Ebook: Photosynthesis

This book got my attention because it is about a complex scientific issue, yet it aims at the massive public rather than science students or scientists. Actually, scientists and science major students might be some of the least interested in this book since it is very basic for them. My major was chemistry in college but I was still interested on it. The author, Asimov, became very famous in my Mexican city back in 80's and early 90's so I went ahead to read this book of him. It is is very old (1968) so I compared the book claims with my standard modern (late 90's) American biochemistry text books and found no discrepancies.

The book explain how plants are able to use carbon dioxide, water and light (energy) to make food and oxygen and how animals do the reverse, transform food, oxygen and energy into carbon dioxide, water and our own bodies, while clarifying common misunderstanding based on common sense like thinking that the water we expire after breathing comes only from the humidity in our bodies (that humidity is not the issue). It also explains a little bit of some scientific topics:

-Thermodynamics, yes, he'll make you understand it with simple daily life examples and language. This science is much about how things can happen in nature because of energy. In this specific case, he'll show you how photosynthesis can happen. He even gets in an interesting analysis about extensions of thermodynamics into how human can create knowledge, it is a point that many readers might struggle to understand. Many may struggle to understand which side Asimov stands by, but he stands for no one. He just wants to understand more the universe and make us join him.
-The nature of light and organic chemistry.
-The theory of evolution about how life started in our planet and evolved in complex forms. This is the single section that is outdated, but the book could still be right since nobody can prove how life really started.

Asimov makes complex biochemistry understandable by using a narrative style that describes how scientific discoveries were made back from 1648 by Van Helmont. It figures that experiments from those times had to be simple, so simple that anybody should be able to understand easily. For example, Asimov describes how people figured out that plants used mostly water (rather than soil as common sense would say) to grow: by weighing the soil used to grow a plant and weigh it after the plant had grown up. However, by the time he describes experiments from XIX and XX centuries he proves his writing mastery. Asimov well warns about common sense or focusing on the obvious, especially with the narration about how people realized that gases existed and eventually discovered which ones the air is composed of. The book even proves that science is also fun because it's a puzzle. People have fun solving puzzles, playing chess, video games, etc. Yes, many people need rather complex stuff to have fun because they're intelligent and need to be challenged; hopefully you'll be one of them. It'd be a great idea to trade video games for this reading.