PIRSA:24050073

The Tacoma Narrows bridge collapse, 1940

Unruh, B. (2024). The Tacoma Narrows bridge collapse, 1940. Perimeter Institute. https://pirsa.org/24050073

Unruh, Bill. The Tacoma Narrows bridge collapse, 1940. Perimeter Institute, May. 09, 2024, https://pirsa.org/24050073 

          @misc{ pirsa_PIRSA:24050073,
            doi = {10.48660/24050073},
            url = {https://pirsa.org/24050073},
            author = {Unruh, Bill},
            keywords = {Cosmology},
            language = {en},
            title = {The Tacoma Narrows bridge collapse, 1940},
            publisher = {Perimeter Institute},
            year = {2024},
            month = {may},
            note = {PIRSA:24050073 see, \url{https://pirsa.org}}
          }

Bill Unruh

University of British Columbia

Talk number
PIRSA:24050073
Collection
Talk Type
Subject
Abstract

4 months after it opened, the Tacoma Narrows bridge, one of the world's
longest suspension bridges at the time, collapsed spectacularly in the first
storm that hit it. Though it was built to exceed all of the standrds at the
time, something  clearly went wrong. The failure was filmed from almost the
beginning to the end (about 1 hour), and that film has been shown to almost
all first year physics or engineering classes as an example of resonance, that
explanation is clearly nonsense. What happened? Why did it collapse. The
explanation is closely linked to, for example, the reason that clarinets or
flutes, or even violins, make their music. With Daniel Green (whom you may
remember from his time at Toronto) we were able to show in detail what
happened.