Where do trees come from?

Is a question my three year old asked me the other day. It’s not such an odd question; it was only a few months ago that we were going round Tatton Park and I was trying to explain how weird I found it that the bulk of a tree just comes out of the air. You can understand how people get bigger – they eat real food which has mass and so you then do. It seems to much more strange – to me – that trees do the same thing from the air. Anyway, Richard Feynman has done a much better job of explaining this, as you’d expect, and here’s his take.

It’s also another chance for me to plug the posters we did – the Feynman one can be found here.