WTC collapses discussion thread IV

jas, I'm done with your mindreading, insults and triumphalism. Happy circles!

I wish I could read minds...

Then again, maybe not.

Sigh, I'm going to repeat my posts from the tail end of the previous thread:

jas: a house of cards built from sheets of glass (and joined with pieces of tape) will collapse if bumped, and it will destroy (crush or smash or whatever word you want to use) itself under its own weight. There are plenty of other examples of conceivable configurations of materials that will collapse under their own weight. If there weren't we wouldn't need engineers to build buildings.

Also, you have repeatedly claimed that the WTC were built to withstand forces of 2000% of their static weight. NIST claims that it was only 500% for the outer columns and 300% for the central core.

I wish you could stop trying.

This is so humorous, I can hardly write my reply.

The house of cards analogy is Pants', not mine.

Can you name some in which the upper part crushes through a larger, lower section? That is all I'm asking.

About dt:

Pants-of-dog, I think your argument about a constant or varying v is beside the point. Garcia uses v(initial)=-7.7m/s and dv=.5m/s. He then says that for the floors to fail, they (or any portion of them) need to be deflected by only ~7cm=~.07m. The time for this to occur is not more than the distance divided by the slowest velocity, which is ~0.01s.

Fidel, the dt in Garcia is the time for the floor to break, not the time for the entire tilted floor to pass through the position held by the lower floor before the lower floor broke. Thus, the argument using trigonometry is completely irrelevant. (Pants is basically right on this point. I'm not sure if the mod's agree with him or simply don't want to take a side in an honest argument. It's simply not fair to call Pants-of-dog a troll for disagreeing with you.)

(I'm using ~ to mean approximately. In this case, not off by more than 10%. Since there can never be complete certainty in estimate, this is commonly used in this sort of discussion. I expect this will be familiar to most readers, but I've not seen it used on the boards before, so I thought I'd say it now to avoid confusion.)

Wineglasses stacked a hundred million miles high. The same with panes of glass if you use them to build a house of cards. Bjorkman claimed that no possible physical configuration of objects will allow for the top part to crush the lower part. There are many, many such configurations. As I said, this is why we need engineers.

Hang on there, pardner.

What do you mean by "Wineglasses stacked a hundred million miles high"? How many upper wine glasses would be crushing through how many lower ones, and how would this occur?

Please explain also how a "house of cards" built with panes of glass would crush through itself from the top down with the removal of a few panes of glass, leaving a rubble pile of broken glass.

Bjorkman claimed that no type of construction can crush the same type of construction. I assume that we all agree that a tower of wine glasses (or glass sheets) a hundred million miles high will crush itself under its own weight.

I didn't make any claim about upper and lower blocks, but, since you asked, I'll have a go.

There's a house of cards built of sheets of glass. Let's say nice big sheets. They are artfully balanced on top of each other, so that at each point where the balanced sheets of glass meet, the two lower pieces support the weight of one or two horizontal pieces, the two upright upper pieces above them, and the weight of the house of cards above. I remove one of the horizontal pieces. Let's say, above half way, but not right at the top. The sheets that were resting on it start to fall. All the ones above them start to fall. The two that initially started to fall hit the lower uprightl pieces beneath them. Glass is not too bad at supporting weight or resisting force edge on, but if you hit it in the middle of the pane, it smashes. The lower upright pieces shatter. The other horizontal pieces they were supporting start to fall. All the unsupported upright pieces above them start to fall. These new upright pieces smash into the middle of the horizontal planes of glass that used to be a full layer beneath them. These upright pieces, or others, or the pieces of the smashed horizontal pieces smash through the next set of even lower upright pieces. The falling upper layers continue to smash the horizontal layers on the lowel levels. Sometimes the falling sheets break two, but there's plenty of other falling sheets, and a even half or a quarter of a falling sheet can smash a horizontal sheet of glass. The whole lower structure is crushed from the top down. There are panes of glass falling everywhere. Some of them smash into lower sheets of glass. Some of them hit each other while falling and shatter eachother. Some of them fall off the side and smash to pieces when they hit the ground.

(Sorry this got a bit complicated in the middle. I had to take into account that a house of cards has a triangular lattice.)

It's a house of cards; once it starts to fall; it's all going to come down. It's made of glass; the pieces break when they hit each other or the ground. It's a house of cards made of glass. How can you imagine that if you remove a couple sheets of glass you are going to end up with anything other than a pile of broken glass?

Does this look like "crushing" to you?

Why do you assume this? Why does the tower need to be a hundred million miles high?

Yes, glass impacting other glass will shatter. It does not crush through itself. Your examples are really reaching but still not quite making it.

Pants, where is the upper block in this picture? It sure looks awful short to me. What do you think?

Pants, where is the upper block in this picture? It sure looks awful short again....

Pants, does the official hypothesis work without an upper block piledriver?

Crushing, huh?

Is this really the only example you can come up with?

Glass? What about steel? It's a lot stronger than glass or a house of cards. Bjorkman says the trade towers were basically tall bird cages framed with steel and overall density of the buildings about the same as wool considering the amount of fresh air between floors. And there were about half a million tons of steel in each tower. Bjorkman says that one-fifth of a steel structure can not annihilate the other 80% of the same steel frame structure by gravity alone.

Yes, and even glass will not produce a top-driven collapse.

Bjorkman made a claim. Logically speaking, I need only one counter-example to refute it.

Still, if you like them, here's some more. Fans of TV's "The Big Bang Theory" will remember "You are forgetting the square-cube law. An ant the size of an elephant would crush itself under its own weight."  (An ant might be able to lift many times its own weight and fall distances many times its own body length, but an elephant cannot, because as things get bigger. they might get stronger in absolute terms, but, relative to their size, they get much weaker. This is a point that is worth remembering, when you consider how incredibly strong you think the WTC was.) More things that collapse under their own weight: A star before just before it goes supernova. My bread dough when I leave it to rise and forget to knock it back. A life-size replica of the WTC built entirely out of chocolate. A life-size replica of the WTC with all the metal beams replaced by concrete. Exact replicas of the WTC stacked on top of each other a hundred million miles high. An avalanche. A land-slide. The giant sink holes that opened in Guatemala.

Avalanches and (some) land-slides start at the top.

Does anyone remember if the Guatemalan sink holes started at the top?

Anyway, the point remains. Bjorkman claims no type of structure can crush through itself. There are many. If you want to see the same phenomenon with concrete and steel, it's just a matter of building something large and hollow enough.

I see. Thank you.

The upper block in those pictures is behind the dust cloud. If it is tilting away from the photographer, foreshortening would make it appear smaller than it was. If the photographer was substantially lower than the upper block, the upper block would be even more foreshortened.

As I have said, the term "crush-up/crush-down" is a shorthand phrase, not a comprehensive description. The photos depicting toppling exterior columns verify the claims I have already made in this regard. Thank you for providing evidence for my claims. The fact that these columns topled outward means that the upper block did not need to buckle (or crush, if you prefer) all the exterior columns. The same could be said for the core columns. Obviously, there would be very little (if any) photo or video evidence for core column toppling.

I have never read the phrase "upper block pile driver" except in your posts. I would like you to define it clearly before I make a decision as to what the "official report" says.

Think of a hammer smashing a dinner plate and without any tilting of the hammer face whatsoever. Our carpenter is from Finland and never-ever tilts his hammer just for argument's sake.

Now imagine you're on planet earth where Newtonian laws of gravity are in play, and the upper block of WTC2 tilted by as much as 23 degrees according to several different video recordings.

Please do not quote my posts unles you are somehow replying to them.

Thank you.

Pile driver, hammer -  what's the difference, Pants? Or is there a quantum explanation for the dual hammer-dinner plate effect of some sort? Spooky. It's as if steel buildings were made of glass, or a house of cards so to speak.

I agree that you and Griscom used the same trigonometric argument to calculate dt. The dt that both of you calculated is a measure of the length of time a tilted, falling floor would take to pass through the position original held by a lower, stationary floor. What is needed for Garcia's equation is the time it takes for a portion of the falling material to break the portion of the floor that was directly beneath it. These are different.

As you said, Garcia omits any mention of the angle. This is because it doesn't affect the time he estimates for the falling material to break the portion of the floor that it is falling on.

I forgot to add: Garcia does explain where he got 0.01s from. It's an upper bound on the length of time that it would take for he falling material to deform and the break the floor that it is falling on. To estimate this time, he uses some measures of the strength of steel and stuff like that. I'm not sure I buy his argument, so I'd be perfectly willing to think about any objections that you might raise to it. There might be a problem with his argument, but the problem does not involve the trigonometry of tilted floors.

Tilting of the upper block would effect duration of impact absolutely. As Griscom said, impact occurs in a straight line on the point of impact. If the concrete slab is tilted by just one degree, then the impact has to begin with the low end of the slab and march 64 meters to the high end of the floor.

But none of this would matter for several reasons. Bazant claims that the upper block imparted a 30 g dynamic load on the lower block after an unimpeded free fall of 3 metres. Tony Szamboti said he originally read about the 30 g dynamic load and didn't think anything more of it. That was until his mechanical engineering experience kicked-in. He realized that Newton's laws of motion and gravity do not support Bazant's hypothesis. For a 30 g dynamic load to break through the floor below, there would have to be both a loss of velocity and deceleration. Garcia admits to a loss of velocity of 0.5/m/s. Szamboti says there should have been veleocity loss of 5.3m/s and deceleration of 304m/s^2 after a jolt for which there was no opposing jolt as per Newton's third law and conservation of momentum. And Szamboti's inclusion of calculations for just three energy sinks are most conservative by his own admittal. There were probably more energy drains on the initial impulse. A 30g dynamic force should have destroyed the upper block after the initial impulse, and which it most likely did, and which photographic evidence tends to suggest actually happened. Rigid upper block as pile driver is very probably a US government endorsed whitewash of what really happened on 9/11.

Once the lower floor is broken, it's not clear to me that it offers any resistance. I'm not saying I believe in a rigid upper block model, but if we were to take that model, I would assume that anyone who has used a knife will recognise that it is easier to cut through with the sharp point end first and then slide across, rather than use the entire blade in one go. According to the  trigonometric argument put forward by Griscom, it should always be easier to use the whole blade all at once.

If you can imagine a knife that is 64 metres long and tens of metres wide, I suppose it might be more realistic. Could you handle a knife that long?  A knife is designed to slice through meat, fish, bread, and maybe some cheese. 250 steel columns and steel flooring girders are a lot more substantial than a fish fillet or chicken sandwich. A credible theory for collapse initiation has to satisfy Newtonian laws of physics. None of the four or five variations on NIST pancaking through pile driver theories do though. And that's the problem. More information is needed, A new investigation should happen, like there were subsequent investigations into the death of just one man murdered on Novemeber 22nd, 1963. The last official US Government investigation into JFK's murder concluded that Oswald probably did not act alone and that it probably was a conspiracy.

PB66, you do not seem to understand the concept. We are not talking about things crushing under their own weight, The Twin Towers did not crush under their own weight; if they did, we would have seen a large upper block crushing a smaller, weaker lower block. Instead, the official theory asks us to believe that a smaller, weaker upper block crushed the larger, stronger lower block. This is not something being crushed under its own weight. None of your examples are applicable.

No. There are none. Your examples miss the point entirely.

An avalanche, as we already discussed in previous threads, does not crush vertically through rock. It does not crush vertically through the earth. It flows over these things.

You have not provided any example of top-down crushing of something by a smaller something of the same matter and density. Nor has Pants. Do you know why you haven't? Because there isn't one.

Please provide evidence for this statement. Don't worry - there's more to this you'll need to explain.

Please cite where Bazant makes the claim that I have bolded.

As I said above, I don't dispute that things were ejected outwards. This is what could happen if crushing were actually occurring--obviously, on a lesser scale. This would also happen with other events occurring. It's not a game of semantics, Pants. Bazant uses the term "crush" because he has no other choice. It's still grossly inaccurate.

Do you know what "upper block" means?

Do you know what "piledriver" means?

Do you understand that the theory you are defending claims that the upper blocks crush through the intact buildings, effectively serving as piledrivers? If you don't like the terms "piledriver" or "crushing down", what term would you use to describe what the upper blocks (in your theory) are doing to the intact bulk of the building.

That's right, Jas. Even if the 12 floors of WTC1 did remain intact as a "rigid upper block", it still could not have crushed the other 80 percent of the much more massive and stronger part of itself. However, video evidence does not support the rigid upper block theory. There was no significant deceleration, which means that there was no crushing of the lower block occurring, and Newton's laws of nature were "circumvented" in some way on 9/11/01.

But it did. The top section of the towers fell onto one floor, then that floor and the original block fell onto the next floor, etc., etc.

- one of the obvious questions people seem to be missing is - if you want the upper block to fall onto 'one floor' of the lower block - how is that it's not only one floor of the upper block impacting one floor of the lower block, and thus one floor of the lower disentigrates, and one floor of the upper?? Exactly the same 'physics' would apply, wouldn't they? (I'll understand if you avoid this, as there's no actual 'physics' readily discernible anywhere in this whole redqueen "I make whatever rules I want!!!' discussion ... )

PB66 understands perfectly. PB66 needed only one example to show that Bjorkman's axiom is not universally applicable. (S)he has provided several. So have I.

Please provide evidence that the upper block has disintegrated.

My evidence is that you see the upper block before it falls. Assuming the mass does not magically disappear, the upper block must still be there. Of course, it is possible that it has been reduced to rubble, but the mass of the falling rubble would still conceivably had a pile-driver effect. But it probably was not turned to rubble, as Bazant has shown in his equations concerning velocity of the shock wave.

You have yet to provide any evidence that the upper block crumbled. Please provide it now.

No. The only inaccurate thing is your depiction of Bazant's model as some sort of claim that the towers were universally pulverised.

A pile driver is a specific tool used by pile installers. It hammers the pile into the ground. The pile is then buried vertically, and intact.

Since you are not claiming that the WTC towers are actually perfectly intact and buried in the earth at ground zero, you are obviously using "pile-driver" in some sort of metaphor.

I would say that the upper block destroyed the lower storeys, or hammered them perhaps.

Please provide evidence for any of these claims.

There are two reasons.

One is that the rubble between th eupper block and lower block would have cushioned the impact between the upper block and lower block.

The second is more complicated, and deals with the velocity of the crushing fronts going up and going down. Bazant shows how the velocity of the wave going up into the upper block decelerated very swiftly.

The mathematical evidence for an essentially rigid upper block of storeys begins at the bottom of page 15/29, and ends on the subsequent page. The figure 9 that Bazant mentions during the mathematical discussion is on page 29/29.

http://wtc7lies.googlepages.com/Bazant_WTC_Collapse_What_Did__Did_No.pdf

When I look at my cat from a certain angle, she has no head. My cat has no head!

(And yet she meows! Damn you, all-powerful United States of America! Why?)

Writer, I wanted to thank you for the videos you posted. They were very informative.

If you need help finding your cat's head, let me know.

.

If you think either you or PB66 have provided any examples of a top-driven crushing down then your understanding of physics is much poorer than I thought. Of course, your tripod example was the first indicator of this.

I'm sorry, but you simply haven't.

I already did. Look at the picture.

This is not evidence. Common sense physics tells us that the upper block would have been partly turned to rubble and arrested in its descent. This is what Ross and Chandler and Bjorkman and Jones and Griffin and Ryan and hundreds of other people in the scientific and engineering communities have stated, and what we've been arguing for weeks and months now.

Since the upper blocks are clearly not visible in the above photos, the visual evidence supports the physical principle. Newtonian physics has once again been proven correct.

As for your statement that I've bolded, rubble would not be able to piledrive 80 and 90 floors of intact concrete and structural steel. If you want to now shift the argument this way, i.e., that it's rubble that crushes the 80 and 90 intact floors, then you'll need to acknowledge that you are now no longer supporting the Bazant/NIST hypothesis, not to mention that your argument won't hold up for even the length of time it will take you to argue it.

I don't recall using the term "universally pulverized". Those goalposts really are portable, aren't they?

Thank you for confirming the definition we have been using for about a dozen threads now.

My original question was: does the Bazant/NIST hypothesis work without an upper block? It's obvious that it does not.

Bjorkman's axiom, that you paraphrased, is that a small portion of a structure cannot cause a global collapse by falling onto a larger structure made the same way.

This is not universally true. Exceptions to Bjorkman's axiom are a house of cards, a structure of wineglasses stacked a hundred million miles high, an exact replica of the WTC made of chocolate, etc.

You have exluded some of these examples and others because they do not "crush" through the lower structure, but destroy the lower structure in oher ways. This contradicts the first post you made on this page where you claim that "crush-down" includes many events including toppling, and does not mean solely crushing.

What is also missing, besides the fact that the fictional upper block did not "fall" through the 85% remaining structural steel core adn perimeter columns which can support load increases of up to 2000% before failing, is that in order for the fictional upper block to have any crushing or hammering effect on the lower storeys, it must absorb some of this energy itself. According to Ross, Bazant does not account for this energy loss, in addition to not accounting for the load absorption that the lower storeys would obviously be providing.

I'm not sure how or why Bazant is able to remain employed at Northwestern University. This subject alone deserves a thread of its own.

Pants, that link seems to be referring to WTC7.

I don't see an upper block in the picture, so the upper block doesn't exist.

There are no dogs in the picture. Therefore dogs don't exist.

Listing the names of people who agree with you is not an argument. When the Church was arguing with Galileo about a heliocentric solar system, most of the "experts" at the time agreed with the Church. The "experts" were wrong. Ross and the rest of them have been shown to be incorrect.

What physical principle are you talking about here?

Fast moving rubble would still cause damage. Blunderbusses were weapons like shotguns that could be loaded with anything. Put some rubble in a blunderbuss. Would you shoot yourself? No.

But I am not changing my argument. What I am doing is showing you that the rigidity of the upper block is not as important as you think it is.

I'm sorry, but that is how I thought you were defining "crushed". Since you seem to be defining "crushed" in different ways at different times, please provide a definition of what you mean by "crushed".

Well, you didn't even need me to answer the question, did you?

Now, please provide evidence that the Bazant model, or any other GC model, violates a law of physics.

No. These would not allow a top-driven gravitational collapse that pulverizes the lower portion.

The house of cards is not an example. If you want to use cards, use the analogy of a tall stack of playing cards, comprising several decks. Theoretically destroy a few cards in the upper portion of the stack. The upper stack does not crush through the remaining stack.

So sad that so many have no life.  Looking through this thread some of us laugh.  Naturally, who has time to read the nitty gritty?  Not those of us who have a life.  Looking in from my perspective, well....sad that so much time is spent on nothing!

Ross is wrong. He makes the incorrect assumption that the upper block would have landed perfectly on top of the columns in the lower block. Since we know the upper blocks tilted, Ross is wrong.

If you had actually looked at the link, you would have seen the title of the work is:

What Did and Did not Cause Collapse
of WTC Twin Towers in New York.

Please provide evidence that a structure made of wine-glasses stacked a hundred million miles high would not globally collpase if you removed a million miles worth of wine-glasses two thirds of the way up.

Yes, that's right. Dogs are not in the picture. Dogs were not reportedly a component of the collapse. Thank you for confiirming what evidence is.

The one that says that things cannot crush through or pulverize other, larger things of the same matter and density via gravity alone.

Yes, rubble has the ability to cause damage. It does not crush through 80 and 90 intact storeys of a steel-framed highrise.

The upper block is integral  to the NIST/Bazant hypothesis, so yes, it is very important.

No, of course not. I was just hoping you would understand it for yourself.

LOL. I think the onus of proof is on you in this case.

If a government sponsored conspiracy theory authored by a couple of fall guys for NIST is not experimentally repeatable, then it's basically worthless as an explanation. Once again, it's not up to a&es for 9/11 truth to provide a better explanation for what happened, although they already have provided several more plausible theories as per William of Ockham's philosophy. The law says that NIST obligated to provide more information and detail concerning collapse initiation at the root cause of three building collapses on 9/11. Many of the 900 engineers for 9/11 truth don't necessarily care whether it was an inside job or not. They have certain professional obligations to understand exactly why three heaviliy insured white real estate elephants collapsed as they did on 9/11 so as to avoid any future flaws in buildings they might be contracted to design themselves. There is nothing out of the ordinary about the inquiries made by more than 1200 independent A&E's for truth. They are just doing their jobs. NIST and the feds continue to avoid their responsibilities for a transparent and accountable investigation into the truth about 9/11. Why? Why were investigations into the Lewinsky-Clinton affair or Whitewater or Columbia shuttle disaster each worth more time and money than the worst building collapses in history? What was crazy George Bush's government hiding from the public? What truths are this Liberal Democrat government under Obama continuing to hide from a world it continues to want to dominate militarily?

You don't seem to understand the principle. Tilting would not affect load absorption by either the upper or lower blocks. In order for your fictional upper block to crush anything, it has to absorb some of the energy of impact. Bazant does not account for the energy lost in this absorption.

Exactly, integrity. This is why the absurdity that is the official theory is able to pass with little notice in the mainstream. No one actually understands what is being proposed. Crticisms of it are socially and politically marginalized. No one is paying attention to it. You've hit the nail on the head.

That's right. Tilting would have changed force balance but not total energy released into what were a number of energy sinks. Bazant and Greening would have us believe that all of the energy was made available for overwhelming 250 steel columns at each floor level and for "crushing."

The guvmint guys have avoided a lot of scientific explanation by repeating the words, "collapse was inevitable." The truth of the matter is that they knew it was inevitable for a certain undiscerning percentage of the population to be satisfied with the word, "inevitable", over scientific empricism. Which leads us to believe that some of us are easily placated by government sponsored conspiracy theories. Auhoritarian fascist dictators used to say that it was easier to murder one-thousand people than one million. Today the reverse is true. A few thousand people murdered on 9/11 paved the way for the US Government and US-led NATO forces to murder more than one-million human beings since 2001. Millions of people have acquiesced to the double speak of a number of modern day megalomaniacal psychopaths running the world today.

Here is my goofy drawing of where I believe the upper block should be, according to the NIST/Bazant hypothesis. The yellow line outlines a block of less than 15 floors. The green line is my estimate of the collapse zone, i.e., the upper floor of the intact bulk of the building. The red dots measure a height of 15 floors, the number Pants used in his math. Which is why you can see the upper block I drew is shorter than that.

Edited: inserting a different pic here showing a more realistic size of the fictional upper block due to its having already supposedly crushed through the impact zone, as we see in the plaguepuppy video posted from a previous thread.

A lot of this stuff can be understood by anyone who has taken a physics course in high school, community college, or university. Canadians are among some of the most well educated people in the world, and so some significant percentage of Canadians would understand the fundamentals.

Most Canadians voted against FTA and against NAFTA. And in spite of us having one of the most well informed publics in the world, those trade deals were forced on us by paternalistic governments wielding phony majority dictatorial powers. It's been a pattern for some time and said to be why voter turnouts have declined in North America in general over the last 20 or 30 years. It's called the democratic deficit, and more and more Canadians and Americans want accountability and transparency in government. We don't have it. 9/11 Commission panelists have described their own report as a whitewash and justice denied by several government agencies. 9/11 is just the tip of a much larger iceberg and overall democratic deficit. Whether you have a life or not and regardless of whether you care about integrity in government, you're being lied to constantly.

There is no such physical principle, because what you claim is false.

In what way is the house of cards made of glass sheets not an example of a falling upper structure smashing a lower and larger structure?

Are you making some sort of distinction between smashing and crushing? If so, I'd be curious to know what it is.

Why does it have to be a "house of cards" for you guys? I know why. Because a house of cards is famously flimsy. You're picking an example of the flimsiest structure you can think of in an attempt to prove a point that you don't seem to understand.

If you want to use panes of glass, stack 110 of them one on top of the other. Let's say they're .5 cm thick -- or thicker, if you like; you can use 1,100 for a better effect, too -- and have little nubs on each corner so that a space is created between each one when stacked. Destroy 3 - 6 of them (30 - 60 if you're using 1,100 panes) in the upper 20% portion by whatever means you like, leaving a hinge of layers upon which the upper stack rests. The upper stack will not crush through the bottom stack. Why? Because the bottom stack provides resistance.

I'm not sure which Newtonian law describes this principle. It is either the one describing the inertia of an object (both at rest or in motion) until something acts upon it, or the Third Law which states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, so that when you throw a heavy book on your coffee table, the table doesn't collapse and the book doesn't fall through the table, because it is able to provide an upward force against the falling book. It's the law that describes what happens when you hit the cue ball against another billiard ball: the cue ball does not continue its same motion. If it's a straight-on hit, it bounces back a bit and stops. If it is an angled hit, it is deflected in a different direction, but has lost some of its momentum. The ball that it hit provided a force against its impact.

I'm picking the flimsiest structure I can think of because it most easily illustrates that what you describe as a universal law is not true in all cases.

If you are claiming a universal physical law, can I replace your "small nubs" by a gap of 20 metres?

(As an aside: I don't play pool, but if a moving ball hits one of equal mass, it will stop, but not bounce back. You can use conservation of energy in the centre of mass frame to see this.)

Glass, massive steel columns and reinforced concrete - it's the same thing really. I think I remember this truth from the documentary series, Sesame Street. I'm pretty sure it was Count von Count's axiom, or something. One of these things is not like the other... I love to COUNT! AH! AH! AH!

If you'd care to explain how Newton's laws apply to some of things but not the rest, I'm sure we'd all love to hear it.

It is true in all cases.

Probably. Then we're getting back into your hundred million miles of wineglasses analogy. Remember we are talking about a top-driven collapse via gravity alone. I guess you're also aware that 20 metres is five times the height of one WTC floor.

I'm pretty sure I have seen the cue ball shudder backwards for a cm or two when I have played pool, if it's hitting the ball directly and with force. I could be wrong. I will take a look next time.

How many 110 story buildings do you know of are framed with glass columns and floor girders? Perhaps you can explain what glass has to do with what we've been discussing over several threads. I must admit that images of a sky scraper made of glass does help me to visualize the official government conspiracy theory a little more so than before. But not a lot.

I am glad to see this thread is still going.  http://wtc.nist.gov/ [77] was still updating their documents last year.  Read The 9/11 Commission Report [78], it talks a lot of about "the new terrorism", and very little about what happened to the buildings.

Ask people basic questions like: How many buildings [79] collapsed?  Listen to the answers you get.

Is "collapse" even the word?

"It Fell in Silence: The Collapse of World Tade Center 7" by Nathan Janes of PUPAGANDA.com [80]