A note from the author, Chandler Burr:

C. B.: Almost no one admits it, but the sense of smell poses a huge mystery: Not only do we not know how it functions (while we understand completely sight and hearing), we actually shouldn't be able to do it at all. Smell should be impossible. I explain why in "Emperor." Even if the sense of smell functions like all the chemists, biologists, and professors claim it does, which is by recognizing the shapes of smell molecules, we shouldn't be able to smell molecules that didn't exist in our ancestral environment, like plastics or gasoline. But we can smell plastics and gasoline. How? Luca proposes, from a series of absolutely ingenious discoveries and smell experiments whose story I tell, that a molecule's odor is not at all contained in its form. It's contained in the vibrations of electrons that hold atoms together. We literally smell atoms. How? By a microscopic machine gun in the nose that fires electrons into molecules and measures how much energy they lose passing through. Which, if it's true, will entirely change our ideas on the functioning of biology, chemistry, and physics. That's why all the people in the "Shapist" camp are, as I show, violently opposed to this idea of "Vibration." It threatens them, and you'll see how they tried to suffocate this dangerous idea in its cradle. Science is sometimes neither pleasant nor honest.

Luca Turin is a witty and amazing man. He has a book of perfume reviews coming out this Spring.

I only bought The Emperor of Scent for his few perfume reviews. The rest of it bored me witless.