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I might not be able to explain this perfectly, as I took physics a year ago, but I'm going to try and take a stab at it.
Light is made of photons, packets of energy that have no mass. While conceptually photons exist as discrete packets of energy, in reality they are like any form of electromagnetic radiation which exists as waves.
Light can be absorbed, reflected, or transmitted. Absorbtion takes place when light photons hit an atom, and the photon's energy is taken in by the atom without exciting an electron. Reflection is the null opposite of this, the photon is not accepted by the atom. Transmission takes place in the way you describe it, by exciting an electron. Most atoms exist in a stable form called the ground state. In this state, an atom can only be excited by a photon of a specific wavelength (photons exist as waves). If this certain wavelength is absorbed, an electron is excited and another photon is emitted, bringing the atom back down into the ground state.
Electrons conceptually exist in electron shells around a nucleus, the distance from the center of the nucleus translates into an energy level. As a photon enters this electron cloud in absorbtion and, its energy is added to the electrons for that atom. The only way a photon can be emitted is if the photon being absorbed has a high enough energy to bump an electron up to the next energy shell.
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Charlie was a chemist but Charlie is nomore, what Charlie thought was H2O was H2SO4
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