You mean like this (controlled demolition where you can see the collapse start at the bottom) or this (again, controlled demolition where you can see the collapse initiated from the bottom)? THAT is what a controlled demolition looks like.
Compare to this.
Wow…they look completely different. Probably because they ARE completely different.
ETA:
As a thought experiment, what happens when you open an accordion out, fill it with talcum powder then squeeze it together…
-XT
Yup, just like the magic bullet. Ah…the Warren Commission trained you well.
It’s bad enough that you ignore questions and logic. The next time you insult someone or dismiss their statements with a snide remark like this, I will be happy to ban you. In the meantime try responding to questions and employing logic.
NM…I think I’m letting emotion take me to a bad place in this thread, and I see the Mods are keeping a close eye so…
-XT
Um, no I don’t. The last few, maybe, and only when people are acting exactly like Mozart is acting right now for several pages. But not
“just about every” 9/11 thread. And I guess I could say I find it ironic that you don’t make any points against my argument, except that you’re not listening to it.
No. He’s seen the effects of overpressure blowing a little debris out of windows below the collapse.
And he apparently doesn’t recognize that in a controlled demolition, the blast effects of the explosives behave in the opposite way that we see in the WTC. The strength of the blast in a controlled demolition is at its maximum as it FIRST explodes, and loses energy with time.
The WTC “squibs” do the opposite. They start small and get bigger with time. Exactly the way you’d expect a big ass plunger to compress the air faster as it approaches that localized area.
Interesting factoid–I was reading “The Sum of All Fears” the other day and the characters discuss the small amount of overpressure (IIRC, only about one PSI) needed to break out a plate glass window.
Even making all the assumptions both of you have made, I don’t think this would work anyway. In fact, if it works like my brain thinks it would work, the truthers would use it as “evidence”.
My brain:
You’ve got a super-tall tower of brick. You tilt it. It snaps someplace – let’s say exactly in the middle, as in Miller’s post.
Bottom section: Still slightly tilted, but pressure relieved by the snappage (this assumes you’ve stopped tilting when the top section broke).
Top section: now in freefall, possibly slightly tumbling due to momentum gained in the tipping/snapping.
So, the top section is in freefall. There’s no strain on the bricks. It won’t break any further (until it hits the ground, of course). So, cracked at the point of impact, timber like a tree. Truthers win, and this is why analogies are bad.
Right?
The problem I have with these threads is they cede way too much ground to the CTs. There’s a lot of ground they need to cover before the physics of collapsing buildings begins to become relevant.
There are three main classes of 9/11 Conspiracy.
A.)LIHOP, where the physics issue is moot, as LIHOPs and rationalists both believe that the planes were the sole cause of the collapse. (LIHOP–let it happen on purpose. The least crazy conspiracy theory.)
B.) There were no planes. Too crazy to be worth discussing. Thousands of New Yorkers saw the planes and they were filmed by multiple independant persons.
C.) the standard version. There were planes, somehow controlled by the gov’t, but the gov’t needed to put explosives into the towers for some reason.
If you’re dealing with the standard version, the CT needs to show a number of things before the Physics even becomes an issue:
—How did the gov’t control the planes? Were they indeed hijacked by the 19 terrorists, a combination of LIHOP and Standard version, or were they remotely controlled, or were the hikjackers very very dedicated members of the conspiracy?
----How did the gov’t plant the explosives? Controlled demolition is a very difficult job. Generally it takes months of prep work, lots of trucks and large amounts of carefully placed bombs. And this is when it’s fully open and the demo company has the cooperation of the police and other authorities.
—Finally, why did they need the controlled demolition in the first place? Once the planes flew into the Towers the gov’t had all it needed to achieve it’s end of provoking the populace into war. Why go to the trouble of rigging the buildings, risking exposure, when the planes did all the work for them? If anything the sight of the ruined towers, great holes towering over the NY skyline, would have been a continual source of rage, and more effective propoganda than the empty footprint of ground zero.
If you argue with the CTs about physics, you’ve ignored these questions as much as they have. You’ve actually made their position seem more rational than it is. The CTs need to answer at least the three questions above before the debate should turn to physics.
And David Shayler trained you well, apparently - when in doubt, accuse your opponent of being a mindless government shill. I will repeat the important phrase above:
If you were genuinely interested in a rebuttal of the “controlled demolition” argument you could watch the video helpfully provided by xtisme above, but you won’t and the point is moot anyway: you yourself have already admitted that the fall of the WTC towers looked nothing like a controlled demolition. Saying that this was by design is equivalent to saying that God did it - there is no proof that it was so and there’s quite a lot of proof that doing so was completely unnecessary.
What I never understand about these theories is: why bother? Why set up this elaborate hoax involving planes flying into the buildings when you could just have planes flying into the buildings? Is Osama bin Laden secretly Rube Goldberg in disguise? (It would explain the beard, I suppose.)
On preview: I see I’m not the only one asking that question…
I’d actually expect the vibration of the snap alone to take the top peice into a thousand peices. A stack of legos has the misfortune to be flexible - not really flexible, but just enough to allow the ends of a given chunk to start flexing in the air and then snapping it in the middle.
Though you are correct that the (stated) uncrushability of the legos makes it a poor model; it’s clearly the case that whatever slight tilting occured in the WTC towers, it was rendered largely irrelevent because when structural integrity failed at any given point, it turned that area into the structural equivalent of empty air - one floor could fall into the other with relatively little impedance. But not none - the ununiformity of a floor’s collapse could tear apart the floors above and beneath enough to cause them to lose structural integrity as well.
To model this in lego you’d basically have to have legos vanishing the minute a disconnected lego touched another lego. Which could be done in a computer but would be a little tricky to do in real life.
Realistically, aside from computer modeling (which is fake), there’s no possible way to model the entire collapse without building a reasonably large-scale model (say, half-scale) of appropriate materials, whacking it in the side, and setting fire to it. You can model various aspects of the collapse in various ways and, in some cases, with small models, but it’s literally impossible to replicate the entire thing - if nothing else, the materials are always going to be far too strong, if you can manage to get your model to stand up at all.
Well, if it snapped in the middle, the bottom section would still be 30,000+ bricks tall, which is still way, way, way too long to be stable, so it would continue to break up until it reached a height that was sustainable.
That, or the initial break would be at the sustainable height.
I don’t think so - as the parts tumble, they’ll spin, which will put strain on them causing them to break apart further, and the more they break apart, the more “debris” there will be for the larger parts to break against. And if we’re talking the full scale, 65,000 brick experiment, they’ll have plenty of time to break up on the way down.
But, yeah, it’s an inexact analogy, and trying to perform it at any reasonable scale is going to backfire and conform to the Truther’s expectations, just like Mozarts Lincoln Logs or psikey’s toiler paper tubes.
Actually, I had two: the first being that I have been able to use experience in these discussions successfully in real life situations, and the second being that enjoyment of these debates is not predicated on the other party changing his mind.
—Why not forgo planes & demolition charges and park some truck bombs in the garage again?
That is an attempt at misdirection and does not address the question of why your untrained expectations of the behaviour of damaged skyscrapers should trump the observed and explained actual results.
This shows that you are missing my point. Like I explained to xtisme: I’m not trying to change Mozart’s mind. Though it would be nice if it happened, I fully realize that he is preaching religion, and arguing against that is like asking an alcoholic to stop drinking. What I am trying to say is that people should stop letting him act, at all times, like the previous several hundred posts don’t exist. Why are we answering, on page 8, a question that was answered on page 1? Why not link back to page 1 and ask him why he ignored it that time? Because as sure as death and taxes, he will ignore it again, if all we do is answer him again. And I don’t see how answering something for the umpteenth time is helping out any lurkers. If we’re going to assume they’re following the thread, then we have to assume they already know the answer.
That doesn’t counter his second point.
And the reason I personally don’t just post “why don’t you answer post ###” is because whenever people do that to me, I’ve already answered it. So when I see you doing that to him I assume that he will assume he’s already answered it. And thus I don’t expect any human being, truther or not, to answer a “why don’t you answer post ###” post.
If I’m going to bother posting in this thread, I’d prefer to post something with content.
It doesn’t? How so?
That doesn’t make any sense to me. You think Mozart thinks he has addressed all the points here, despite ample evidence that he hasn’t?
Are you saying you would be fine with having the following conversation?
Poster
What color is the sun?
begbert2
Yellow.
Poster
What color is the sun?
begbert2
Yellow.
Poster
What color is the sun?
begbert2
Yellow.
Poster
What color is the sun?
begbert2
Yellow.
Poster
What color is the sun?
begbert2
Yellow.
Poster
What color is the sun?
begbert2
Yellow.
Poster
What color is the sun?
begbert2
Yellow.
Poster
What color is the sun?
begbert2
Yellow.
Poster
What color is the sun?
begbert2
Yellow.
Poster
See? No one can tell me what color the sun is, so I am obviously right when I say it is purple.
That’s essentially what’s going on here.
Yellow?! To a Warren Commission stooge, maybe.
Or my first one, for that matter.
Poster
What color is the sun?
Cisco
Yellow.
Poster
What color is the sun?
Cisco
Check post 2.
Poster
What color is the sun?
Cisco
Check post 2.
Poster
What color is the sun?
Cisco
Check post 2.
Poster
What color is the sun?
Cisco
Check post 2.
Poster
What color is the sun?
Cisco
Check post 2.
Poster
What color is the sun?
Cisco
Check post 2.
Poster
What color is the sun?
Cisco
Check post 2.
Poster
What color is the sun?
Cisco
Check post 2.
Poster
See? No one can tell me what color the sun is, so I am obviously right when I say it is purple.
This is somehow better? At least my way I can have the enjoyment of riffing off the recurrent idiocy. Plus, everything I say actually makes sense even to readers uninterested in doing research to read an otherwise-uninteresting post.
He’s presuming that all lurkers read the whole thread.
I mean, I know I always do. Sometimes. Though even when I do I never go back and check out what was happening in post ###.