Eli5: Why can’t smells or flavors be quantified and encoded in the same way colors and sound can (with RGB, frequency, etc)?

834 viewsOtherPhysics

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

15 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

They can.

There are just hundreds times more factors and chemicals that factor into this rather than a single wave frequency.

You are viewing 1 out of 15 answers, click here to view all answers.