Osco

I appreciated Yggdrasil's reply and was able to glean some things out of it in spite of the fact that my last chemistry class was in high school soooo many years ago. You might find the web page at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthesis helpful. It explains the process at a bunch of different levels and includes links for more information on a number of things Yggdrasil mentions in his/her post. I was checking out photosynthesis just to refresh my memory at an elementary school level. When I first saw the formulas that showed the multi-part reaction, I started wondering about using the first part of the reaction for commercial electrolysis of water to get hydrogen. That’s when I started noting all of the inconsistencies on the WEB regarding the chemical formula.

Funny, I’ve just been doing some research on this subject out of curiosity. According to my research, the experiment that you are talking about was performed a long time ago by a guy named Samuel Ruben. He used the experiment to prove that the oxygen byproduct of photosynthesis came solely from the water. This confused me because most references I found list the chemical process as: CO2 + H2O -> CH2O + O2. Therefore, the oxygen can not come solely from the water. I now believe that this formula is in error, and a more accurate basic formula is: CO2 + 2H2O -> CH2O + O2 + H2O (or 6CO2 + 12H2O -> C6H12O6 + 6O2 + 6H20). Now there is enough oxygen from the H2O to satisfy the O2 output. This would imply that the oxygen in the resulting water would come from the CO2. If you performed your experiment with radioactive CO2 and fed this water back into the process, then you would have a hard time figuring out where the O2 came from! I'm sorry to say I'm still trying to verify the basic formula for photosynthesis, but right now I'm going with the CO2 + 2H2O.