If trees consist primarily of co2 gas+ water +light + a few essential minerals, how does this combination cause such hard wood trees that require an ax or chainsaw to chop some of them down?
Has any scientist been able to determine how gas and water …lite and minerals combine to produace the density of wood?
I am totally bewildered how this occurs…IF i am wrong or left something out, please set me straight.
You’ve left out some serious componants. I’ve only had one herbology class, so I can’t even begin a list of what you’ve forgotten. I’ll leave that to Dopers with greener thumbs.
You have to remember that basic atoms in particular combinations with eachother have completely different features and reactions. 2 oxygen molecules and 2 hydrogen molecules by themselves get you gas, but combines you get hydrogenperoxide.
Another example, from this cite
But that doesn’t mean that we are 3 gasses and a rock.
I’m seriously suspicious that this is some sort of strange creationist troll attempt. Are you being honest with this question?
[QUOTE=Pullet
But that doesn’t mean that we are 3 gasses and a rock.
I’m seriously suspicious that this is some sort of strange creationist troll attempt. Are you being honest with this question?[/QUOTE]
Pullet, i’m going to ignore your hubristic comments…Thank you for the human anatomy lesson. The hardest material in the human body = bone which as you know consists primarily of calcium phosphate = calcium hydroxyapalite…The rest of the human anatomy: muscle, skin, fat, organic tissues and the like are relatively soft and easily incised with a scalpel, cautery or laser beam.
My questions involves how these materials which i describe above in combination produce such a hard wood that requires an axe or chainsaw to cut through. …and can experimentally, has any person been able to combine the basic elements of which plants or trees are made of to produce same?
Obviously, you’ve never seen me wake up in the morning. 
Seriously, tho… “How can carbon dioxide and some other stuff make such hard trees?” you ask? Well… what do you think diamonds are made of? Carbon can become VERY strong, when arranged right.
Slight hijack: So what IS the hardest life-created material? Hardwoods from a tree? Bones from a human or other animal? Chitin from an insect? Shells from oysters, or maybe their pearls (I suspect pearls aren’t very hard, but…)?
Wood is mostly a mixture of cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin.
Cellulose, and hemicellulose are, as far as a non-chemist is concerned, starches; they consist of little but various sugars bound together to form giant molecules. They’re pretty simple to make out of CO[sub]2[/sub] and water, and the biochemical pathways by which they form are well understood.
Structures made of cellulose and hemicellulose can be quite tough, but it’s the lignin that contributes most to the hardness of wood. Lignin formation is a lot more complicated than cellulose formation, but the process starts out with three molecules that are ultimately derived from sugars (nee CO[sub]2[/sub] and water), p-coumaryl, coniferyl, and sinapyl alcohols. Here’s a review of the lignification process. If you are not well versed in plant biochemistry, the linked page will be painful to look at. However it does demonstrate some of the detail to which scientists understand wood formation.
I too am a little condused by the underlying assumptions of the question. The human body for example isn’t at all soft an easily cut. Even without bone we have keratin making up our hair and fingernails. Even in thin sections such as our toenail it is incredibly hard to cut, but when you look at that material in the form of animal horns you will find that it is far tougher than wood. I’d rather cut down a tree made of the hardest harwood than have to try to cut down one made of horn.
So what is the hardest life-created material? Various plant silicates beyond any shadow of a doubt. There are a range of these, but basically they are various forms of glass/sand. That makes the hardest of them marginally softer than diamond, and orders of magnitude harder than any wood, bone or even aragonite.
Sorry, MadSam. Sometimes the height of my arrogance just depends on your position relative to me.
My response remains unchanged. Take the basic bricks (atoms) and combine them in different ways and you will get radically different things. Ta-da! Trees from water, carbondioxide and light.
And as Sqink has already pointed out, these combinations are produced under very specific processes and in specific environments. Squink clearly knows more about these things than I do, but I doubt anyone has been able to go from atomic componants to lignin in a test tube.
Or have they? Because that would be so cool! Blake, can I get my jewelry coated with plant silicates? I’m always scratchin my braclet and the platinum plating doesn’t seem to help.
You probably could get your watch encased in plant silicates, but it wouldn’t achieve much. Common Glass is already harder than platinum, and we all know that glass watch faces never gets scratches, right? Unfortunately it doesn’t work that way. A broad flat surface of glass, silicate or even diamond can still be scratched by a pointed metal obect despite being the harder of the two.
Hardness is only one part of durability, and it’s durability that you want.
I have little doubt that if they chose to, biochemists could synthesize lignin starting from nothing more than carbon dioxide and water as raw materials. However, this would be very complex, expensive, and tedious. It would be much easier to start from more complex components derived from plants; or just use plant lignin itself. There really wouldn’t be much point to a synthesis from scratch, so I doubt it’s been done, but it’s almost certainly possible.
I’m going back to the chicken thread. A girl can only take being wrong for so long 
I thank Squink and all the rest of you…even Pullet for your responses. My op started when I kept looking at the tree trunk of a giant oak…about 10 feet in diameter…approximately 300 years old in my back yard and became overly absorbed on how gas, water, sunlight and a few minerals could produce this huge structure.
It suddenly dawned on me that everything consists of atoms…the difference being configuration of a group of atoms and the density of that group…Balso would, i would think, be less dense that mahogany.
The I started thinking how scientifically thinking how we continue to discover more and more particles inside the atom…and now i’m over my head and i can save that for another disxcussion under great debates.
Just remember that it’s not all “gas”. Trees take in the carbon dioxide we exhale (which is CO2), and they emit oxygen (which is O2). They hold on to that atom of carbon. And all that carbon adds up.