5 ms·

The same could be said about sense of smell. And frankly any of the other senses. Even touch, if you realize that the atoms in your hand never really "touch" ot

The same could be said about sense of smell. And frankly any of the other senses. Even touch, if you realize that the atoms in your hand never really "touch" other objects.

drdeca 5y ago
Depends how you define “touch” doesn’t it? It’s not like the atoms have sharp boundaries which fall short of coinciding with the boundaries of other atoms, what should it even mean to say that they do or don’t touch? I don’t know much of anything about how smell works. Does it involve quantum mechanics in ways which don’t fall under “chemistry” (with chemistry being an implication of quantum mechanics) ? I think “has to be understood in terms of quantum mechanics beyond just chemistry” is a reasonable distinction to make, and applies to the way these birds work.
- smaddox 5y ago
  > I don’t know much of anything about how smell works. Does it involve quantum mechanics in ways which don’t fall under “chemistry” (with chemistry being an implication of quantum mechanics) ? Arguably, yes. You could call smell a chemical sensor, but it's not sensing chemicals through a chemical reaction. Instead, it's sensing the modes of excitation of a molecule, i.e. the distribution of available state transitions, which is inherently quantum mechanical.
  - drdeca 5y ago
    Cool! I didn’t know that. Thanks!
  - lisper 5y ago
    That's interesting. Do you have a reference?
    - smaddox 5y ago
      No, sorry. I don't remember where I first read about this, but it was a story about a perfume manufacturer successfully using IR gas chromatography to synthetically recreate an expensive perfume component (or something like that), where other techniques had failed. I don't know if there has been any subsequent research publications that definitively demonstrate what's going on. It's possible that shape matters, too, as it does for other receptors. Either way, quantum mechanics is still critical for understanding the mechanism.
      - lisper 5y ago
        Found this: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-21150046 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-21150046 Apparently, it's controversial.
K0balt 5y ago
It might be more accurate to say that every atom in the universe are touching just a little, but the closer together they are, the more they touch. It’s a matter of threshold of probability, really. The inputs to the biological sensorium remain linear off the scale of discernment, but there are mechanisms involved in the sensing that have a nonlinear signal response, giving the very useful illusion of binary edges to sensory phenomena.

The same could be said about sense of smell. And frankly any of the other senses. Even touch, if you realize that the atoms in your hand never really "touch" other objects.

drdeca 5y ago

Depends how you define “touch” doesn’t it? It’s not like the atoms have sharp boundaries which fall short of coinciding with the boundaries of other atoms, what should it even mean to say that they do or don’t touch? I don’t know much of anything about how smell works. Does it involve quantum mechanics in ways which don’t fall under “chemistry” (with chemistry being an implication of quantum mechanics) ? I think “has to be understood in terms of quantum mechanics beyond just chemistry” is a reasonable distinction to make, and applies to the way these birds work.

smaddox 5y ago
> I don’t know much of anything about how smell works. Does it involve quantum mechanics in ways which don’t fall under “chemistry” (with chemistry being an implication of quantum mechanics) ? Arguably, yes. You could call smell a chemical sensor, but it's not sensing chemicals through a chemical reaction. Instead, it's sensing the modes of excitation of a molecule, i.e. the distribution of available state transitions, which is inherently quantum mechanical.
- drdeca 5y ago
  Cool! I didn’t know that. Thanks!
- lisper 5y ago
  That's interesting. Do you have a reference?
  - smaddox 5y ago
    No, sorry. I don't remember where I first read about this, but it was a story about a perfume manufacturer successfully using IR gas chromatography to synthetically recreate an expensive perfume component (or something like that), where other techniques had failed. I don't know if there has been any subsequent research publications that definitively demonstrate what's going on. It's possible that shape matters, too, as it does for other receptors. Either way, quantum mechanics is still critical for understanding the mechanism.
    - lisper 5y ago
      Found this: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-21150046 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-21150046 Apparently, it's controversial.

K0balt 5y ago

It might be more accurate to say that every atom in the universe are touching just a little, but the closer together they are, the more they touch. It’s a matter of threshold of probability, really. The inputs to the biological sensorium remain linear off the scale of discernment, but there are mechanisms involved in the sensing that have a nonlinear signal response, giving the very useful illusion of binary edges to sensory phenomena.