged particles and is an overall neutral charge and can be ignored for this discussion. Now, these particles emit electric fields, which as I said above are what a Photon, which is light, are made up of. So we have a photon, which has an electric and magnetic field, hitting an atom which is full of all these fields from its Protons and Electrons. So What happens? The fields in the photon, being exactly the same type of fields in the atom, interact with the atom and the photon "disappears" as the energy that it was made of is transferred by these fields into the atom.
That is a very rough explanation of what happens. The full details are very complex and involve lots of math and further science.
But how can objects absorb all that much of energy?! That way we would have nuclear weapons in our hands!
Each photon has a very very very small amount of energy usually. When an atom absorbs a photon of a frequency close to visible light, it merely warms up slightly. Very high energy photons can be created, and will do things such as give an atom so much energy that one of the electrons are knocked out of its orbital. If we go even higher we find that if a photon has enough energy, when it interacts with an atom the energy it transfers can create new matter! (Matter can, and is created, however energy and mass are not) But these super high energy photons only exist in a specific places such as the cores of super massive stars and around black holes and similar.
