Plants use carbon dioxide and produce oxygen while animals use oxygen and produce carbon dioxide. It’s one of nature’s many Huttonian cycles with “no vestige of a beginning—no prospect of an end.” But what James Hutton could not have dreamt of is the literally astonishing magnificence of the invisible machinery working behind the scenes to sustain the carbon cycle. What would the often misunderstood Scottish polymath say today in response to photosynthesis and the electron transport chain? What would the father of the Scottish Enlightenment conclude from “Nature’s most elaborate nanoscale biological machine” which “converts light energy at unrivaled efficiency of more than 95 percent compared to 10 to 15 percent in the current human-made solar technologies”? Read more