You can not hear the mass of a homology class (Q909253)

Let M be a compact Riemannian manifold. The mass of a homology class is roughly the minimum volume of any cycle in that class. The shape of a manifold is the function which assigns to each homology class its mass. The authors focus on a particular 6-dimensional manifold M and a 1- parameter family of isospectral metrics \(g_ t\) discovered by \textit{C. S. Gordon} and \textit{E. N. Wilson} [J. Differ. Geom. 19, 241-256 (1984; Zbl 0532.58032)]. They show that the shape of the manifold varies with t; thus the shape can be used to distinguish between isospectral metrics. This has important implications for the isospectral problem in general.