Leaning Church Tower in Cologne

On the 28 of September 2004, a church tower in Cologne, Germany, began leaning because of underground cavities and construction disturbances. It is the most prominent and noted tower after the Cathedral. The lean aroused a great deal of emotional concern for the whole city, and was a focus of attention because of the apparent imminence of collapse. The tower was stabilized as quickly as possible, and the danger subsided.

Our egg hosts in Cologne, Prof. Dr. Johannes Hagel and Margot Tschapke, have an independent research program using custom random sources, from which continuous data are recorded. One of these showed strong deviations on the 28th, and this prompted an exploratory look at the GCP data and the Cologne egg. The results are shown in the following graph. I asked Johannes for his intuitions about what we might see, and he made the following comments.

What I personally expect from your curve comes (1) from the basic hypothesis of our project that "Events of collective emotional content cause deviations in RNG's in the spatial neighbourhood to these events" and (2) from observations we made during the recent two years. One such observation is that unpreviewed events tend to cause deviations at the instant of the onset of the collective emotion. For expected events (like football matches) we observe deviations already in advance (in the order of hours).

Applying the basic hypothesis and these observations as well as our curve (mainly RNG1) we would expect a deviation of the cumulative difference [ CD = #(0) - #(1) ] starting between 7:00 and 9:00 Cologne local time since this is the period within which a large number of people learned about the event either by direct vision or by the local news. By setting the zero point say to 8:00 we would then expect the z = 2 curve to be cut within the following few hours in either the positive or the negative direction, where z(n) = sqrt(CD(n)).

If I understood your way of presentation correctly your curve z^2-1 should cut the limit of 3?

While the single egg in Cologne did not show a big response around the predicted time, There is a strong deviation of the network as a whole, and its timing is similar to the prediction. Cologne is GMT plus 2 hours, so 8:00 in Cologne corresponds to 6:00 GMT. The curve (of all eggs) shows a strong inflection at that time, and if we calculate a Z-score for the departure from zero over the next two hours, the steady negative trend does cut the 3 sigma envelope.

Leaning Church Tower in
Cologne

Here is the two hour period from 8:00 to 10:00 local time (06:00 to 08:00, GMT). The negative deviation for all eggs culminates at Z= -3.208. Leaning Church Tower in
Cologne


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