From 1983’s BBC TV series “Fun to imagine” here’s Richard Feynman discussing fire.
we know that oxygen and carbon stick together very tight. How is it that the tree is so smart to manage to take the carbon dioxide, which is the carbon [and] oxygen nicely combined and undo that so easy? Ah life, life has some mysterious force. No, the sun is shining and it’s the sunlight that comes down and knocks these oxygen away from the carbon. So it takes sunlight to get the plant to work. And so the sun all the time is doing the work of separating the oxygen away from the carbon. The oxygen is some kind of terrible byproduct, which it spits back into the air and leaving the carbon and water and stuff to make the substance of the tree. Then when we take the substance of the tree, and stick it in the fireplace and there’s all the oxygen made by these trees. And all the carbon would much prefer to be close together again. And once you let the heat to get it started, it continues and makes an awful lot of activity while it’s going back together again. And all this nice light and everything comes out and everything is being undone. When you’re going back from carbon and oxygen back to carbon dioxide and the light and heat that’s coming out, that’s the light and heat of the sun that went in. So it’s sort of stored sun that’s coming out when you burn it, the log.
Image: Simon, January 2026 in San Giovanni, Sassari