It seems like any color or sound can be accurately encoded (and recreated) with just a few numbers. Yet that doesn’t seem to be the case with smell or flavor. You can take a photo or sound recording and it’ll be a faithful recreation, but there’s no way to do that with smells or flavors. Is it a technology limitation or is there something fundamental to them that makes it harder to encode?
In: Physics
Light and Sound are both possible to represent, manipulate, and synthesize using electronic computers. Smell and Taste work differently and are much much harder to do the same with.
Light and Sound can both be modeled as waves. Light is an electromagnetic wave, and Sound is an acoustic/compression wave. Waves are very convenient to work with for computers because the mathematical representation of a wave is readily computable with the same sorts of computation methods that electronic computers are already doing. It’s very easy to output an electronic wave as Light or Sound.
Light is done by translating the waveform into a sequence of instructions that controls the switching on/off of light emitting pixels on a monitor. Sound is done by translating the waveform into an electrical pulse that is analog to the acoustic pulse, and the speakers connected to the computer will convert the electrical wave into an acoustic wave that you can hear.
Smell and Taste are not able to be modeled as waves. The underlying phenomena here is based on chemical receptors in the nose and mouth, and these can only be stimulated by the presence of the appropriate chemicals. We can model the molecular structure of these chemicals, but we have no output devices that can synthesize them on the spot. There’s no known way to do this right now. The underlying physics is just not something that we’ve yet learned how to model electronically or synthesize with output devices.
Latest Answers