Eating the Sun: How Plants Power the Planet

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A story of a world in crisis and the importance of plants, the history of the earth, and the feuds and fantasies of warring scientists—this is not your fourth-grade science class's take on photosynthesis.

From acclaimed science journalist Oliver Morton comes this fascinating, lively, profound look at photosynthesis, nature's greatest miracle. Wherever there is greenery, photosynthesis isworking to make oxygen, release energy, and create living matter from the raw material of sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide. Without photosynthesis, there would be an empty world, an empty sky, and a sun that does nothing more than warm the rocks and reflect off the sea. With photosynthesis, we have a living world with three billion years of sunlight-fed history to relish.

Eating the Sun is a bottom-up account of our planet, a celebration of how the smallest things, enzymes and pigments, influence the largest things­­—the oceans, the rainforests, and the fossil fuel economy. From the physics, chemistry, and cellular biology that make photosynthesis possible, to the quirky and competitive scientists who first discovered the beautifully honed mechanisms of photosynthesis, to the modern energy crisis we face today, Oliver Morton offers a complete biography of the earth through the lens of this mundane and most important of processes.

More than this, Eating the Sun is a call to arms. Only by understanding photosynthesis and the flows of energy it causes can we hope to understand the depth and subtlety of the current crisis in the planet's climate. What's more, nature's greatest energy technology may yet inspire the breakthroughs we need to flourish without such climatic chaos in the century to come.

Entertaining, thought-provoking, and deeply illuminating, Eating the Sun reveals that photosynthesis is not only the key to humanity's history; it is also vital to confronting and understanding contemporary realities like climate change and the global food shortage. This book will give you a new and perhaps troubling way of seeing the world, but it also explains how we can change our situation—for the better or the worse.

What Customers Say About Eating the Sun: How Plants Power the Planet:

(This is my favourite part).The most scientifically technical parts of this book are concentrated towards the beginning. In reading this book, you will encounter many disciplines such as: history, history of science, physics, physiology, chemistry, biochemistry, and biology.Finally, there are seven diagrams in this book, all of them helpful. XXXXXQUESTION: Why should anyone want to pay homage to chloroplasts. In the type of photosynthesis that occurs in plants, carbon dioxide and water react in the presence of sunlight to produce life-producing and life-maintaining oxygen. The result is wonder, intellectual excitement, clear explanations, lyrical writing, and a new insight into how the world works, linking the very small with the very large. He is editor of the science publication "Nature." (Morton also has an asteroid named after him).This book is divided into three parts:Part 1: describes how scientists used the analytical tools of the 20TH century to discover the molecular machinery of photosynthesis. It's also about how our understanding of photosynthesis might help us choose a wiser future.

There is a handy glossary to help with technical terms if you missed their explanations earlier.What begins as an essay on an under-appreciated part of the history of science turns into something much richer. You can skip forward if you desire without losing the thread of the book.

The author of this book is Oliver Morton, an award-winning science journalist. Answer: NO.

ANSWER: Chloroplasts are the specialised structures in which photosynthesis takes place in, for example, plant cells. Do you have to read these chapters to understand the rest of the book.

I would have, though, liked to have seen more diagrams.In conclusion, this book reveals how life is made from light by detailing the most important process on the planet.photosynthesis.(first published 2008; list of illustrations; author's note; introduction; 3 parts or 9 chapters; main narrative 410 pages; glossary; bibliography; further reading; acknowledgements; index)XXXXX Thus, this book looks into photosynthesis, one of the miracles of evolution.

(Note that some of the steps of photosynthesis are still not completely understood).Part 2: tells how the molecules discovered in (part 1) came to dominate the Earth's chemistry, to reshape its atmosphere, and to drive changes in its climate and habitability.Part 3: tells what our use of fossil fuels is doing to the carbon cycle (the flow of carbon through the Earth system), and what this affected carbon cycle is doing to the climate.

Eating the Sun is a model of science writing for the nonscientist and an exemplary chapter in the history of science, written with integrative intelligence, leavened with deft, humorous biographical characterizations, and punctuated by a series of concluding statements of startling, poetic power. Oliver Morton has woven a cloth of pure gold from the threads that trace the story of photosynthesis.

This part tends to wander, and the science is overly speculative. Still, it can be irritating to run across haughty statements to the effect that an occasional maverick [scientist] might stumble across a breaking discovery, even without being part of the "community." Just ignore him. He also does a decent job of describing the evolution of photosynthesis through the eons, including the changing biochemistry of life and the atmospheric compositions. Fortunately this is the shortest part, and few writers are gifted (or lucky) enough to get future predictions correct anyway. He appears to like scientists who show modesty, display a bit of eccentricity, and express (or feign) interest in nonscientific activities (hiking, gardening, etc). Yes, it is true that science writers are not necessarily excellent scientists themselves, but who really expects them to be.

Does anyone recall that carbon dioxide does not get split to release oxygen, but rather to make the sugars and proteins in the plants.The biophysics part clearly is the jewel in "Eating the Sun." Morton's repeated demonstrations of light energy translating to chemical energy, and the marvelous variations here, will cause the reader to keep saying, "Oh, yeah." Because the author is a skilled writer and storyteller, the fabric of plant life / animal life gets explained well. The last section of "Eating the Sun" seems to be everyone's choice as the weakest. Morton, as any science writer of quality, does a fine job of telling a technical story to inform the popular reading audience, but also to make the science interesting - interesting, to the point of whetting the appetite for more detailed study elsewhere. Since he also has a tepid confidence in free markets, these choices probably blend understandably. The rest of the book is good enough to be well worth reading. His story is photosynthesis, a topic that everyone knows a little about (carbon dioxide in, oxygen out, leaves are green), but few know just how fascinatingly intricate is the biochemistry and the biophysics.

Scientists he deems crucial to the discoveries on photosynthesis receive his good press.One could complain that the author's bias toward those various scientists could make a reader smile.

The book focuses on photosynthesis and it's relation to plant life, animal life, and the history of life and the climate. The third section - Humanity, Energy - looks at the future: climate change and human activity that affects it. The first section - Carbon, Energy, and Light - describes the discovery of various aspects of photosynthesis. Consequently, there are interesting stories of various scientists, often competing with each other.The second section - Beginnings, Fossils, Forests and Feedback, Grass - looks at how plant life began, developed, and worked to allow animal life to develop.

A few parts I skipped because they didn't seem interesting to me (e.g., Priestly and the discovery of oxygen).Another reviewer condemned the book to a 2 star rating on the basis of one point in the context of a 450+ page book. It is the shortest section, and doesn't look at these topics in depth. It develops long, and often subtle, strands of scientific fact and reasoning. I am not competent to judge his point, nor the overall scientific content of the book, but the book made sense to me, and to other reviewers including a professor of the history of science at Harvard, a director of a botantical garden, and well-respected The Independent (London). However, in small parts the writing can be annoying: foot notes not fundamentally related to the topic, philosphical musing and "waxing poetically". It is the only popular science book I know that focuses on the amazing and wonderful process of photosynthesis.

But this is understandable, as by the time we start this section, we have already read 314 pages of dense content.I really enjoyed this book, especially how it drew together the strands of plant and animal energetics. That leads me to believe that overall the accurancy of the book is not a problem. This history, and the scientists involved are the focus. This section focuses on the science rather than the people, although contributors are noted.

(the miracle of sea life and deposition)" clause in Urey's alledged assertion that Morton so blithely accepts and delivers.Otherwise, some of his writing is positively eloquent - poetic, even - as on the last two paragraphs on p. He's obviously not up on his geochemistry, and no fact-checker came to his aid here.Carbonate rocks (limestone [sedimentary] and Marble [metamorphosed limestone] are formed by living organisms in the sea in which CO2 is dissolved and available for body-structure and shell-making. The cast off shells and corals of sealife find their way to sea bottoms over thousands of millennia and are compressed and cooked by the continuously delivered overlying sediments into limestones miles in depth.One does NOT get carbonate rocks out of the chemical weathering of silicates unless there's a ".then a miracle occurs. Although the book gets a good deal of the science right - particularly the biochemical part, Morton's assertion (on p. 141. turn(s) silicate rocks. 199 of the hardcover edition) that ".as Harold Urey pointed out in 1950s that when water and CO2 are both present." [the resulting carbonic acid] ". into carbonate rocks, a process known as chemical weathering." This assertion is flat wrong, and SO wrong as to destroy Morton's authority for me for the entirety of the book.