How do Trees Really lift Water to their Leaves?

BC:
OK, so that's your excuse for not doing bouble blind trials (not a very impressive one but...) .

What's your excuse for totally failing to do the maths?
What's your excuse for persisting with ideas that simply don't hold water when someone else looks at the numbers?

As things stand, if someone took up your ideas and ran with them and they actually turned out to be right then your epitaph might well be "Had some ideas about so-and-so but hadn't the abillity to follow it up with a proper explanation or investigation".

It's not an excuse it's an observation of over 15 years of observing how people go back on their words and fail for whatever reason they can come up with to carry out this simple repeatable study. Why do you think this is B.C et al? Who stands to gain when this therapy is eventually made mainstream? And make no mistake it will be! But who stands to lose the most money when many drug companies and charities and surgeons and doctors find their services are no longer as important as people currently believe them to be? Do you think for one minute I have not been to Universities, Sleep Therapy Centres, Dr’s Surgeries, Hospitals, Colleges, Secondary Schools, Spinal Units, Members Of parliament, Editors of Journals, Science Forums, Television, Radio, Newspapers, Private meetings with surgeons nurses and doctors, argued and shown exactly how this therapy works in front of professionals in charge of caring for people dying including my own Father?

Make no mistake B.C I know who and what I am up against!

The numbers is not quite as simple as Sophie makes it out to be, and I need some help to make certain that everything is taken into account including all of the observations from the experiments.

For example: A tree grows slowly and is filled with fluids from the onset so does not require fluids to be lifted to the leaves as per Sophies rope and bucket analogy. But does require an understanding of why adhesion and cohesion enables the water to remain inside the tree even when the leaves have fallen in deciduous trees. My understanding of this, again based upon observations rather than plucking out of thin air is that the density based circulation provides a mechanism for keeping the tree not only topped up but is more than capable of providing an ever increasing head of water enabling the tree to continue growing away from the soil by adding an upward positive pressure at the tips of branches as well as providing a positive pressure to the phloem and a negative tension to the xylem that reaches from the roots to the water molecules in the soil. It is this incredible bonding quality of water that enables the tree to draw water to it’s roots from the soil and circulate it up to the leaves and back to the roots. Circulation is the key word here. Plants like ourselves and many other species do not lift water but circulate water! Circulating may require a pulley block and rope with buckets on it to understand it but not in the sense that it begins as an ampty

Raising the tube experiment from ground level to 24 metres over 10-15 years would not replicate the adhesive or cohesive structure of the tree either and would fail because the experiment is not designed to show an exact structure of a tree but to show how water can remain suspended in a tube over twice the height limit thought possible in physics and circulate fluids.

What I really wanted to hear in the forum was and is offers to help rather than offers to hinder progress. Dave Short did offer to help. Without the experiments being replicated it is infuriatingly difficult to show in words what is happening, in particular with the elasticity of water and tension.

Good News

A now retired doctor and physicist who I met some 15 years ago and who said then all those years ago he would be able to jointly write these experiments up for publication has again confirmed that his help will be forthcoming. This is what is needed: Practical sound advice and guidance. This is what makes a person stand out from the crowd!


This same doctor said after meeting me in person, at a University, as he looked out of his window: “today for the first time I truly understand a tree” without even seeing the experiments!

I have also said this and so have many academics and teachers.

Lyner:
Quite frankly, AKF, as far as I can see, you are up against yourself. If you really wanted to make this work then you would actually use history to help you instead of trying to play the tragic hero.
You don't read what anyone has written in these recent posts. You argue in one direction when the issue is in another direction. Has anyone doubted that you have seen results from your therapy experiments? Has anyone doubted the Brixham results?
What do you want to be 'remembered for', someone who found out something which could have been useful or someone who demonstrated just how wrong it's possible to be when you ignore all the facts?
I think you are revelling in all this opposition rather than trying to learn anything from what people have written.
Do you really think that the people on this forum are ruled by vested interests? You are exactly the same as the creationists and the Moon Landing Conspiracy proponents. The truth is clearly too complicated for you to understand so you have to make up your own home brewed ideas instead.
Such a shame. You want to be the one man in History who produced a brand new Science, all on his own. Everyone's out of step but you.

So wrong and so far off the mark about where this is heading Sophie. I do learn from you and others, my lesson might not go in the direction you anticipate but that is the problem with people who think laterally rather than a blinkered approach.

I have taken on board all of the posts and let's face it they are available for reflection and are being read by the doctor who has agreed to help with the paper. The real shame is that the significance of all of this appears to go over your heads.

You said science does not suck in that it can be explained better by pressure changes. The cohesion tension theory has an elaborate explanation stating that as one water molecule leaves the tree to the atmosphere another is drawn up to replace it. Well blow me if this was the case we would have water spurting out of the tops of buildings filled with cavity wall insulation and all of the water would leave the top of the tree rather than the observed source to sink flow.

Picture a deciduous tree in Autumn with all of it's leaves on the ground standing 40-50 metres as naked as a newborn. The cohesion tension theory states evaporation from the leaves causes water to be sucked up, SUCKED being the appropriate term for one molecule replacing another in a vertical chain from root to leaf. Well blow me again there are no leaves to suck here yet the buds begin to burst in the upper most branches during the spring. How does your precious historic science deal with this obvious anti-suck observation? It can’t can it? Only a density change be it from the warming of the outside of the tree or from the release of stored salts and sugars or even a combination of both can explain this new burst of life in what is after all a multiple conduit system consisting of predominantly non living tubular cells.

Another argument is that the collective pull of the densely leaved canopy can account for the impressive heights of trees. Well blow me again there are many trees locally that have very little canopy yet continue to grow vertically and have done so for some 21 years. Larch being a prime example.

The problem science is having at the moment is accepting that trees do not suck water up and emit it to the atmosphere, they circulate sap and some of it is emitted to the atmosphere and as a result of the water loss inevitable density changes take place!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Lyner: No Science in all that. I'm afraid. You can relate as many instances as you like but that constitutes no proof of any principles.
In your circulation theory, would you be able to discuss the actual quantities involved? How much goes out at the top and how much goes down again (and then where does it go, laden with all these salts?).
Try thinking things through to their conclusion rather than giving us more purple passages.

BenV

Quote from: Andrew K Fletcher on 11/07/2009 05:45:31
Well blow me if this was the case we would have water spurting out of the tops of buildings filled with cavity wall insulation...

"No Ben it was meant as sarcasm"

That's simply not true, is it? If you really think that, they you do not have a grasp of the physics involved at all.

I'm with sophie, and pretty much everyone else. We're bored of your waffle - do some science instead.

Cohesion tension theory states transpiration pulls on vertical columns of water dragging it up to the leaves from the soil! How? Why can't we see a model? Why should introducing a density change at the roots (adding salt to the soil) stop this imaginary process?

Why do the leaves bother to fall from the tree in the Autumn if they are so efficient at dragging water from the ground?

All answers welcome, here is a chance to do some "science"

Ben was speaking metaphorically about the constraints of the cohesion tension theory as it stands. Not literally but yes according to the tension theory if a brick evaporates water it should also apply the same tension to the water below so stacking one brick onto another should cause rising damp to travel to the tops of walls but it clearly does nothing of the kind.

If you are bored BenV, perhaps you should read something more interesting

B.C aka Bored Chemist:

Quote from: Andrew K Fletcher on 12/07/2009 09:32:32
All answers welcome, here is a chance to do some "science"
Not literally but yes according to the tension theory if a brick evaporates water it should aslo apply the same tension to the water below so stacking one brick onto another should cause rising damp to travel to the tops of walls but it clearly does nothing of the kind.

If you cover the walls with a layer of waterproof material (I can't say I have tried tree bark- but it would be interesting) then that's exactly what happens. The water soaks up to the top and evaporates there.
Of course, without that cover, it evaporates before it reaches the top.
Science is based on observation. My observation is that your assertion is false.
This tends to support (though it does not prove) the opposite viewpoint.
In effect you have just proved your own ideas to be faulty.

Show us how a few leaves can suck water up tubes stretching a hundred metres when we struggle to suck water up a tube a metre high.

Explain how the buds get water delivered to them when there is not a single leaf on a tree?

Explain Strasburger's observations with circulation taking place for several weeks in a tree that has every single living process killed by introducing picric acid into it at a severed trunk immersed in a bath full of the stuff.

I repeat the Cohesion tension hypothesis sucks and is nonsense and deserves it’s rightful place deep within a fictional blackhole.

Nice try on the rising damp but one that has been put forward several times over the years and in this thread capillary action was debunked as it could not address the diameters of the tubes involved and the flow rates observed, let alone the heights achieved by trees..




HOW ON EARTH CAN A TREE EVAPORATE WATER WITHOUT ALTERING THE DENSITY OF THE SAP?

Quote from: sophiecentaur on 16/07/2009 10:22:19
Of course there will be dense solutions at the top. The question is whether there is enough to provide the motive power mechanism you propose.

Well yes someone has said the density changes will not take place because more water will arrive to re-dilute it and take it’s place. This of course does not prevent the change in density but merely supports a circulation theory rather than a redundant one way ticket to the atmosphere hypothesis.

If 98% of all the water drawn through the roots evaporates . . . . .

So you are implying that the 2%, falling can lift the 98% for transpiration? Fantastic. We have a brilliant new way of making skyscraper lifts work, for free.
You are still locked onto this circulation theory with not a single numerical reason to justify it. If the numbers don't tally, there must be another reason. But of course, Maths is just there in order to discredit the unqualified, isn't it?

Well it appears to work for the Californian Redwoods and a few other magnificent specimens towering well over a hundred metres. Did anyone observe a mechanical lift used in their construction?