[colechristensen]

This is a pretty... dubious refutation.

The wind excited a vibrational mode of the bridge which caused it to kind of fail and when parts started breaking more modes were activated and it fell apart.

It's being sold as this gotcha! it's a myth! it wasn't _really_ resonant frequency!

And like... I studied aerospace structures... sure "flutter" is a bit of a better explanation, but saying "resonance" is a myth is a bit silly. Complex structures have lots of vibration modes. The first fundamental frequency can be picked usually and called _THE Resonance Frequency_ or whatever, but it's not like something anybody really places that much emphasis on being the boss in charge of all the vibration.

Myth != terminology nitpick in a layman's explanation

But you get a lot of layman going around correcting people and calling things myths.

It's like Internet people arguing about "just a theory", nobody who actually does science really cares at all about the precise meaning of the word "theory".

[WalterBright]

The movie of the galloping bridge looked like resonant frequency to me.

Back at Caltech, the dorm halls had poured concrete walls. Naturally, some students got a signal generator, a power amplifier, some speakers, and installed the speakers at the node of one of the halls (the halfway point).

Then turned it on, and tuned the frequency until it matched the resonant frequency of the hall. The energy in the halls quickly built up until the entire building was going whomp whomp whomp. Except that the frequency was too low to hear.

You just got a feeling that something was very very wrong. Residences would come out of their rooms wondering what the heck was going on.

A fine prank!

Of course, that was exciting the resonant response with a driving resonance frequency, which is not what happened at the Tacoma Narrows bridge, which had a different way of exciting it as already explained.