Sounds like you are an old-school spectroscopist. Nowadays we design the instruments so you don't need chemistry or physics knowledge to run them and get good answers. They are designed for bus drivers and waiters/waitresses. No, I am not joking.Dooh !
If course, that's what resonance is all about, isn't it ?
OT Alert !
Sigh ... nostalgia again !
I miss the old Baird Atomic Differential IR that we ran at a Lube Oil Testing Lab where I worked as an intern in the early 70's.
We eventually got an IBM FTIR in the early 80's which did all the tedius stuff for us but it was very satisfying to be able to filter out the known components in a sample, a little at a time 'by hand' by identifying them in 'the book' ( dang, I've forgotten the name of that 6-inch thick book of IR Scans )
Dr Jordan, my boss, taught me a ton and he was fun to work with on that spectrometer !
-- kjh
No 6" book these days. The library is built into the software, and includes deconvolution to split out mixtures in the sample.
Lube sampling is done on Inductively Coupled Plasma spectrometers these days. Our ICP-OES does something like 73 elements in 25 seconds.