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
Precursor (physics) a period corresponding to that of the highest-frequency component of the original impulse; with increasing time, components with lower and lower frequencies arrive, so the period of the precursor becomes longer and longer until the lowest-frequency component arrives. As more and more components arrive, the amplitude of the precursor also increases. The particular type of precursor characterized by increasing period and amplitude is known as the high-frequency Sommerfeld precursor. In a region of anomalous dispersion, where low-frequency components have faster group velocities than high-frequency ones, the opposite of the above situation occurs: the onset of the precursor is characterized by