Mechanical resonance Mechanical resonance Mechanical resonance is the tendency of a mechanical system to respond at greater amplitude when the frequency of its oscillations matches the system's natural frequency of vibration (its "resonance frequency" or "resonant frequency") than it does at other frequencies. It may cause violent swaying motions and even catastrophic failure in improperly constructed structures including bridges, buildings and airplanes. This is a phenomenon known as resonance disaster. Avoiding resonance disasters is a major concern in every building, tower and bridge construction project. The Taipei 101 building relies on a 660-ton pendulum—a tuned mass damper—to modify the response at resonance.
What Is it Like to Be a Bat? What Is it Like to Be a Bat? "What is it like to be a bat?" is a paper by American philosopher Thomas Nagel, first published in "The Philosophical Review" in October 1974, and later in Nagel's "Mortal Questions" (1979). In it, Nagel argues that materialist theories of mind omit the essential component of consciousness, namely that there is something that it is (or feels) like to be a particular, conscious thing. He argues that an organism has conscious mental states, "if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like "for"