Models and Reality

To account for this, Haldane’s original decompression model had fi ve theoretical tissues (what you hear today also called “compartments”). Tissue compartments don’t correspond to any particular body tissue, and in reality, there is probably an infi nite number. But, you only need a few appropriate representative compartments to create a model that calculates gas absorption and release, no decompression limits and decompression stops. Haldane judged that fi ve compartments were adequate. More would have been fi ne, but in Haldane’s day, all math was done by hand, so each extra compartment would have added hours of laborious calculations. Today, computers handle these calculations with ease, so modern Haldanean models have as many as 14 compartments.