But Are You Sure You're Sure

Look carefully and tell me, what is this? Because it’s not what you think it is.

L’ange Du Foyeur, Max Ernst, 1937. Image source

Only because Hidden Scents presupposes that we are in the Age of Approximation do we pay attention to talk about certainty in science. The language of smell is anything but certain, and should make us second-guess what it means to “be sure” of something.  

Certainty in complex scientific research an unachievable goal

Feb 2017, phys.org

Looking at 41,000 measurements of 3,200 quantities - from the mass of an electron to the carbon dating of a sample - Bailey found that anomalous observations happened up to 100,000 times more often than expected.

"The chance of large differences does not fall off exponentially as you'd expect in a normal bell curve," said Bailey.

...

"The study shows that researchers in many fields do a good job of estimating the size of typical errors in their measurements, but usually underestimate the chance of large errors," said Bailey, noting that the larger-than-expected frequency of large differences may be an almost inevitable consequence of the complex nature of scientific research.

"As measurements become more and more accurate, the smallest things matter more and more," Bailey said.

...

"These insights can be beneficial given the inherently complex nature of scientific research," says Bailey. "But the chance of avoiding being wrong in some way on some level is almost impossible."

Almost Truth

When you search ‘breath of fresh air’ and every picture has people with their arms open wide. (What’s up with that?) image source

Mice can smell oxygen

Dec 2016, phys.org

There seems to be this debate, or perhaps I should just call it confusion, over whether or not we can smell non-organic molecules like ammonia, chlorine, or sulfur. From what I can get out of people who are professionals in chemistry, smell science, or what have you – we cannot smell these things.

When we smell the ‘chlorine in the pool,’ we are actually smelling chlorine as it mixes with other organic molecules to make chloramines (and the so the smell of chlorine, which most would consider clean and disinfected, is actually the smell of a dirty pool, because the cleaning agent chlorine is mixing with all the organic garbage poop molecules in the pool). “Sulfur” is the smell of sulfur mixed with other organic molecules. Some people say we can smell ammonia, but I bet it’s the same situation.

While we’re talking about it, “metal” is not the smell of metal but the smell of something, an organic something (like our sweaty hands), interacting with the metal.* (I have a smell in my vocabulary called ‘metal mold’ and although I’m not sure what it is, its smell is powerful and unmistakable...and it's on my fire escape sometimes.)

So when I hear this – "mice can smell oxygen" – I have a feeling it’s not as it seems. And sure enough the truth reads like this:

They don’t smell oxygen itself, but the “levels of oxygen in the air.” They also don’t use odor receptor genes to do this; they are chemosensitive genes, but not odor receptor genes. And also, in humans, these genes are non-functional (called pseudogenes or junk genes), so we can’t generalize this to humans, only mice.

Can we say that mice “smell” oxygen? That’s like almost the truth, almost a fact. They can sense it. And if we consider chemosensation to fall under olfaction, just for simplicity sake, then sure, they can. That’s how almost truth works, isn’t it? And for the record, this is one of the reasons Hidden Scents is subtitled …’the age of approximation.’ The very thing that is so commonplace in studying or simply experiencing the world of olfaction is fast becoming the norm in how we interact with the Noosphere, the total collection of facts and knowledge.

*Credit to author Alexandra Horowitz; I got this from her book Being a Dog, it just came out in 2016, and is absolutely fascinating.