Article 4YAYT I'm re-reading The Emperor of Scent: A True Story of Perfume and Obsession

I'm re-reading The Emperor of Scent: A True Story of Perfume and Obsession

by
Mark Frauenfelder
from on (#4YAYT)
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I'm re-reading The Emperor of Scent, by Chandler Burr. It's a non-fiction book about a guy named Luca Turin who is obsessed with odors, specifically, perfume fragrances.

Turin is a biophysicist who wrote a best-selling book that reviewed hundreds of perfumes, in the same way a wine reviewer would write about wine. He believes that the odor of a substance has to do with the way it vibrates on a molecular level. Our noses, he says, contain the equivalent of a scanning electron microscope. This flies in the face of conventional thought on the subject. The reigning theory is that smell is a function of a molecule's shape, not the way it vibrates.

Burr makes a great case for Turin's vibration theory, and the story of how nobody in academia will listen to Turin was a real eye opener. The peer review system for scientific journals is revealed to be totally corrupt.

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