Where does a tree get its mass?

However he's talking mass and reneges on his statement that trees are made from the air by stating that many trees are over 50% water. Well IMO when talking about mass the majority-share counts as the subjects mass origins.

The plant breaks down CO2 into C + O2 via photosynthesis. The C makes up the plant. This is the simplified version he starts with, which was an ample metaphor. However then he states that the tree can be predominantly water. Meaning the plant is made up of say 60% water and 40% carbon.

However the plant is made up of predominantly of water trapped within cellulose membranes. If we talk dry weight, we're still talking 6 carbon atoms (72), 10 hydrogen atoms (10) and 5 oxygen atoms (80). This means roughly 66% of the trees mass comes directly from water from the ground sequestered in its cellulose.

This means roughly only 20% of the tree actually comes directly from carbon sequestered from the air.

So really, where does the plant get its mass? The ground.

If you're asking where the plant gets its dry weight, still the ground by ~6%.

By tackling a logical fallacy with scientific thinking he opened the window to be completely corrected by it himself. Trees grow because they take the carbon out of the air. However you talk about mass and we're talking about molecular weights.

Now if he'd have been as smart of Feynman he would have dismissed the water quite logically again. The rain falls from the sky. Save for a few very large trees that actually reach into the water table, trees well inland rely solely on the rain for their supply of water. That means the 50% of its mass that is water still technically comes from the air from moisture being condensed in cold air and forming water droplets.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1pIYI5JQLE

"Nobody is born a specialist. Every child is born with comprehensive interests, asking the most comprehensively logical and relevant questions. Pointing to the logs burning in the fireplace, one child asked me, "What is fire?" I answered, "Fire is the Sun unwinding from the tree's log. The Earth revolves and the trees revolve as the radiation from the Sun's flame reaches the revolving planet Earth. By photosynthesis the green buds and leaves of the tree convert that Sun radiation into hydrocarbon molecules, which form into the bio-cells of the green, outer, cambium layer of the tree."

http://www.maebrussell.com/Critical%20Path/Critical%20Path%2...

Although a lot of it is a broken system, but the truth is that they aren't expected to. What is expected of them is to get good grades, and since that is possible through rote almost all of my peers take that route. If you ask them in a moment of honesty they say; "why should I do it? I'll just get the grades get into a good college a good job... Why should I waste my time learning this?".

I used to gripe about the system whenever I heard that reply and why they just didn't get it, but now I realize that they are simply reflecting society in general. Most parents quite frankly don't care that they know science or anything as long as they get good grades. Most teachers hardly give a damn about teaching and they aren't even remotely interested in science. Most employers upon employment cannot check and do not look at how much the individual understands anything. They just ask for a degree from a reputable institute.

I admit that it is harder to change the mindset of a population, but this is something that has to be done. Changing the school system and bringing out new books will have limiting impact unless the foundations of this problem (societies attitude toward learning) aren't addressed.

EDIT "couldn't" (I suppose if I'm going to gripe about grammar, I should at least proof read...)

  ...an answer cannot be more precise than its data.  Or its question.

'well of course carbon from the air. ... oh, and water. They have a lot of water.'

He tries to use something pretty clear cut, like mass and trees (mass is mass, and trees are pretty typically also trees) as an analogue to something inherently vague- psychiatry in this case. Whether someone is bipolar is way more up to interpretation than whether something that weights 100kg has a mass of 100kg or not.

1. When we lose weight due to eating right and/or exercising (excluding water weight), it's because the air that we breathe out is slightly heavier than the air that we breathe in.

2. When we're burning wood in a fireplace, the heat it gives off is essentially the sunlight that the tree has collected over its lifetime -- i.e. the heat difference between full sun and the shade of the tree.

3. A solar cell producing peak power is slightly colder than one that is either open- or short-circuited.

The point was good as well. ;)

Opens up more questions than it answers. It seems when trees die, they become earth or even oil. How come they don't completely dissolve into air again? And if they don't completely dissolve into air, how come all the CO2 is not bound in the earth yet (trees pluck it out of the air, then die and bind it to the ground)? There would have to be bacteria or something that converts soil into air (CO2), but then, why don't they dissolve everything?

EX:"Glucose" (C6H12O6) is from 6 * H20 + 6 * C02 => C6H12O6 + 6 * O2.

So a reasonable ansewer would be mostly air and water with some minirals from the soil.

We're not stupid, and this man needs to think about his accusations before he blogs about them...

Bob: That's easy, Eli Whitney

Adam: What's a cotton gin?

Bob: Shrug

The point of my post was twofold.

First, an observation about what we think we know. When you say, "tiananmen square massacre" to people, most have a basic understanding of what happened, EXCEPT that the single image they have associated with it is the one of the student in front of the tank. That incident happened, of course, but it was the image selected to "teach" you about that incident, and that's what stuck. 1) This allows you to think you know something (one image), thought you don't know really anything (what was the point of the whole thing?) 2) you know only what someone else decided to tell you. If they had chosen to show you a pic of a student dropping a hand grenade in a tank, well, there you go.

Second, the most pointed criticisms on this board come from scientists (e.g. electromagnetic). This is because you're not relying on words, you're actually trying to understand the process. Some will do it better than others, fine; but my point was that most people are not taught that that process is important, they are taught only to "know" things. In college I knew a guy who could identify a lot (30?) dinosaurs. By name. Is he an expert? Everyone thought he was.

Point: when I asked him what the modern descendant of the triceratops was, he said it was a rhino. And no one disagreed with him, even after I pointed out that triceratops laid eggs and rhinos don't. He didn't know that, but even once he knew it it did not change his thinking; he was taught to think in terms of names and appearances, and he applied himself accordingly. (I write that story up, in case anyone cares.)

That he thought he was an expert is fine; that he didn't know dinos laid eggs is also fine, but it is of importance to understand the divergence between egg layers and mammals. That's where most people fail, and that's entirely the fault of the way we learn: the news.

It's not school-- we barely remember much. But watch a segment on the news, and you think you're informed, and then you extrapolate from that "information" entirely on the force of prejudices you've acquired from watching other news...

Who thinks China is mean to students? Ask around. Then ask them why they think that. I hope it obvious that had the desire of the news media been to tell you that the Chines govt. was nice to them...

I'm probably preaching to the choir here, but let me spin it around. While I'm guessing most of you are technically oriented, how many would bristle if, after a catastrophe, the government refused to send in crisis counselors and mental health support people to the site? It's not been shown to be effective, and could be counterproductive. But your intuition might suggest to you that it should be done, and so the govt. is left defending itself. Or perhaps you have a strong opinion on what Paulson should have done with AIG. Or whatever-- there is some field out of your expertise where you abandon your logical and scientific mind, in favor of prejudice and presumption in the form of empty words. And you don't know it.

The criticism that I am a poor writer is a common one. I know, I know.

I hope I made my point here (and perhaps enticed some readers?) without offending anyone, which is something I try very hard not to do.

Cheers.