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
Because colors are just different frequencies of light, and sounds are basically just different frequencies of pressure waves. It doesn’t matter what color you’re talking about, it’s still just light. Different pitch sounds that you’re hearing are just variations in how quickly the air around you is moving back and forth, but they’re all the same phenomena.
Scents and flavors, on the other hand, are caused by the way our bodies interact with a huge range of different substances. The molecules that smell like a grilled steak aren’t just slightly modified versions of the molecules that smell like strawberries, there’s a whole bunch of substances in each one of them, and while some of them might overlap, a lot of them are just different.
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