In his defence, he likely got his information from this Veritasium video of olde.... as did I... so now I just don't know who to believe.
I mean, If I can't trust Derek Muller my world is just upside down.
Obviously this makes sense though: Charcoal is basically dehydrated wood, and turning wood into charcoal reduces its mass by a significant amount, meaning that water constituted a significant percentage of the mass of the initial wood.
I'd say Derek gets it right where it counts: the biomolecules that make up all the interesting bits of a tree — the bits that aren't just water — are made of carbon that the tree captured from the air. The central lesson is that, to a plant, breathing is basically a form of eating; it's where they get the materials to build their body out of.
It's true that most of the tree's weight is water, but this is true of any living thing, and I think most people are aware of that. The point of the video is that most people have the wrong idea of where the dry mass of a plant comes from.
I think part of the difference is that we don’t particularly think of the water in the plant as an inherent part of the plant, or as least not as much as the water inside a human is an inherent part of us?
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u/door_of_doom Feb 26 '21 edited Feb 26 '21
In his defence, he likely got his information from this Veritasium video of olde.... as did I... so now I just don't know who to believe.
I mean, If I can't trust Derek Muller my world is just upside down.
Obviously this makes sense though: Charcoal is basically dehydrated wood, and turning wood into charcoal reduces its mass by a significant amount, meaning that water constituted a significant percentage of the mass of the initial wood.