LONDON, Feb 16: English physicist Isaac Newton very nearly uncovered the secret of how plants defy gravity by pulling water up from roots, almost 200 years before the process was described by botanists, new research has shown.
David Beerling from the University of Sheffield, UK, reviewed an old notebook filled with scrawlings by Newton.
Beerling described in the journal Nature Plants that Newton kept a notebook during his college years which he used for jotting down ideas and musings.
One of those was apparently an idea to help explain how it is that plants are able to pull water from the ground via roots and transport it up through stalks and stems to their leaves – defying gravity in the process, ‘Phys.Org’ reported.
Newton suggested in his notebook that light pulled water particles from pores in plant leaves – as “juices” beneath flowed in naturally to refill the pore, juices from below were pulled upward.
This idea is not far from what is the commonly excepted explanation for plant transpiration today – where water is pulled up a plant from roots and evaporates out of leaves, causing tension due to unequal pressure.
The current theory came about by botanists working in 1885, approximately 200 years after Newton was writing in his notebook. (PTI)
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