How do Trees Really lift Water to their Leaves?

On the siphon thread. I provided you with an introduction to the spinning Z tube, designed to test the cohesion in water. There were measurements there. This is what Hammel referred to in his letter to me. You dispute the necessity for a U tube adding that a single capped tube would enable the water to remain in the tube over the 10 meter mark. I provided you with a very early attempt to do this. This was rejected because you said the pipe used was lead. Presumably then we need to alter Galileo’s Limit to using lead pipes only?

Now, why do you suppose that spinning a Z tube was preferred? Why not spin a capped ended tube? Why not spin a straight length of tube?
Both elbows in the Z tube provide the same stress on water as my experiment.

Your meniscus does not represent the strength of adhesion any more than it represents the strength of cohesion, it tells us nothing except that gravity is pulling the water down and some of the water sticks to the inside of a vessel.

Adhesion is very important for your single capped / domed ended vertical water filled pipe to work, and yes I understand why you would require adhesion to be stronger in this case. But the fact remains that no one to date has observed this. If we look around in nature for examples, do we see upright capped tubes or do we see circulation involving a flow and return system? Circulation being circular. In the body we see arterial flow and a return venous flow. In the tree we see phloem and xylem flow. In the ocean we see the conveyor system etc etc. Chop a carrot in half and we see circular patterns. We do not see a tree open at the top and bottom that is able to pull water from the soil like a giant straw and here lies the problem with science having a go at explaining circulation in a mono-directional paper, when in reality the fluids in the tree circulate.

I have seen trees 30 metres high, mostly larch with very few leaves and branches at the top, living by drawing water from root to soil. I can photograph these if required because they destroy the cohesion tension theory, yet according to the circulation theory, little in the way of evaporation would be required for it to continue and more to the point the required tension on the sap for the current cohesion tension to work has never been observed. Despite many attempts.


Summary
The Cohesion Theory considers plant xylem as a 'vulnerable pipeline' isolated from the osmotically connected tissue cells, phloem and mycorrhizas living in symbiosis with plant roots. It is believed that water is pulled exclusively by transpiration-induced negative pressure gradients of several megapascals through continuous water columns from the roots to the foliage. Water under such negative pressures is extremely unstable, particularly given the hydrophobicity of the inner xylem walls and sap composition (lipids, proteins, mucopolysaccharides, etc.) that prevents the development of stable negative pressures larger than about −1 MPa. However, many plant physiologists still view the Cohesion Theory as the absolute and universal truth because clever wording from the proponents of this theory has concealed the recent breakdown of the Scholander pressure bomb (and other indirect methods) as qualified tools for measuring negative pressures in transpiring plants. Here we show that the arguments of the proponents of the Cohesion Theory are completely misleading. We further present an enormous bulk of evidence supporting the view that – depending on the species and ecophysiological context – many other forces, additional to low tensions, can be involved in water ascent and that water can be lifted by a series of watergates (like ships in staircase locks).

Received: 16 October 2003 Accepted: 30 January 2004


www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/1187...ct?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0

Lyner:
There is no point in discussing the siphon phenomenon any more because your appreciation of it is incomplete and you don't seem to want to advance your knowledge at all in that direction.
Yes, trees are wonderful. Yes, there have been experiments on cohesion. But your explanation is what lacks rigour and depth.
I have no quarrel with your external references because they talk sense and do not neglect the effects of adhesion. I can only conclude that you don't understand all they say.
I can't take you seriously if you can't even discuss the water meniscus in normal terms. Is that piece of theory all wrong as well?

lacking rigour and depth as you put it could also equate to keeping it simple. Investigating how this flow and return system fits with human, animal, tree and plant physiology has been trully fascinating. Observing a recovery from cerebral palsy where a girl gets out of a wheelchair and climbs stairs in school after 12 years of being unable to walk: Priceless

Lyner:
Lacking rigour may be fun but the results of that approach are just not reliable. Furthermore, without some rigour in Medical tests, you cannot be sure that what you did was the reason for the observed effect.
Do you choose to go to a modern Doctor or be treated by one who follows Galen's (simple) methods and beliefs?

"Keeping it simple" can lose the whole point of something. A child believes in the Tooth Fairy because that model fits a limited set of observations. When you tell a child "Of course she came for your tooth - see - she left you some money", is that really a Proof?. Children grow out of that simple belief.

You may want to believe that a spontaneous remission from brain damage at birth was a coincidence following a phone call from a parent who was enquiring about a bull terrier and asking my opinion about the breed and how an adult male would be around a severely disabled child. That day this mum got more than she anticipated and agreed to test IBT with her child to see if anything would happen.

Given than nothing had happened in 12 years previous regarding recovery it was indeed a long shot, but a shot well worth taking.
I received a call out of the blue one-day. It was a little girl called Caroline, who rang to ask if I was Andrew, the man who told her mum to tilt the bed. I replied yes, is this Caroline. She replied. I am calling to say thank you for all that you have done for me.

My legs went to jelly that day. Tears were falling from my chin and I collapsed on the floor unable to stand while the little girl told me about how much her life had changed for the better. Not only could she now walk, but the muscles in her legs were restored, her legs were straight, scoliosis had been reversed, she can clothe herself and brush her own hair, something a top neurologist in Wales said could never happen.

It is entirely your prerogative to choose to ignore what I have written here because to-date no controlled study has reproduced the results. Another girl around the same age also began to respond following an article in the Daily Mail National Newspaper relating to recoveries from multiple sclerosis.

Remember. I have never asked anyone for a single penny for helping them to recover. In fact my research has cost me many thousands of pounds over the years. What possible motive other than truth could I have for pursuing this important discovery?

If this was your own daughter, would you still require evidence that the bed has been rigorously tested? After all, the parents only had my word that there was a chance this could help their daughter.

Rosy:
Just because you're sincere (and I don't think anyone doubts that) doesn't mean you're right.

And given that I can explain all the results of your siphon experiments I've seen to date in terms of conventional current physics, your explanation for the mechanism by which IBT achieves its observed effects is getting in the way of the application of what could be an important discovery by making it really hard for the rest of the world to take you seriously.

Lyner:
I really can't see how a perceived medical success 'proves' anything about the explanation of how tension in water works. One is a recorded event and the other is a quaint personal notion. Where is the proof of any causal connection?
I believe you are upset by the wrong issue here. If something you have done has helped someones medical condition that is a wonderful thing. But does it make your understanding of Science correct?

Ben, can you ask me a question that I have evaded?

Rosy, A siphon does not work above 32 feet limit. You agreed in this thread that this was not a siphon, so what has changed since then? This is an age old problem that goes back to before Galileo.

Whether anyone believes the theory or not is irrelevant for people who need help. The question is why has IBT not been reproduced by doctors, surgeons and nurses? For god’s sake, it’s a couple of blocks of wood under a bed that is producing the results. It is nothing short of criminal for this not to have been investigated!

Hiding behind any excuse that prevents tilting a bed in a hospital when circulation is compromised, renal failure has begun and oedema is evident and nothing in the allopathic arsenal is working for the person in the flat bed, does it not reflect very badly on not only the staff and hospital but on the very health care that is supposed to be providing these fragile people with support. I have fought at my own Father’s bedside, have shown the results to the staff and doctors at Russell’s Hall Hospital by bringing him from a comatose state with supposedly irreversible multiple organ failure, while he was fighting cancer to watching his kidneys start functioning and clear urine instead of brown bloody tar in the Catheter bag. His blood pressure returned to normal and his massive swollen legs were observed to shrink before the doctors eyes, buying him and my family a precious 8 months further. Yet every time I went away from the hospital, His bed was deliberately placed flat. Even when the staff had witnessed the huge improvements, they took it upon themselves to ignore the obvious results and place his life in jeopardy once again.

When my Father finally ended up back at the same hospital after collapsing once more, he was again subjected to the same ignorance which caused him to become comatose every time his bed was put flat, and every time it was tilted after a running battle he was observed to gain consciousness. The damage that the drugs he was given for diabetes (which he never had) -Metformin, together with the incompetence of the staff at Russell’s Hall Hospital made certain my Father stood little to no chance of fighting his illness. Infection followed and he eventually lost his life without so much as a single paracetamol to relieve his suffering from cancer of the gall bladder and liver. He refused to take any more medication from doctors right to the end.

So when people give me a hard time for failing to put this together in a way that is acceptable to them, spare a thought to the simplicity of the intervention and ask yourselves why has nothing been done to make sure this important discovery is not washed under the carpet for another 10 years or more.

The main question you have been evading recently is why should a molecule in an inverted u-tube act any differently to one in a single, dome capped tube, or words to that effect, from Sophie.

Andrew, no one here is doing anything to halt research into this, and no-one has any vested interest in seeing you fail. I'm with Rosy on this one, we know you're sincere, and I don't doubt that inclining your bed has some great effects, but I'm not convinced by your proposed mechanism, and I think that's the issue. The main thing for me is that your models seem to ignore certain key things - the massive pump involved in the human circulation system, which would make any other effect minor, and the many pores at the top of a tree. Have you re-created your experiment allowing water to evaporate from the top (which we know does happen in trees from direct observation)? Have you re-created the human circulation experiment with a great big pump in it?

The amount of anecdotal evidence you have certainly suggests that it is worth studying the effect of an inclined bed, and I wish you all the best with it/ However I, like Rosy, suspect that by pushing your hypothesis as well as the results you've achieved, you make it harder for people to take you seriously.

(and as a small co-incidence, I used to drive past Russel's Hall quite often)