The failure of the Tacoma Bridge: A physical model
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
The cause of the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge has been a topic of much debate and confusion over the years. Many mischaracterizations of the observed phenomena have limited the understanding of the collapse even though there has always been an abundance of evidence in favor of a negative damping model. Negative damping, or positive feedback, is responsible for large amplitude oscillations in many systems, from musical instruments to the Tacoma Narrows Bridge failure. We discuss some of the more well known examples of positive feedback, and then show how the interaction of the wind with the oscillating bridge, especially the development of large scale vortices above and below the deck of the bridge, led to such a positive feedback instability. We support our model by computational, experimental, and historical data.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it