I am not focusing on a positive I am concentrating on eliminating a negative.
Obviously if the planes could not do it then something else had to. But if the planes did do it then it should be possible to analyze and explain it with very little trouble. We should not have to BELIEVE anything. So how is it that we are supposed to accept that explanation without even being told the tons of steel and concrete on every level? Why aren’t we even told the quantity and weights of the exterior wall panels when those were the very first structural members that the planes hit?
Why is it that so many people that claim to know physics don’t ask such obvious questions?
And for going on EIGHT YEARS!
Suppose we had 55 empty one gallon paint cans. We fill 11 cans with sand and put 3 quarts of sand in 11 others, 2 quarts in 11, 1 quart in 11 more and leave 11 empty. So we stack 11 cans in a tennis court and then use a machine to shoot tennis balls at the third can from the top.
Now if I were to ask you what would happen when the ball struck the tower of paint cans what would you want to know? Obviously 1 can is an analog for 10 stories of the WTC.
If you watched the video you will notice a segment where I talked about static and dynamic loads and I placed 20, then 40 and then 60 washers on a toothpick. The toothpick held all 60. And yet when I dropped 20 washers from 12 inches above the first toothpick of empty toothpicks then 18 of them were broken.
When I added washers to the toothpicks then the falling mass had to break the toothpicks AND ACCELERATE THE STATIONARY WASHERS. Energy is lost in breaking toothpicks but also because of the conservation of momentum. The falling mass is slowed down by the stationary mass and since velocity is squared in the kinetic energy equation, even though the mass increases the kinetic energy is reduced. So the stationary washers impede more than they assist so consequently fewer toothpicks are broken.
Play around with the conservation of momentum eauation and compute the kinetic energy before and after impact.
The north WTC tower should have been arrested by the stationary mass below, but it is rather difficult to analyze that since we are not told the TONS of STEEL and TONS of CONCRETE on every level of the tower.
Of course the really nice thing about my tower of toothpicks is that it is very cheap. I deliberately showed the washer next to the quarter so everyone would know what size they were. Anyone that wants to duplicate my experiment should have no trouble. They do not have to take my word for anything.
That is SCIENCE! Not being told the distributions of steel and concrete in the towers is ridiculous.
This entire business of the potential energy of the towers is somewhat ridiculous. I don’t object because in order to compute it they must specify how much steel and concrete was how high. But it would take energy to crush every level of the WTC. So to talk about the potential energy of a level and not compute the energy required to crush the level below is nonsense. If you set a 2 1/2 pound barbell weight on top of a styrofoam cup it may have a certain potential energy. But if it takes more energy to crush the cup then it is just a mathematical delusion. Potential energy assumes the mass in question is FREE TO FALL the distance in question.
Mathematics ain’t physics. You have to know the physics to figure out how to apply the mathematics.
psik
PS - Mentioning molecular bonds is so impressive. I doubt that any molecules were broken. The destruction would be at a higher level than that.
To test the theory, I built a 110-inch tower of Jenga blocks and threw a model plane at it. All results, including the subsequent death count, were proportional to the events of September 11th.
You know, scale matters. Mass increases with the volume of the material, while strength increases only with the cross-sectional area of the material.
So you can take a mouse and drop it 6 feet, and the mouse scampers away unharmed. Take a human and drop it 6 feet, and the human might get their breath knocked out, and could turn an ankle. Drop an elephant 6 feet and it will break every one of its legs.
Or take LEGO. Stick a 4x2 brick to a 4x2 brick. The forces holding the bricks together are very strong compared to the mass of the bricks. Now scale up by a factor of 10. A 40x20x20 structure made of 4x2 bricks. The forces holding the bricks together are much weaker compared to the total mass of the structure. And if you scale up again to 400x200x200 then you’ve got a structure that could crumble fairly easily.
In other words, a scale model of the World Trade Center is going to be much much stronger than the real World Trade Center. A 1:100 exact scale model of the World Trade Center is 100 times shorter, 100 times thinner, and 100 times narrower than the real World Trade Center, and so it will be 1,000,000 times less massive. The the support members will be 100 times thinner and 100 times narrower than the real support members, and so will be 10,000 times weaker. Therefore, the scale model is 100 times stronger than the real World Trade Center.
The mass of the impacted object is relevant to the analysis but the fire is a separate phenomenon.
However the quantity of steel in the fire is going to be relevant to the time necessary to weaken. ** If it could.**
But the bottom line is we don’t have the information to analyze either one after SEVEN YEARS. Now why is that? BELIEVERS don’t need to ask questions though. :smack:
[QUOTE=psikeyhackr]
However the quantity of steel in the fire is going to be relevant to the time necessary to weaken.
[/QUOTE]
Ok…why? Why is it important? For that matter, why don’t you think it’s known? The quantity of steel from the load bearing members that would have been in the fire is most certainly known…I’ve seen several different models that show which members most likely failed, even in what order they probably failed…and, those models certainly incorporate the amount of steel used in each member.
But leaving all that aside, why do you think it’s important? What will it prove exactly? Presumably you feel that the weakening of the load bearing members in the building would or could not have caused the collapse (though to my mind anyone with even a cursory knowledge of physics could clearly visualize at least the rudiments of how a structure that is under load COULD collapse if the load bearing members were weakened…hell, a 5 year old playing with an erector set or playing the game Jenga knows if you take out key members it’s going to crash down).
No, ‘believers’ are the one’s who believe that nearly every structural engineer, physicist, civil engineer, materials engineer, etc etc…nearly every person who actually has some expertise on this subject…is either deluded or in on it. Except for a handful of (mostly non-experts and whack jobs) who are trying to get the ‘truth’ out, of course…
My apologies; I phrased my thought poorly. As a rule, energy is neither created nor detroyed; it goes somewhere. In an inelastic collision, energy is not really “lost”; it goes into, for example, deformation of one or both of the bodies (the classic example of a *perfectly *inelastic collision is two lumps of clay adhering together). In your washer-and-toothpick model, where does this energy go to? And, as CannyDan alludes to, do you think that fairly represents the energy transfer in a full-scale building?
Transferring potential energy requires that the weight actually drop that distance, yes. Conversely, a weight that drops a certain distance must transfer its potential gravitational energy into some other form. Whether your weight spontaneously crushes the cup depends on its failure mode, but I agree it’s unlikely.
Solids are held together by molecular forces. In order to break anything you must, by definition, break molecular bonds, which takes energy to do.
I don’t know physics all that well and I’m not up on the latest CP of the 9/11 crowd (are they still claiming that the US used lasers to knock down the towers?), but one thing I don’t get is this:
Why go through all of the unnecessary effort to acquire multiple aircraft, to hit multiple targets, and involve thousands of unnecessary people in the conspiracy when they could have just placed bombs in the building. Shoot, have two Timothy McVay Rider trucks in the garage of each building.
Seriously, it strains credibility to think that the US government went to the unnecessary trouble of knocking down three buildings in NY, punching a hole in the Pentagon, and shooting down a plane in Pennsylvania, when all it had to do was hire a few people (instead of thousands) to plant rider trucks with bombs in them in the building.
They would even have a precedent for blaming the terrorists, as there was a bomb in 1993!
So why go through all the trouble? I doesn’t make any sense.
But so many people make such a big deal about how HUGE the airplane was. ROFL
The plane was less then 150 tons including the 34 tons of fuel. The one that hit the south tower was doing 540 mph. Now I will concede that that is a lot of mass moving pretty damn fast.
But after you have seen the video a dozen times and gotten over the shock of the explosion do you ask yourself, “can you see any motion in the building as a result of the plane impact?” What does it say about that building if you can’t?
I consider the oscillation analysis on the south tower to be about the best work in the NCSTAR1 report. They say the building deflected 12 inches at the 70th floor and oscillated for 4 minutes. They don’t say the building deflected 14 inches at the impact level which is what I extrapolate.
So if an object weighing over 100 tons hits another object and it barely moves isn’t it obvious to wonder about the TONS of material in the struck object. You don’t find it peculiar that we don’t have a table telling us the tons of steel and tons of concrete on every level of the towers after SEVEN YEARS, soon to be EIGHT?
Any yet so many people believe this plane that could barely move the building on impact totally destroyed the building in less than two hours. But then they don’t ask about the distribution of steel and concrete. :smack:
So, your contention is that the plane should have knocked the building over? And if it didn’t knock the building over when the plane crashed into it, the building should have stayed up? And therefore, since the building crumbled, it must have been something other than the initial plane crash that caused the building to fail?
Is that about it?
Because I agree with you. If the building didn’t fall from the initial crash, there must have been some additional factor in the hours between the crash and the collapse.
How about this. The plane crashed into the building. That weakened the building severely, but didn’t cause it to collapse. Then a roaring fire started from the jet fuel, office furniture, carpets, and paper. The fire weakened the steel supports until two hours later they were weakened enough to sag just a little. And then the floors above the crash site started to fall, and then the whole building failed.
Or do you have some other theory about what must have happened during those hours between the crashes and the collapses? If so, trot it out.
psik, what exactly is it you don’t get? A big ass airplane crashed into a far bigger assed building. The building swayed a bit, but quickly returned to equilibrium.
A huge fire, started by 34 tons of burning jet fuel (roughly kerosene) burned uncontrollably, using as fuel all the combustible materials available to it on the wrecked floor(s) where the airplane originally struck.
The heat of the fire weakened structural steel supports. Some of these failed as structural elements, meaning they deflected or bent, thus causing the now well toasted floor to collapse.
When the floor collapsed, it and all the floors above it fell, probably only about 10 feet. The total weight crashed into the floor below, which was unable to withstand this sudden force, and it collapsed in turn. The process repeated for successive floors, eventually reaching the ground.
Repeat for the other tower.
Now I’ve used all small words. Nowhere is it necessary to know the exact distribution of metal on a floor or floors to understand the collapse. Afer all, we watched it live, then watched it over and over again. Hell, Ray Charles could see how the collapse occurred.
Your scepticism, especially given its basis in irrelevant absurdities, is unwarranted, even nonsensical.
Not even remotely peculiar since no one who knows anything about structural engineering either a) thinks it is useful, or b) can’t get all the information they need from other sources that have already been supplied.
No one cares because it’s not really very interesting information, regardless of how many times you claim it is.
