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> 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 imp
by 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 agoCool! I didn’t know that. Thanks!
- lisper 5y agoThat's interesting. Do you have a reference?
- smaddox 5y agoNo, 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 agoFound this: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-21150046 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-21150046 Apparently, it's controversial.