Biochemistry: Wald and Brown

(P being the pulsation period) could, therefore, assume any value. Moreover, if the disturbing force were periodic, a resonance of the free and forced periods would be immediately established and the amplitude of the oscillation greatly enhanced. Second-order effects, ignored in the present investigation, would thus probably soon become appreciable and could operate to destroy the resonance. Should they fail, however, to do so, the only way in which a star built up according to our model could escape from its predicament would be through a gradual change of its whole internal structure which would convert it into another model characterized by a discrete spectrum of eigen-frequencies, or the old model might drift out of the region of continuous frequency spectrum. Barring such an escape in time, however, the consequences of any periodic disturbance of the configurations built up according to our model might become conspicuous, or even cataclysmic-whatever the period of the disturbing force. The extent to which any such phenomena may actually occur in Nature must, however, be left for future investigations to decide.