He and colleagues at Cornell and other universities in the United States, Britain and Germany have devised a theory based on what happened to the Millennium Bridge to estimate how much damping or stabilization is needed in footbridges. The applied mathematician and expert on the phenomenon said collective synchronization is now something engineers will have to consider when designing bridges. That is what nobody had thought about and engineers did not anticipate." Why did they all start moving in step? They did it unconsciously. "The phenomenon was that people who were walking at random, at their own favorite speed, not organized in any way, spontaneously synchronized," said Steven Strogatz, of Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. Like phoenix it needs to be reborn.
But as large crowds walked across the steel structure on opening day in June 2000, the 1,050-foot-long (320-meter-long) bridge swayed from side to side because of a phenomenon known as collective synchronization.
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