I used to be roommates with an engineering student who wrote his thesis on the restoration of a famous bell (I can't go into details as the fact the bell was defunct at all wasn't public information). They talked to experts in the field and read a boatload of theory. The restoration succeeded but everyone held their breath when the bell was first struck again with public attention.<p>There is a lot going into the science of how bells work. There are charts and diagrams and tables and fancy formulas, there are endless simulations, there are standards for measuring resonance, changes in density, impurities and whatever.<p>However, it's all meaningless. It's technically impossible for the foreseeable future to predict how a bell will sound if struck for the first time. We can with some degree of accuracy predict how likely it is to crack or how quickly it will degrade and we know how to make bells that will sound a certain way based on centuries (if not millenia) of practical experience. But in the same way we know Aspirin helps with headaches but don't have the science or technology to understand why and how the effect could be replicated, "bell science" is mostly informed by practical experience and niche cultural knowledge not the kind of stuff you can actually find in engineering papers.