This is scientific Americans 60 second science. I'm Karen Hopkins. This will just take a minute.

When I was in college, I worried about exams and how I was getting home from the pub. When Isaac Newton was an undergrad he came up with a theory of how water moves through plants

200 years before botanists figured it out for themselves.

That's according to an article in the journal Nature by For botanists figured it out for themselves.

That's according to an article in the journal Nature by David Bierling of the University of Sheffield's

Department of Animal and Plant Sciences.

Bierling writes that between 1661 and 1665, Newton, while at Cambridge University, kept a

notebook in which he jotted down musings on various matters.

Buried between sections on philosophy and attraction electrical infiltration is a half page on the subject of vegetables.

There, the young polymath tackled the topic of plant sap and how it might rise from the roots to the leaves. Newton suggested

that what he called a globule of light shining on a leaf could knock away a

particle of water, causing the juices of the plant to riseth upward.

He's loosely describing what we now refer to as the process of the

uses of the plant to riseth upward. He's loosely describing what we now refer to as the process of

transpiration in which the energy of sunlight causes water to

evaporate from a plant's surface thereby drawing water up through the stem.

Where Sir Isaac came up with this idea, we'll never know.

But it suggests that before he saw that the apple must come down,

he was doing some serious thinking about within the tree what goes up.

Thanks for the minute. For Scientific Americans 60 Second Science, I'm Karen Hopkins.