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The Walls of Jericho - Could They Have Fallen as the Bible Describes?
The Battle of Jericho is one of the more astonishing stories in the Bible. Some guys march around a city, tootle their horns, the walls fall, and they storm in. Of course, scientific thinking proves that story is totally implausible ... or does it?
We know quite a bit today about scientific principles unknown at the time of the Israelites' attack on Jericho. Specifically, the Jericho story references the principle of resonance: mechanical resonance and acoustic resonance, the two forces that collapsed the walls of Jericho.
Basically, when two objects that are touching each other vibrate together, the result can be increased vibrations or decreased vibrations, depending on the frequency at which each object is vibrating. Vibrations can increase to the point of destroying the objects vibrating.
The Angers Bridge in Angers, France, collapsed on 18 April 1850 when 478 French
soldiers marched across in lockstep; 226 soldiers died in the river below. "Because the soldiers were marching together, they caused the bridge to vibrate and twist from side to side, dislodging an anchoring cable from its concrete mooring." [read more]
The Manhattan Bridge reacted dynamically to two recent mass pedestrian exoduses from
the island. The cables groaned and the bridge swayed visibly from side to side as masses of pedestrians crossed the bridge after 9-11 and again during the blackout of 2003. "Contrary to logic, pedestrian traffic is actually heavier than vehicular traffic. Pack people into the same square footage of a car or SUV, and the humans weigh more than the vehicle. What's more, pedestrian movement interacts with a bridge - vibrating it, in the words of several engineers - in a much more chaotic and little understood way. While cars and trucks move their weight in a smooth, uniform manner, pedestrians constantly shift weight from side to side and strike the bridge in an up-and-down motion. Witnesses observed the bridge reacting to both types of pedestrian stress on the day of the blackout. "Allan McRobie, a lecturer in engineering at Cambridge, says flatly that bridges are not designed for the dynamics of crowd interaction . He called pedestrian traffic and bridge engineering "a gray area" where a complex web of action and reaction is at work. "The basic point is that engineers don't know what happens when a crowd walks over a bridge," he says. "Ochsendorf of M.I.T. says he wondered about the bridge's load and reaction when he watched the blackout coverage on television. For a decade, engineers have learned how foot traffic vibrates a bridge. "The problem of lateral vibration has been noted for more than a century, but no one has become concerned about it as a design problem until the last couple of years." " from Point of Collapse
direction by their oscillator, and they reportedly felt the bridge shaking many yards away, there were no "earth shattering" effects. It is worth indicating that, in the time of the event undertaken by Tesla, buildings were not built to withstand such resonance. from Wikipedia
MythBusters: PLAUSIBLE
Will lockstep marching break a bridge? There were some difficulties in testing this myth conclusively. During the first test, Jamie made 12 air-powered marching soldiers, but they moved too slowly. During the second and third tests, the soldiers stomped too hard on the bridge, causing the bridge to collapse without any harmonic vibration.
Was It a Miracle? Miracles are not contrary to nature, but only contrary to what we know about nature. ~ St. Augustine