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Birth of a Notion.
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I don’t know if what I am talking about is magic or not but if it is, feel free to submit my email address to the halfbakery’s chemistry basics for newbies newsletter.
We have devices that can detect the presence of substances from ranging from alcohol to carbon monoxide in air. I’m going to take
a huge leap here, but wouldn’t it be possible to make a detector that could decect and identify each separate chemical property that any given smell is composed of? If I am correct, the chemical properties data could then be retained in the smell detector/recorder, which you could have sent off to a lab and have recreated. If this were possible we might be able to bottle and re-experience moments in time that were especially important to you, duplicate perfumes that are out of stock, the smell of your grandmothers bananna bread,
as well as all sorts of useful applications I’m not really interested in thinking about.
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Well, it sounds reasonable enough. The smell detector part isn't baked to the degree that you mention in the idea, but it seems possible. (I'm no syentist.) As for cooking up smells, scientists have been doing that for a long time to study how certain smells affect people. But labs haven't made it their business, to my knowledge, to cook up designer scents for people like you describe. That sounds very eenteresting. I'll give you the scent of a baking croissant. <yawn> |
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What you need is a portable mass spectrometer. And I do believe they are available, off the shelf at every local scientific instrument supply emporium. It's not magic, but it costs as much as medium scale magic. |
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The difficulty with smell synthesis is that our nose are so sensitive that individual sense of smell are different. Some people can sense some smell so well while some smell nothing even they are exposed to same chemical mixture. |
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It is also difficult to compare smell with your memory, since our brain isn't wired to recoginze smell individually but the overall memory triggered by all of them at the same time. |
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Like your grandmothers bananna bread. I am sure that if we do chemical analysis of the samples collect at each time your grandmother bake, it will be different every time. Even during the different stage of baking, it will be different. If we can only catch one of them, you will always feel something lacking from real thing. |
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