In another thread on Above Top Secret someone named “ZeuZZ” has decided that he knows what happened. He even has science to help! Of course his understanding of the situation and the science involved is flawed but why let that stop him?
Anyway, he presents 9 “incontrivertible facts” (his spelling) that make the 9/11 collapse very fishy. Let’s look…
“1. Sudden Onset: steel when heated does not suddenly buckle or break, it melts and sags. The buildings were perfectly motionless up to the moment they began their collapse.” – quote in context
In fact the towers were not motionless. The distance and scale in the television images showed no motion to the naked eye, but people inside the buildings reported significant motion.
“2. Straight Down: they didn’t topple towards the damage, they took the path of most resistance, symetrically down.” – quote in context
In fact the debris took the path of least energy. Resistance is only one factor. The available energy source was gravitational… straight down. In the absence of any significant sheer force or a resistance sufficient to resist (and thus force a redirection) of gravities downward force straight down is exactly where you would expect this to go.
When we do the math (and certainly the NIST report has) we find that once the mass of the building above the impact had moves as little as one floor height there wasn’t anything in the structure below it that was going to stop it.
“3. Almost Free-Fall Speed: Buildings brought down by controlled demolition collapse at almost free-fall speed because when the upper floors come down, they encounter no resistance.” – quote in context
The key word there is “almost”. The actual time of the collapse is perfectly in line with a gravitationally powered fall faced with the minimal resistance of the floors below. Review of the seismic data available shows that the collapse time was between 11.3 and 14 seconds per tower and not the “free fall” time of 9.1 seconds. One good discussion of this is available in this report.
“4. Total Collapse: acording to the pancake theory, the horizontal steel supports broke free from the vertical columns. But if that is what had happened, the 47 core columns would have still been standing.” – quote in context
The theory here is that the building would have slid past the columns without dragging them down. This is silly of course. Any twisting, any rotation, any debris moving out of a theoretically perfect alignment would make the destruction of the core columns inevitable. As the collapse is a chaotic event the likelihood of such forces is very high.
“5.. Dust Clouds: Yet another common feature of controlled demolitions is the production of pyroclasic style dust clouds.” – quote in context
In other words, when stuff gets destroyed you get dust. The term “pyroclasic” is probably a misspelling of pyroclastic. All that really means here is that there was a lot of gas moving and allot of fine particles. This is completely in keeping with the collapse.
“6. Pulverization of Concrete: The only energy available should have been the gravitational energy. This is no where near the amount of energy needed to turn all the concrete into tiny particles of dust.” – quote in context
There is a mix of errors here.
- Large quantities of concrete were simply broken up. The amount of concrete turned “into dust” is not remarkable.
- The design of the WTC made comparatively little use of concrete compared to a conventional structure. There simply wasn’t as much concrete there as people think there should have been.
- The gravitational energy involved was massive.
The problem with 9/11 results is that they are entirely non-intuitive. The amount of energy involved is simply outside of our normal day to day experience. The weight of the towers is estimated at 510,000,000 kg EACH. That’s 4,636,000 per floor. Put another way each of the 110 floors weighed about 1051 tons or the same as 15.5 Abrams M1A1 tanks. The whole tower was a stack of more than 1,708 battle tanks. (someone feel free to check my math, it is approximate but should be close).
The energy impact of a single floor collapsing is approximately 1.67 x 10^8 Joules or the equivalent of 0.0399 tons (about 5,0125 pounds) of TNT. What’s interesting is that by many estimates the maximum impact resistance of a single WTC floors support structure was 6.29 x 10^8 Joules. In other words, if floor 110 had fallen onto floor 109, things would have stayed standing. In fact a single WTC floor may have survived the impact of as many as 3.7 floors upon it. WTC1 started with the combined impact of 14 floors and WTC2 was 29 floors, in both case far, far more than the 3.7 floors needed to create a sustained collapse.
“7. Horizontal Ejections: But gravitational energy is, of course, vertical, so it cannot even begin to explain these horizontal ejections.” – quote in context
Of course it can. The amount of energy of even a single floor collapsing is huge. Not only is it destroying much of what it touches it is compressing (and heating) the air inside the building as it goes. Lots and lots of stuff is going to squirt out the sides. The gravitational energy is driving the collapse, but in the impact of floor to floor the energy is kinetic, not gravitational.
“8. Sounds Produced by Explosions: there is abundant testimony to the existence of such sounds before and during the collapses of the towers.” – quote in context
Entirely incorrect. There are scattered reports of loud sounds but not a single report that is inconsistent with the sort of rumblings and collapse noises from a collapse.
“9. Molten Steel: Shown in various video tesimony, and reported by several reliable witnesses” – quote in context
The problems with this claim are numerous and too lengthy to get into here. Go ahead over to the 911 Myths page on the topic for in depth coverage. I’ll summarize…
- In fact there are no widespread accounts of molten steel. There are a few poorly documented quotes of a “friend of a friend” nature.
- Almost every quotation about molten steel evaporates on investigation into a second hand report from a forgotten source.
- The terms “molten metal” and “molten steel” seem to be used interchangeably by many reporters – the difference is critical.
- The pictures used to back this claim show glowing hot metal, not molten. In at least one case the photograph appears to have been altered.
- Below ground fires in the debris of a office building (plastic, fuel oil and so on) can easily reach temperatures needed to keep steel glowing hot and can sometimes p
eak out at more than 2.300 degrees.
Well, that was fun.
No comments yet.