• Corpus ID: 34695039

You Can ' t Hear the Shape of a Drum Spectral geometry yields information about geometric shapes from the vibration frequencies they produce

@inproceedings{Gordon2009YouC,
  title={You Can ' t Hear the Shape of a Drum Spectral geometry yields information about geometric shapes from the vibration frequencies they produce},
  author={Carolyn S. Gordon and David L. Webb},
  year={2009}
}

• Carolyn S. Gordon, David L. Webb
• Published 2009
• Physics

A the middle of the last century, the French philosopher Auguste Comte speculated that knowledge of the chemical composition of stars would be forever beyond the reach of science. Scarcely a decade later, however, the new science of spectroscopy was bom-and with it the ability to determine the chem­ ical makeup of stellar atmospheres. 1his development precipitated a revolution in physics. The second most abundant ele­ ment in the universe, helium, was first discovered spectroscopically in the solar atmosphere, and eventually an enor­ mous database accumulated, permitting the identification of molecules in inter­ stellar space by extraordinarily indirect means: observation of the natural vibra­ tion frequencies of a system--or, to bor­ row a metaphor from acoustics, observa­ tion of the pitches at which a molecule naturally "rings." Once the set of vibra-