I love this article tho it seems to drift off at the end and doesn’t explicitly say why LLMs are not science and don’t currently seem to be able to derive mechanisms. Unless they begin incorporating neurosymbolic mechanisms (read mechanistic causal modeling)
To be fair to van Helmont, since the empirical formula for polysaccharides (including cellulose - wood) is (CH2O)n, it’s arguable that the tree is mainly water.
If you do oxygen-18 isotope tracing, you'll see that the O in sugars produced by photosynthesis comes from the CO2, not the H2O. This is a result of the RuBisCO enzyme.
So most of the *dry mass* of a tree comes from the air. Of course a live tree will be mostly water by mass anyway.
I love this article tho it seems to drift off at the end and doesn’t explicitly say why LLMs are not science and don’t currently seem to be able to derive mechanisms. Unless they begin incorporating neurosymbolic mechanisms (read mechanistic causal modeling)
To be fair to van Helmont, since the empirical formula for polysaccharides (including cellulose - wood) is (CH2O)n, it’s arguable that the tree is mainly water.
If you do oxygen-18 isotope tracing, you'll see that the O in sugars produced by photosynthesis comes from the CO2, not the H2O. This is a result of the RuBisCO enzyme.
So most of the *dry mass* of a tree comes from the air. Of course a live tree will be mostly water by mass anyway.
Yes - that’s why I hedged my bets with “arguable”.