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. Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/nvsW-rBjIJg/im-re-reading-the-emperor-of.html