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
Both light and sound are a frequency spectrum of a specific thing. In the case of light a spectrum of photons, and in the case of sound a spectrum of pressure waves in a medium (usually air). This makes them easy to both capture and reproduce – you simply need a device capable of emitting photons/pressure waves and the ability for that device to alter the frequency of the above.
Smells and flavors, in contrast, are millions of different discrete molecules. Sugar and salt, for example, are completely different things at a molecular level. We can’t scan those molecules easily (outside of lab environments) nor do we have a machine that can easily force the chemical reactions required to make those molecules.
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