An angle of the WTC collapse I'd never seen

The structure of the Madrid building was completely different, of course. The WTC buildings were the first for a lot of things, including their designs.
Your argument is rather like saying that a small hole in the fuselage of a plane could never cause pressure to rip out large portions of the fuselage because we had gone through all of WWII with lots of planes suffering lots of holes and it had never happened–carefully ignoring the fact that the design of later planes, using pressurized cabins to fly at higher altitudes and higher speeds, did, indeed, permit small holes to result in large failures of fuselage sections.

I am afraid that this statement does not even make sense. The enormous weight of 20+ stories of buildings covering an acre apiece would provide a huge amount of energy at a rate of sixteen feet per second per second.

No, you’re misrepresenting the facts, again. We go through this on every 9/11 thread and it’s not going to change.

The destruction of the buildings happens due to gravity either way. Potential energy is basically all you have. Demolition charges do one thing and one thing only–they release the building to gravity.

Think of it this way–the North Tower began construction in August of '68 and was completed in December of '70. During that time, imagine all the fuel that was burned in order to lift all the steel, concrete, wallboard, aluminum sheaths, rivets, nuts, bolts, nails, pipes, etc. over the span of those 2 years. The building stored all that energy–2 years worth–as potential.

It was then released into kinetic energy on 9-11, and what took 2 years to build was destroyed in less than 30 seconds.

Figuring conservatively, with 40-hour work weeks, 50 weeks per year, for 2 years, means that there were 14,400,000 seconds to build the thing (assuming I did the math right.) Releasing 14,400,000 seconds of energy in 30 seconds would destroy the building.

Put another way–take all the fuel burned (and the energy of the coal burned for electricity) during that 2 year construction, put it into a big tank anywhere in the building, and detonate it. Reckon the building would fall?

Since I’m just a layman, I have to rely on the “Good Science and 9-11” calculations here, but for potential energy:

E=mgh where m = mass, g = acceleration due to gravity, h = height.

The only real variable here is the exact weight of a WTC tower, but an estimate yields a gravitational potential energy of 1.139x10^12 Joules.

ie: 1,000,000,000,000, or a Trillion.

Energy wise, that’s like detonating about 272 tons of TNT.

The gravitational energy of the buildings alone, without any added variables (like, oh, the kinetic energy of an airliner) added in, results in enough energy to destroy the buildings. It has to–that’s what would happen even if the towers were imploded. Gravity has to do the job.

Something else to consider: the 1993 WTC bomb was 1,310 pounds, and according to this article, the “architect” of the WTC (I’m assuming they mean Leslie Robertson, since the principal architect had died in '86) said that if the '93 bomb had been parked closer to the poured concrete foundations, then THAT bomb would have brought the towers down.

Again, the reason is simple–it’s not that the '93 bomb’s measly 1,310 pounds would somehow pulverize the building–it would simply release the gravitational energy, which would. The WTC’s structural engineer believed that that relatively small catalyst would be enough to set up the failure, and we’re arguing that a fueled airplane that not only transferred X amount of kinetic energy into the building, but also severed structural support columns AND started fires AND blew off fireproofing material (that, by many accounts, wasn’t robust even before the attacks) couldn’t do it?

Hoo-boy, talk about a non-starter.

There is some dissent, ivan, unfortunately it got drowned out by the crank crowd. The NIST report had several petitions for changes to its report, but it was mostly detailing - critical detailing but detailing nontheless.

There are also a couple of engineering papers out there making the argument that despite the architects claims the impacts alone would have doomed the towers. This is definitely a minority opinion among engineers and once again was drowned out by the crank crowd. You can can go find them yourself since you really are not interested in doing anything but complaining, but they are out there.

So just how many skyscrapers before 9/11 had:

a) Steel frame construction without concrete or other more fireproof materials
b) Had massive fires that started on multiple levels at once
c) Had no firefighting efforts on the fires
d) Had a larger building fall on them or a jet slam into them.

I think you would find your sample size is rather small.

The other thing that I forgot to point out is this:

In order for the buildings to have been brought down by a controlled demolition, then obviously something had to be demolished. In your classic building implosions, we all know that the engineers place hundreds of charges throughout the building’s structural support columns. The explosives detonate, the columns give, and gravity takes over the destruction of the building.

Now, the video I linked in my OP shows that the core of the North Tower remained standing after the rest of the building fell away. There is still photographic evidence of the same thing happening with the South Tower. So, obviously, no charges were planted in the interior core of either building. If there had been, the core wouldn’t be left standing.

That leaves the perimeter columns. But, since those are on the outside of the building, visible to millions, any demolition explosives would be perfectly obvious. So those weren’t blasted, either.

So what’s left to 'splode with charges?

And, since we’re on the whole “no other building has ever…” thing, I’d like to see an example of a controlled demolition where the engineers, um, left the structural core of a building standing like the ones who ‘pulled’ the WTC did. Pretty sure that’s not part of the whole methodology.

But do you believe it [the explosives being in the towers]or not? Answer the question!

I’m not going to discount it, when NIST themselves have said they didn’t look for any as it was too unlikely an hypothesis.

We did something like this in the last thread, too.

Just to give a feel for this amount of energy, note that the maximum bomb load of a B-29 was 20,000 pounds, or 10 tons. So the gravitational potential energy released by the WTC collapse is equivalent to a bombing run by a fleet of 27 Superfortresses.

Seems like enough to pulverize a building to me.

But it certainly doesn’t mean that explosives were actually involved. Clearly, it would be impossible to hide the amount of explosives necessary to bring down a building, to say nothing of hiding the preparations necessary to making those explosives effective. As has (sigh) been said so many times, by so many others, before.

That is not what they said.

Go on, keep repeating the lie. First of all, we’ve already stated that we are not talking about a conventional controlled demolition, hence your bollocks about it requiring too much explosive and preparation is completely misleading.

You should also check up on how many people had access to the WTC buildings involved, in say the month prior to it happening. Big hint - there was a lot, and it wouldn’t be too difficult too go unnoticed in such a large building. Not that they couldn’t also have had fraudulent ID, if they were challenged.

So let me get this straight. Because it is such an unlikely possibility…you’re more likely to believe it?

I wonder how this sort of approach would work in everyday life?

“Either he threw away the report, or he ate the report and stole a piece of paper to make into a decoy wad for the trash can.”

“Either he took a car to work, or he climbed on top of a bus and car-surfed for 45 minutes through rush-hour traffic.”

“Either this cart has a squeaky wheel, or the manufacturer of this shopping cart put a chemical on the handle that makes me want to buy more groceries, with the side effect of imagining that one of the wheels is squeaky.”

From this article, CommonDreams / Common Blunders: Attacking the 9/11 Dissenters

There’s a few cites there for you Derbunkers to get your teeth into.

Wheras you are invoking ‘unconventional demolition’ as a magic word to try and ignore the fact that any sort of demolition is going to leave behind large amounts of evidence.

And somehow they got the magic explosives past the bomb sniffing dogs. Then they put the magic explosive on the columns without any prep work to the column at all! Then the magic demolition men realized they didn’t need to put the magic explosive on the column! It was MAGIC after all, so they just left a small bag in the middle of the room. Then one of the magic demolition men realized that they didn’t need to be in the building at all! The explosive was magic, after all!

Sound stupid? It actually makes more sense then the tales your inadvertently spinning.

To someone with their head up their arse, maybe.

Oh please. Now you’re just grabbing stuff at random from the conspiracy sites.

The same two guys who later wrote a book saying the commission was a success? yeah, they were complaining at the time, and that is why they had Commission powers - to cut through the obfuscation and coverups. The did so.

That is an unsupported lie.

<some useless rhetoric snipped>

Wrong. There were warnings that some sort of attack might be imminent, not what happened.

<more empty nonsense snipped>

Same old, same old. Stuff that has been disproven ages ago.

Here’s a typical piece of NIST bullshit that even an idiot like me can rip apart.

So, the seismic record didn’t even detect the impacts of the planes! How the fuck were they meant to detect much smaller charges intended to just blow up specific columns?

And you call that “scientific reasoning”?

Nope. Your ‘version’ makes not a lick of sense. It is magical thinking at its worst. I just put in the words your version was avoiding.

Except that you fail to do so.

Umm, it did.

http://www.911myths.com/html/seismic_record.html

Look at the first graph. They were recorded.

Because that is what they do?

Does it make less or more sense than the NIST comment I’ve quoted above? Remember, I’m just a layman; they have all the degees and letters after their names.