Science fail 3: supporters of NIST physics still relying on faith, foggy notions, over logic

jas wrote:

Oh, a rapid global failure produced by asymmetrical, local damage. Like magic rocks?

No, I don't believe that jrootham was saying that. Perhaps you should reread jrootham's posts. (S)he was discussing the fact that if the entire block of upper stories fell in one small spot, the energy from the fall would be concentrated there and cause a lot of damage to that specific area.

It is a logical claim, in my opinion.

jas wrote:

You don't seem to understand burden of proof. What you're failing to recognize is that the thread that I started is asking for your (or anyone else's) proof that the magic rock does keep away tigers, i.e., that buildings commonly implode into themselves at the rate of near free fall [i]through the force of gravity alone[/i]. The entire purpose of this thread, and the six preceding it, is to ask for the scientific evidence, the physical principles upon which this ridiculous claim is based. No one has yet provided it. Moreover, you have no historical evidence to back this claim up, but you're asking [i]me[/i] to find it for you. That's not my job, and furthermore, I know there is no such evidence. If you disagree, you're the one who needs to produce it, not me.

The information has already been provided. The NIST reports for you to look at are already available. We have even done so in the preceding thread. Would you like the links to them again?

Moreover, they did not collapse through gravity alone. There was also substantial fire damage as well as the damage caused directly by the impact of the planes.

jas wrote:

I have never made this claim.

I'm sorry, but I though you had. I reread the part that made me think that you had claimed that and I see now that I may have been confused.

jas wrote:

Yes, that is the first logical thing you've said. Are you aware that the fire is cited as a major causal factor in NIST's explanation? Are you saying that you now agree with the premise of this topic--that the NIST explanation is untenable? If so, then perhaps we're making progress.

Please quote the relevant text from the NIST report. From what I understand, there is no indication that the NIST claims that all floors would have suffered fire damage. I was under the impression that the claim is that fire damage was partly responsible for the initial collapse, but did not affect the lower floors that were crushed solely by the weight of the falling upper floors.

By the way, I'm not really engaging with you.  I'm just laying down a trail of evidence to show that not everyone on this site is fucking stupid.

Alright, cut out the oblique personal attacks jrootham and Fidel.

The word "evidence" in this thread has acquired an almost mystical, divine meaning.

jas wrote:

Actually, you would need to provide either a specific quote from the NIST report, or be able to reference a specific section of the report where it clearly explains what removed the resistance of 90 and 78 floors of concrete and steel highrise (we'll leave WTC7 out of this for now) so that they would descend within seconds of free fall. Because from what I've read, it's not in there. If you go back through all the other recent threads, this has always been my first and main question. OK? Burden of proof is on you, here.

And while you're at it, you might want to provide the evidence showing that buildings commonly experience rapid and total collapse after having suffered upper floor damage and office fires of 90 minutes or less. Thanks.

I have a whole PDF that provides clear equations discussing every aspect of the collapse:

http://www.crono911.net/docs/Bazant2007.pdf

I will quote from the conclusion:

Conclusions
Several of the parameters of the present mathematical model have a large range of uncertainty.
However, the solution exhibits small sensitivity to some of them, and the values of others can
be fixed based on observations or physical analysis. One and the same mathematical model,
with one and the same set of parameters, is shown capable of matching all of the observations,
including: (1) the video records of the first few seconds of motion of both towers, (2) the
seismic records for both towers, (3) the mass and size distributions of the comminuted particles
of concrete, (4) the energy requirement for the comminution that occurred, (5) the wide spread
of the fine dust around the tower, (6) the loud booms heard during collapse, (7) the fast
expansion of dust clouds during collapse, and (8) the dust content of cloud implied by its size.
At the same time, the alternative allegations of some kind of controlled demolition are shown to
be totally out of range of the present mathematical model, even if the full range of parameter
uncertainties is considered. These conclusions show the allegations of controlled demolition to
be absurd and leave no doubt that the towers failed due to gravity-driven progressive collapse
triggered by the effects of fire.

Bolding mine for emphasis.

To answer your specific question about what removed the resistance, I can only answer that no resistance was removed except on the floors where the airplanes impacted. On those floors, the impact of the planes caused extensive structural damage to the core, many of the perimeter columns, and a large part of the floor deck. it also removed a large portion of the fireproofing on the remaining intact structure. The fire caused by the jet fuel weakened the steel dramatically, which then led to the collapse of the remaining structure on the impacted floors. This collapse then led to the subsequent total building collapse.

To summarise, the removal of the fireproofing and the jet-fuel fire weakened the already overloaded structure left intact after the jet impact. This "removed the resistance" of the structure, but only on the floors hit by the planes.

As for the demands showing that buildings commonly experience total collapse after having suffered upper floor damage and and office fires, I would like to point out that the WTC buildings would not have collapsed if those were the only two causes of collapse. There are also two other important facts that need to be addressed: the removal of the fire proofing caused by the impact of the planes, and the destruction of the sprinkler system due to the same impact.

The 9/11 was not the second attack on the WTC. The place had become a case study in civil engineering in 'security hardening'. The fourth attack, an aborted AMFO attack in the basement brought up architectual ablative structures in building defense(attack 4)( lessons that were not applied to the death of hundreds of marines in Africa at an "Embassy'). I, too, actually laughed at first when I saw that creative way to supply that amout of fuel that high in a building that fast BUT those two thousand firemen, cops, janitors, office skeleton staff were all salt of the earth people like me. Thank god #7 went down with less loss of life. But, the planes did not bring the three buildings down. The number of contradictions continues to expand and the profits of KBR keep growing.

E.P.Houle wrote:

PoD, Within minutes of watching the "towers" show I was looking at the specs on Bldg. 7 and the 2x600 gal fuel tanks on the 7th floor(14th?). I did not see a 747 parked in the basement. You and Fidel are arguing in two different courts; Fidel proves overwhelming holes in the NIST case, he is in the court trying the credibility of NIST but you are defending NIST in the court of criminal liability. It's interesting that in your approach that the missing steel beams were the first evidence off the property when they could show clearly the cut marks and settle this. I've seen the photo but I cannot email it to you, it seems to be missing.

I'm sorry, but I have no idea what you are trying to say.

jas wrote:

Your simplistic outline here demonstrates what I've suspected all along: you don't even understand the issue. For a building's top floors to descend through its lower floors in the time that they did and in the manner that the official theory states it did, resistance has to be removed. It's a law of nature and matter that even NIST accepts. It is false, illogical and idiotic to suggest that the buildings collapsed as they did, with nevertheless all 91 and 78 floors presenting the normal resistive force that one would expect of a steel-frame highrise. This is the whole crux of the argument, which you seem to chronically not understand.

If you were going to suggest that the buildings presented normal resistance in their descent, you might have done it in post #1 so we wouldn't have wasted all this time on you. You truly do not seem to understand what is being argued.

I do understand what you are trying to say. You are claiming that the colllpase of the two WTC towers was so rapid that it could not have been caused solely by the impact of the falling upper block of storeys, and therefore, some other factor (presumably a false flag operation by the US government) was responsible for bringing them down. This factor was responsible for demolishing the structure of the floors in such a way that all resistance was removed, thereby allowing the upper block of storeys to descend at near free fall speeds.

Is that a reasonable summary of your claim?

If not, please explain where I have misunderstood.

If it is a reaonable summary, then I must say that you make several erroneous assumptions that do not seem to correspond with reality, and are simply wrong.

You assume incorrectly that the towers collapsed at near free fall speeds.

You also assume incorrectly that the resistance provided by the structure below was enough to provide support to the descending block of upper storeys.

Quote:

As for Bazant, I notice the believers keep bringing up this article, as if it's the only article they have to go on, as if no other reputable scientist in the world would dare touch such nonsense theories. So here we go again with the Bazant debunking:

• The Missing Jolt: A Simple Refutation of the NIST-Bazant Collapse Hypothesis
• Discussion of "Progressive Collapse of the World Trade Center: A Simple Analysis" by K.A. Seffen
• Destruction of the World Trade Center North Tower and Fundamental Physics - By David Chandler
• NIST and Dr. Bazant: A Simultaneous Failure - by Gordon Ross

 

What exactly are the criticisms they have about Bazant's work?

Now, I also notice that you have posted several excerpts from several different critics of the NIST report. I will get to them as time allows, but right now my beloved is waiting for me to come to bed.

Ya, Pants isn't doing anything but deferring us to whacky theorists like Bazant, who had to change his paper a few times before JEM would finally publish it. And it was due to James Gourley pointing out errors in his work. I think it's time Pants did some explaining in his own words instead of sloughing us off to quacks like Bazant.

But that's not what the official conspiracy says, Pants. The Commission's report said the south tower collapsed in ten seconds flat. All of the Commission, Bufo Adada Bazant, FEMA and NISTers should get together and get their official conspiracy theories straight.

"It looked just like one of those controlled demolitions." - Dan Rather

lol

Reopening this thread to continue the "discussion"

jas wrote:

pyroclastic cloud

jas wrote:

Spot the difference.

Pyroclastic clouds do not exist.

When the term is used, it is usually as a synonym for pyroclastic flows. http://jersey.uoregon.edu/~mstrick/AskGeoMan/geoQuerry33.html

jas wrote:

As for the crush down theory, common sense tells you that the accreted matter would accumulate between the falling mass and the upright mass, which has to slow the falling mass down.Pulverized material does not accumulate onto the upper block. It's pulverized. It doesn't add to the "crushing power" of the falling block. If anything, it creates an obstruction to its momentum.

The accreted matter would only slow down the falling mass if it is not falling itself. Since it has already been demolished, it can not be held up by the structure anymore. Since it is not held up, it must be falling. Since it is falling, its mass counts as part of the falling mass.

The resulting mass (the original falling mass plus the addition of the accreted matter) would be slower than the velocity of the original mass, at least at the instant after collision, and before it starts accelerating to gravity. To understand the underlying physics, please look up [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inelastic_collision]inelastic collisions[/url].

jas wrote:

Furthermore, there's no logic or any precedent that says that the alleged falling block would have the power to crush down before being crushed itself.

In the video showing the two large towers being demolished using the verinage technique, the upper block clearly was capable of crushing the lower block before the upper block itself was entirely crushed.

jas wrote:

The falling block actually suffered the fire damage, so it's a weaker structure than the standing block.

Neither the upper block nor the lower block suffered fire damage. Fire damage was restricted to the floors that suffered impact from the jets. This is because skyscrapers must have separations between floors capable of resisting a fire for several hours (usually two hours).

jas wrote:

In real life,  all other things being equal, floors would be destroyed on both sides of the interface of the falling mass and the upright mass--as may have been demonstrated in your controlled demolition videos--but in the case of the WTC, with the falling block losing mass before the upright block.

Unfortunately for you, the video showing the two taller towers being destroyed by the verinage technique shows the upper block maintaing cohesion quite well.

This is the video that I am addressing in this post, by the way: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EY3nj728WPY

jas wrote:

Finally, simple physics tells you that when something has to crush through something else, energy is lost at each step - much more energy than gravity can make up for.

To crush something takes energy, but that energy is not always higher than the energy due to gravity. For example, I could easily crush an egg by simply lifting a brick above it and letting go. I could just as easily crush an egg by dropping [i]another egg[/i] onto it. Sometimes gravity can not make up the energy required to crush something. Sometimes it can.

Here is a summary of the calculations used to figure out the kinetic energy with which the upper block of storeys fell on the lower block of storeys:

Quote:

the mass of one WTC floor [is] assumed to be 1/110 the mass of an entire WTC
tower, namely m = (510,000,000 / 110) kg
...
We consider the initiating event of a WTC tower collapse to be the failure of
crucial steel support structures at the appropriate upper floor level of the building,
followed by the free fall of the entire upper block of n floors through a distance hf = one
floor height = 3.7 meters. It is readily determined using the relation v = the square root of {2gh) that the
descending upper block impacts the floor below at a velocity of 8.5 m/s.

The reason why it is important to know the initial mass and velocity is because we need to know those two numbers in order to calculate the [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_energy#Newtonian_kinetic_energy]kin... energy.[/url]
[img]http://upload.wikimedia.org/math/4/1/4/4140f53f66a68e92afec2389ba289e25....

Quote:

For one WTC floor collapsing onto a floor below, the kinetic energy immediately
before impact is
Ti = ½{510,000,000/110} x (8.5) to the power of 2 Joules
Ti = 1.67 x 10 to the 8 J
....
Since the WTC 1 collapse consisted of 14 floors
impacting the floor below, and the WTC 2 collapse involved 29 floors impacting the
floor below, we have the kinetic energy before impact,
Ti (WTC 1) = 14 x 1.67 x 10 to the 8 J = 23.4 x 10 to the 8 J
Ti (WTC 2) = 29 x 1.67 x 10 to the 8 J = 48.4 x 10 to the 8 J

Any questions so far?

My quotes come from this paper: http://www.911myths.com/WTCREPORT.pdf

Jacob Two-Two wrote:

..... It's more like an egg falling on a large upright stack of eggs. Will they all be crushed one by one through to the table? Probably not, and one could say the same about the tower.

Why not?

Jacob Two-Two wrote:

Wouldn't a section of tower falling through several times its own mass lose more energy on the way down than one falling though the same mass as itself? It makes sense to me that a section crushing itself would happen quite rapidly and not necessarily be indicative of the speed of one crushing several equal sections. Logically, I would expect the latter to move slower and continue to slow as it progressed. Mind you, I freely admit I'm not about to do the math so I'm asking you instead. :)

Oh, I understand that it is not intuitive, and I will try to show as clearly as possible how it works.

In a way, you are correct. If a car crashed into a telephone pole it would bend the pole a certain distance. If it crashed into four at the same time, it would go less of a distance. This makes sense.

Now, imagine the car rips the pole out of the ground and keeps going. Obviously, the pole will slow it down.

If it hits four poles one, after the other, it will slow down even more.

But it is important to note that the amount of energy stays the same. Energy is a product of mass and velocity, so if the mass increases, the velocity decreases, but the amount of energy stays the same. In our example, we would add poles (more mass), the car would slow down (less velocity), but the car would still burn the same amount of gas (equal energy).

So, in the WTC collapse, the successive floors would slow down the falling (and ever increasing) mass.

But there is one important difference between our car on the ground and our building falling down: acceleration due to gravity. After each impact, the mass would slow down because of the added mass, but would then accelerate due to gravity. If you want to go back to the car example, imagine it plowing through a series of telephone poles as it drives down a ski slope.

I hope that clarifies things on a non-mathematical level. Later on, I will show the math behind this, but right now, I have to get my beloved to bed.

Pants-of-dog wrote:

Fidel wrote:

[url=http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=19891]NIST ommitted, falsified, and fabricated evidence[/url] by Prof. David Ray Griffin

Very little, if any, of that website has anything to do with collapse times.

Well you're WRONG again. Because that article mentions that NIST first denied, then admitted WTC7 fell at free fall rate of collapse and in the empirical sense not "qualitative" or any other goofy terms you might decide to splice into the official conspiracy narrative.

Well it's just that NIST eventually had to admit Sunder's original "qualitative" claim that WTC7 took longer than free fall had to be scrapped because it was at odds with established Newtonian laws of physics as well as video evidence of the collapse. In other words, NIST's original conspiracy theory was revealed to be bullshit thanks to 1200+ architects and engineers for 9/11 Truth, a group which, coincidentally, has 25,000 combined years of professional experience.

Pants-of-dog wrote:

Fidel wrote:

Well it's just that NIST eventually had to admit Sunder's original claim that WTC7 took longer than free fall had to be scrapped because it was at odds with established Newtonian laws of physics as well as video evidence of the collapse. In other words, NIST's original conspiracy theory was revealed to be bullshit thanks to 1200+ architects and engineers for 9/11 Truth, a group which, coincidentally, has 25,000 combined years of professional experience.

Fidel, you make a lot of unsupported and irrelevant claims.

But the claim which you say is unsupported is now stated to be true by NIST themselves. So you're WRONG again. What part of the word WRONG don't you understand?

Pants-of-dog wrote:

If you want people to believe what you are saying, then I strongly suggest you clarify exaclty what your claim is, provide some sort of logical argument for that claim, and provide evidence that your argument is true.

If you can't keep up with the discussion wrt NIST's original lies and deception regarding WTC7 now thoroughly debunked by 1200+ A&Es for truth, then perhaps you should just admit that you don't know and leave it at that. Or get back to us when you do discover what the new and improved official conspiracy says.

[url=http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20080829205835711]'Debunking NIST's Conclusions About WTC 7 is as Easy as Shooting Fish in a Barrel' and other Responses to 8/21/08 NIST Briefing on WTC7[/url]

You seem to be having the same problem with empiricist use of the term free fall that NIST used to experience similarly before their whacky collapse theory was debunked by 1200 plus A&Es for 9/11 truth. If you want to argue against what NIST has since admitted to, then be our guest.

And if you have anymore questions about what NIST has backtracked on over the last several years, just ask.  Jas and I sometimes find it difficult to keep up with your lack of understanding surrounding these issues in general without having to tutor you on each and every detail. You should think about paying us.

Fidel wrote:

And which web page have you shamelessly plagiarized now?

Thank you for reminding me.

The equations were taken from here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inelastic_collision#Perfectly_inelastic_col...

The mass and the distance are from the same link as my [url=http://www.rabble.ca/comment/1156932/Here-summary]previous[/url] post.

That information, again, is here:

http://www.911myths.com/WTCREPORT.pdf

Fidel wrote:

....Because after you claimed to fully understand Manuel Garcia's non-existent calculation for instantaneous time interval for duration of impact, we just don't trust you. Not really.

Here is where I specifically address the fact that Garcia does not mention how he came to that exact number:

http://www.rabble.ca/comment/1149152/Fidel-wrote-And-there-were

Since I addressed how he did not explain how he came up with that number, I hazarded two guesses. First I assumed that we were dealing with essentially rigid structures, and Bazant's work seems to confirm that, and secondly, I assumed that (s)he posited a relativley short impact time because impacts are, by defintion, very short.

If you feel that any of these two assumptions have been disproven in the course of the debate, please link me to the post.

My comments were in the same post where I point out that Griscom (the person criticisng Garcia) also never showed how (s)he came up with a longer impact time.