Harold McGee, in conversation with David Weitz, "Nose Dive: A Field Guide to the World's Smells"

HARVARD SCIENCE BOOK TALKS
From Harold McGee, James Beard Award-winning author and leading expert on the science of food and cooking, comes an extensive exploration of the long-overlooked world of smell. In Nose Dive, McGee takes us on a sensory adventure, from the sulfurous nascent earth more than four billion years ago, to the fruit-filled Tian Shan mountain range north of the Himalayas, to the keyboard of your laptop, where trace notes of phenol and formaldehyde escape between the keys. We'll sniff the ordinary (wet pavement and cut grass) and the extraordinary (ambergris and truffles), the delightful (roses and vanilla) and the challenging (swamplands and durians).
Here is a story of the world, of every smell under our collective nose. A work of astounding scholarship and originality, Nose Dive distills the science behind the smells and translates it, as only McGee can, into an accessible and entertaining guide. Incorporating the latest insights of biology and chemistry, and interweaving them with personal observations, he reveals how our sense of smell has the power to expose invisible, intangible details of our material world and trigger in us feelings that are the very essence of being alive.
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Harold McGee studied at Caltech and Yale, and since 1980 has been writing about the science of food and cooking. He’s the author of the award-winning book On Food and Cooking, a visiting lecturer in Harvard University’s course “Science of Cooking: From Soft Matter Science to Haute Cuisine,” and a former columnist for the New York Times. He’s been named food writer of the year by Bon Appétit magazine and to the TIME 100, an annual list of the world’s most influential people. His latest book is Nose Dive: A Field Guide to the World’s Smells. It began as a project about the flavors of food and drink, but expanded over the course of a decade to encompass the smells of the material world at large, which flavors often echo.
David Weitz received his PhD in physics from Harvard University and then joined Exxon Research and Engineering Company, where he worked for nearly 18 years. He then became a professor of physics at the University of Pennsylvania and moved to Harvard at the end of the last millennium as professor of physics and applied physics. He leads a group studying soft matter science with a focus on materials science, biophysics and microfluidics. He co-developed and co-teaches the course "Science of Cooking."
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