Tacoma Narrows Bridge (1940) Billah and Scanlan (1991) reported that in fact, many physics textbooks (for example Resnick et al. and Tipler et al.) wrongly explain that the cause of the failure of the Tacoma Narrows bridge was externally forced mechanical resonance. Resonance is the tendency of a system to oscillate at larger amplitudes at certain frequencies, known as the system's natural frequencies. At these frequencies, even relatively small periodic driving forces can produce large amplitude vibrations, because the system stores energy. For example, a child using a swing realizes that if the pushes are properly timed, the swing can move with a very
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"