9/11 Experiments: The Great Thermate Debate

[Pygar2]

The idea is that the steel was designed to support an unmoving building. Once enough debris weight and steel softening occurred to allow one floor to drop, that one floor, with all the floors above it, became a *moving* juggernaut, which added a floor of mass with every floor it destroyed. *NO* floor was designed to stop the mass of all the floors above it, falling on it. Each successive floor just made the floors below it, less meaningful in slowing the juggernaut- none of them could have ever possibly *stopped* it. The fact that the buildings fell in no more than about twice the speed of gravity, so to speak, is just about what you would expect. One floor at a time, is all it needed, or took.

 

[pong]

The fact that the buildings fell in no more than about twice the speed of gravity, so to speak, is just about what you would expect. One floor at a time, is all it needed, or took. -- Pygar2

There are hundreds of architects and building engineers over at ae911truth who would disagree with your well-meaning but amateurish assessment. Remember, too, that before 11 Sept 2001, no steel-frame skyscraper had ever collapsed due to fire. What a strange event that THREE well-built skyscrapers all defied normal expectations on a day when the bearded boxcutter gang showed up.

 

[Tyger]

here is a vid showing damaged light poles and a taxi and a caomparison of the footage and simulation

Very interesting - but the visualization doesn't go far enough. The plane did penetrate as far as the second ring. We are only seeing the outside ring. Why aren't they showing the penetration through to the second ring I wonder.

 

[Stagger Lee]

The idea is that the steel was designed to support an unmoving building. Once enough debris weight and steel softening occurred to allow one floor to drop, that one floor, with all the floors above it, became a *moving* juggernaut, which added a floor of mass with every floor it destroyed. *NO* floor was designed to stop the mass of all the floors above it, falling on it. Each successive floor just made the floors below it, less meaningful in slowing the juggernaut- none of them could have ever possibly *stopped* it. The fact that the buildings fell in no more than about twice the speed of gravity, so to speak, is just about what you would expect. One floor at a time, is all it needed, or took.

I watched a program where one guy who was in the staircase of about the 3rd or 4th floor survived the collapse by hunkering down in a corner shielding him as he basically rode down on that floors concrete slab. One would think, had there been explosives wired on the bottom floors, he himself would have been obliterated. I don't believe the whole official story, but I can see how the towers collapsed from the weight of each concrete floor falling on the one below it.

 

[Stagger Lee]

There are hundreds of architects and building engineers over at ae911truth who would disagree with your well-meaning but amateurish assessment. Remember, too, that before 11 Sept 2001, no steel-frame skyscraper had ever collapsed due to fire. What a strange event that THREE well-built skyscrapers all defied normal expectations on a day when the bearded boxcutter gang showed up.

"no collapse due to fire"
How many of those buildings had a passenger plane slam into the side of it? I wouldn't pretend to know more than any one of those engineers, but it seems plausible that one concrete slab/floor falling would cause a domino effect, taking the building down.

 

[pixelsmith]

WTC 1 and 2 were designed to withstand passenger plane strikes because of the B25 crash into the Empire State Building in 1945. Oddly enough the Empire State Building did not collapse into its own footprint at a near free fall speed.
WTC 7 was restructured to house a fortified terrorist attack command center for the mayor which he abandoned on 9/11 for some reason.

 

[Muadib]

I've posted this before, but it's a great explanation of why the towers fell the way they did and shows that not only did the collapse of the towers not violate the laws of physics but that they in fact followed them exactly as we would expect them to.

Static v. Dynamic Loading:
Why the WTC Towers Fell So Fast
Some conspiracy theorists are puzzled about why the WTC towers fell at almost free-fall speed on Sept. 11, 2001. They suppose that the speed of collapse is evidence that something or someone must have destroyed the structural integrity of the undamaged lower part of each tower.

After all, they reason, "only the upper floors of the building were damaged, so why did the lower floors collapse, and why did they fall so fast?"

This web page answers those questions, simply enough for even a conspiracy theorist to comprehend (I hope). I do use some simple math and some very basic physics, but even if you don't understand that part you should still be able to comprehend the basic reasons that the towers fell so fast.

What the conspiracy theorists apparently don't understand is the difference between static and dynamic loading. ("Static" means "while at rest," "dynamic" means "while moving.")

If you don't think it can make a difference, consider the effect of a stationary bullet resting on your chest, compared to the effect of a moving bullet striking your chest. The stationary bullet exerts a static load on your chest. A moving bullet exerts a dynamic load.

As a more pertinent example, consider a 110 story building with a roof 1,368 feet high (like the WTC Twin Towers). Each floor is 1368/110 = 12.44 feet high, or aproximately 3.8 meters.

Now, suppose that the structural steel on the 80th floor collapses. (Note: I'm using as an example 2 WTC, which was the building that collapsed first.)

The collapse of the 80th floor drops all the floors above (which, together, are equivalent to a 30 story building!) onto the 79th floor, from a height of aproximately 12 feet.

Of course, the structure of the lower 79 floors has been holding up the weight of the top 31 floors for many years. (That's the static load.) So should you expect it to be able to hold that same weight, dropped on it from a height of 12 feet (the dynamic load)?

The answer is, absolutely not!

Here's why.

First, let's calculate aproximately how fast the upper 30 floors slammed into the 79th floor. (If you slept through high school physics, you may want to skip ahead to the result.)

d=distance, g=acceleration of gravity, t=time, v=velocity
d = 0.5 g x t²
Solving for t:
2d = g x t²
t² = 2d / g
t = sqrt(2d/g)
t = sqrt(2d) / sqrt(g)

v = g x t
Substituting for t:
v = g x sqrt(2d) / sqrt(g)
v = g x sqrt(2d) / sqrt(g)
v = (g / sqrt(g)) x sqrt(2) x sqrt(d)
v = sqrt(2g) x sqrt(d)

g = 9.8 m/sec²
d = 3.8 meters

Thus:
v = sqrt(19.6 x 3.8) m/sec
v = sqrt( 74.5 ) m/sec
v = 8.6 m/sec

1 meter = 39.37 inches, so
v = 8.6 m/sec x (39.37/12) ft/m = 28 ft/sec.
which is 19 mph.

In other words, if you drop something from a height of 12 feet, it will be moving at about 19 miles per hour by the time it reaches the ground. It doesn't matter whether it is a single brick or a 30 story building. After falling 12 feet it will be moving at about 19 mph.

That's about the speed of a collegiate sprinter. (The world record for running the mile is 3:43.13, which is an average speed of 16.134 mph.) If you could sprint that fast and ran into a brick wall the impact might well kill you.

So if the lower 79 floors are strong enough to support a stationary 31 story building, do you think they will be strong enough to support a 31 story bulding falling at 19 mph?

The answer is emphatically no! But if you are not convinced, then ask yourself this roughly equivalent question. Suppose that you can hold up a 50 lb weight with little difficulty. Do you suppose that you could survive a 50 lb weight falling on you from a height of 12 feet - i.e., at 19 mph? (Warning: Do not try this!)

To answer that question without killing someone, I devised the following experiment. First, I found an easily dividable weight: I used my penny jar. Then I made a support for it: I used a piece of notebook paper stretched over a loaf pan, and taped in place. As you can see, the paper was strong enough to support the jar:


(click on the photo for a close-up)
(I was going to determine the limit to the amount of weight it would support, by adding pennies to the jar until the paper tore, but that's all the pennies I had in my penny jar.)

Then I removed the jar from the paper, and set it aside. I took five pennies from the jar, and taped them together. I stood on a stepstool, reached as high into the air as I could (about 9 or 10 feet from the floor), and dropped the 5 pennies onto the paper from that height. As you can see, even though I didn't drop it from a full 12 feet, the paper still could not withstand the falling pennies:


(I took the pennies out of the loaf pan for this photo; that's them next to the lower-right corner of the pan.)
Then I weighed both the five taped-together pennies (12 grams), and the penny jar full of pennies (1372 grams):



As you can see, 5 taped-together pennies weigh just 1/114th as much as the penny jar, yet they tore the paper on the first try. (I didn't try an even smaller stack of pennies.)

You can imagine what would happen if I'd dropped the full penny jar on the paper from 10 feet up. If a 12 gram penny stack broke right though the paper, obviously the paper would hardly have slowed the 1372 gram jar full of pennies at all... just as the lower floors of the WTC towers hardly slowed the fall of the upper floors.

That is experimental proof that a stiff (inelastic) structure which can support a given static load may break when less than 1% of that mass is dropped on it from a height of 10 feet. From that fact, it follows that if the full mass which the structure is capable of supporting is dropped on it from a height of 12 feet, the strength of the structure can be expected to slow the fall by less than 1%.

In the case of the WTC towers, there was a second factor which also slowed the collapse, but not by much. When the top 30 floors of a 110 story building fall 12 feet onto the 79th floor, due to the collapse of the 80th floor, the mass of the 79th floor is suddenly added to the mass of the falling structure. The momentum of a 30 story building falling at 19 mph suddenly becomes the momentum of a 31 story building falling at a slightly smaller velocity. The question is, how much smaller?

p = momentum = m x v
m1 = mass of the top 30 stories
m2 = mass of the top 31 stories = aprox. (31/30) x m1
v1 = velocity before the additional mass is added = 19 mph
v2 = velocity after the mass is added
Momentum is conserved, so:
p = m1 x v1 = m2 x v2 = (31/30) x m1 x v2
Solving for v2:
v2 = v1 x (30/31) = 0.968 x 19 mph = 18.4 mph

So you can see that the two factors which slowed the fall of the WTC towers were both very small. The strength of the structure below the point of collapse could be expected to slow the rate of collapse by less than 1%, and the accumulation of additional mass by the falling part of the structure due to the the "pancaking" of the lower floors could be expected to slow the rate of collapse by about 3%.

Of course, the above analysis is just about what happened when the top 31 stories fell onto the 79th floor. To predict the progression of the entire collapse, you have to repeat the calculations for each floor. For the next floor, calculate a 32-story building starting with an initial velocity of about 18.4 mph, and accelerating for another 12.4 feet to about 27 mph, and then slamming into the 78th floor. Since kinetic energy is proportional to velocity squared, the falling mass hits the 78th floor with about twice the kinetic energy that the top 31 stories had when they hit the 79th floor. Obviously, the 78th floor could be expected to slow the collapse by even less than the 79th floor did, which is why the building collapsed at nearly free-fall speed.

Dave Burton
Cary, NC USA
Feb. 21, 2007

P.S. - Here's a video, created by Dave Thomas of NMSR.org, which illustrates that even a very short drop dramatically multiplies the force exerted by a falling object, as compared to a stationary object:

Mr. Thomas has also written an excellent article about the physics of the Towers' collapse.




References:

1. • wtc.nist.gov: National Institute of Standards and Technology reports & information
   • FEMA: World Trade Center Building Performance Study (or here)
   • www.9-11commission.gov: 9-11 Commission Report
   • Scientific American: Preliminary Opinions of M.I.T. Stuctural Engineers (Oct. 2001)
   • Article: Engineers blame collapses on fires
   • Article: Faulty Fireproofing Is Reviewed as Factor in Trade Center Collapse
   • Cable fire safety info from www.cablefireresearch.org (look at the photo of what fire can do to structural steel)
   • BBC: Q&A: What really happened
   • WGBH/Nova: Building on Ground Zero
   • Popular Mechanics: Debunking The 9/11 Myths (March 2005), and Editor's Notes
   • Book: Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can't Stand Up to the Facts, by The Editors of Popular Mechanics
   • WGBH/Nova: Demolition Woman, Interview with Stacey Loizeaux (1996)
   • jod911.com - Journal of Debunking 911 Conspiracy Theories
   • 911myths.com - 9-11 Myths... Reading between the lies
   • debunking911.com - Debunking 911 conspiracy theories
   • 429truth.com - a campaign to expose the truth of 4-29
   • Did the U.S. government plan and execute the 9/11 attacks?
   • xkcd.com: [1], [2]

 

[pixelsmith]

Really Maudib? Why not look over the blueprints before posting funny stuff like this?
If they fell according to your "explanation" then the central core columns would be standing there like a record spindle and the floors would be stacked up like records. Some how the core structure magically collapsed in on itself.


Lower Core construction.

 

[Stagger Lee]

I have to say, watching the towers collapse, I recall them "crumbling down" from the top- which is consistent with the 80th floor giving way to the weight of the top floors. Again, I'm not an engineer, just using common sense.

 

[Muadib]

Really Maudib? Why not look over the blueprints before posting funny stuff like this?
If they fell according to your "explanation" then the central core columns would be standing there like a record spindle and the floors would be stacked up like records. Some how the core structure magically collapsed in on itself.

Why don't you learn a little bit about the laws of physics and things like momentum before you post funny stuff like this? The columns were broken and the floors were basically pulverized by the energy generated by the collapse. Large parts of the core columns were left standing briefly before they toppled over. You can read a bit more about it here and I'll post the entire article which, as usual, completely contradicts everything you say:

Each floor of the towers contained over two million kilograms of mass. The gravitational potential energy of a standing tower with twelve-foot floors extending upward 110 stories can be calculated straightforwardly; it comes to over 420 billion joules of energy, or the equivalent of 100 tons of TNT per tower. This energy, which was released completely during the collapses, is more than the energy of some of the smaller nuclear weapons in the U.S. arsenal, such as the W-48 (72 tons TNT) (Sublette 2006). This is where the energy required to break columns, pulverize concrete, and expel debris through windows came from. (Truthers often compare such expulsions of air and debris, visible several floors below the collapse fronts, to “squibs,” explosive devices often used in demolitions. However, they are readily explained by pressure changes as the towers, acting like a gigantic bicycle pump being compressed, collapsed.)

The Twin Towers used a “tube within a tube” architectural design, which provided considerable open office space in the interiors of the Towers. Much of the structural support was provided by a dense grouping of thick central core columns in the interior and the perimeter walls on the outside. When the towers began to collapse, large parts of the inner cores (called “the Spires” in 9/11 Truth circles) were actually left standing, briefly, before they, too, toppled over. The perimeter walls were largely forced to peel outward in large sections, producing the iconic images of Ground Zero with which we’re all familiar. Between the outer perimeter and the inner core, the weight of the upper sections plowed through one floor after another, breaking the floor connection brackets and support columns, pulverizing concrete decks, and gaining momentum and mass with each additional floor failure. Had the buildings been constructed differently (the Port Authority was allowed to circumvent some existing New York buildings requirements for the Towers), the collapses might not have even happened (Young 2007).

Rest of the relevant parts of the article:

The Claims
As with any well-developed pseudoscience, literally thousands of individual arguments can be advanced in support of the proposition that the United States secretly carried out the September 11 attacks. This report will examine the most enduring and oft cited of these claims: “free fall” of the towers, reports of thermite and molten steel, and WTC 7’s curious collapse. Some of the factions that have developed (such as the “no-planers”) will also be described briefly.

Claim One:
“The Twin Towers collapsed at free-fall accelerations through the path of greatest resistance.”
Perhaps the most bizarre aspect of September 11 was the rapid destruction of both 110-story Twin Towers: after the collapses began due to cascading structural failures at the airplane impact locations, each tower fell completely in just fifteen to twenty seconds. Mainstream scientific analyses, including years of work by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), generally looked at the cause of each collapse: the intense fires (started by jet fuel and fed by office contents and high winds) eventually caused floor trusses to sag, pulling the perimeter walls inward until they finally snapped. At this instant, the entire upper section of each tower fell the height of one floor, initiating an inevitable, progressive, and utterly catastrophic collapse of each of the structures.

While the mainstream explanation (dismissed as the “official story” by 9/11 Truthers) usually ends with the initiation of these unstoppable collapses, the 9/11 Truth movement’s attacks begin there. Gage of AE911 Truth says on that group’s website, “Destruction [of the Twin Towers] proceeds through the path of greatest resistance at nearly free-fall acceleration” (Gage 2011; emphasis added). Many 9/11 Truther pundits drop the “nearly” and say simply that the collapses were at free fall. Truthers then insist that free fall acceleration indicates a complete lack of resistance, proving that the structures were demolished with explosives. We are also told that the sheer mass of the towers, “80,000 tons of structural steel,” would simply resist collapse.

View full-size chart.
How could the buildings fall so quickly? It’s been explained very well in the technical literature by Northwestern’s Zdenek Bazant, PhD, and others (see, for example, Bazant 2008). I’ve developed a simpler physics model of the progressive collapses that agrees quite well with the main points of Bazant’s more rigorous results (Thomas 2010b). Here are some of my findings:

• Each floor of the towers contained over two million kilograms of mass. The gravitational potential energy of a standing tower with twelve-foot floors extending upward 110 stories can be calculated straightforwardly; it comes to over 420 billion joules of energy, or the equivalent of 100 tons of TNT per tower. This energy, which was released completely during the collapses, is more than the energy of some of the smaller nuclear weapons in the U.S. arsenal, such as the W-48 (72 tons TNT) (Sublette 2006). This is where the energy required to break columns, pulverize concrete, and expel debris through windows came from. (Truthers often compare such expulsions of air and debris, visible several floors below the collapse fronts, to “squibs,” explosive devices often used in demolitions. However, they are readily explained by pressure changes as the towers, acting like a gigantic bicycle pump being compressed, collapsed.)
• The Twin Towers used a “tube within a tube” architectural design, which provided considerable open office space in the interiors of the Towers. Much of the structural support was provided by a dense grouping of thick central core columns in the interior and the perimeter walls on the outside. When the towers began to collapse, large parts of the inner cores (called “the Spires” in 9/11 Truth circles) were actually left standing, briefly, before they, too, toppled over. The perimeter walls were largely forced to peel outward in large sections, producing the iconic images of Ground Zero with which we’re all familiar. Between the outer perimeter and the inner core, the weight of the upper sections plowed through one floor after another, breaking the floor connection brackets and support columns, pulverizing concrete decks, and gaining momentum and mass with each additional floor failure. Had the buildings been constructed differently (the Port Authority was allowed to circumvent some existing New York buildings requirements for the Towers), the collapses might not have even happened (Young 2007).
• Even the 9/11 Truth movement’s most eminent physicists are confused about the basic principle of the difference between static and dynamic forces. A piece of paper, taped across a jar’s opening, will support a heavy coin such as a quarter indefinitely (static load). However, if the coin is dropped from just a few inches up, it will tear right through the paper (dynamic load). Given the information at hand—for example, the mass of the upper section of the north tower (fifty-eight million kilograms), the distance it fell (3.8 meters, about twelve feet), and the stiffness/rigidity of the lower structure itself, the dynamic force imparted on the lower section can be estimated as some thirty times the upper portion’s weight. This is many times the lower structure’s safety margin, which explains why it was quickly overwhelmed.
• Once progressive collapse began, there were decreasing time intervals of free fall (between floors), punctuated by very brief, incredibly violent collisions—decelerations—of the upper mass, for each floor in turn. There was resistance at every step of the collapse, as the upper section collided with and incorporated each floor below. Conservation of momentum shows that the reductions in falling speed were slight as each floor was impacted, going as the ratio of floors before to floors after (e.g. 14/15, or about 94 percent, for the first impact). Accordingly, the upper section fell from rest to about 19 mph, was slowed down to 18 mph by the first impact, continued to fall until a speed of 26 mph was reached, was then slowed down to 24 mph by another impact, and so on. While the first plunge lasted about nine-tenths of a second, the upper section took only four-tenths of a second to fall through the next floor, three-tenths of a second for the next one, and so on until the bottom floors, which were crushed at a rate of just seven-hundredths of a second each, at speeds of over 100 mph. Yes, there was resistance at every step, as many tons of structural steel was demolished; yet the entire process, like an avalanche, lasted only fifteen to twenty seconds, about 50 to 100 percent longer than true “free fall” would have lasted.
• Physics teacher David Chandler’s measurements of the first seconds of the collapse of the North Tower (WTC 1) showed that it fell with increasing speed but at only two-thirds of gravitational acceleration (g) (Chandler 2010). Chandler argues that this means the bottom section exerted a constant upward force of one-third of the upper section’s weight upon its mass, and he declares that this force should have been much larger, indicating that “some sort of controlled demolition was at work.”
• Second, Chandler argues that being a Newtonian action/reaction pair, the impact force of the upper section on the lower section was only a third of the upper part’s weight. However, I’ve found that his estimate of the downward impact force was too low by a factor of one hundred. In addition, I found that the actual process—a series of twelve-foot free falls punctuated by violent and brief collisions with each floor—would have resulted in an average acceleration of precisely what Chandler measured for the start of the collapse of WTC 1, namely 2/3 g. (By the end of the collapse, my calculations indicate an average acceleration of only 1/3 g, but this can’t be measured in dust-obscured videos.)

Claim Two:
“Nano-thermite and military-grade explosives were found in dust from the towers. Tons of melted steel were found in tower debris.”

The thermite reaction is very hot, but it is also very slow compared to high explosives.
Real controlled demolitions commonly use explosives to topple large buildings. However, the hallmarks of actual demolitions (the characteristic “boom-boom-boom-boom” sounds and the flashes of high explosives) were completely absent in Manhattan on the morning of September 11, 2001. Many 9/11 Truth advocates, including architect Richard Gage, insist that high explosives must have been used to bring down the Twin Towers, as they say this is the only process that can possibly explain the “ejection of debris hundreds of feet from the towers.” However, they simultaneously insist that thermite or a derivative (thermate, nanothermite, etc.) was used instead, so as to topple the towers quietly. (This is but one of many instances in which 9/11 Truth claims flatly contradict each other.) Thermite itself fails as an explanation for the destruction of the Towers on many levels:

• The thermite reaction, which takes place between iron oxide (rust) and powdered aluminum, is practical for welding train tracks in the field and for destroying engines of vehicles that must be left behind during combat operations. The self-sustaining reaction, once initiated with heat, produces significant volumes of molten iron, which can melt and cut iron structures beneath it. For thermite to melt through a normally vertical steel beam, however, special high-temperature containment must be added to prevent the molten iron from simply dropping straight down uselessly. The thermite reaction is very hot, but it is also very slow compared to high explosives. Thermite is simply not practical for carrying out a controlled demolition, and there is no documentation of it ever having been used for that purpose.
• Jesse Ventura hired New Mexico Tech to show how nanothermite can slice through a large steel beam. The experiment was a total failure—even in the optimum (horizontal) configuration, the layer of nanothermite produced lots of flame and smoke but no actual damage to the massive I-beam tested. However, Ventura’s TruTV Conspiracy Theory show slyly passed it off as a rousing success (Thomas 2010a).
• Niels Harrit and Steven Jones, along with several coauthors, published the “peer-reviewed” paper “Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe” in the Bentham Open Chemical Physics Journal (Harrit 2009). This article does not make the case for thermite use on 9/11. The paper examined “distinctive red/gray chips” found in WTC dust (unfortunately, with no chain of custody for the dust), and these were claimed to be thermitic because of their composition (iron oxides and pure aluminum) and other chemical properties. However, the presence of rust and aluminum does not prove the use of thermite, because iron oxide and aluminum are found in many common items that existed in the towers. Furthermore, the authors admit that their “differential scanning calorimeter” measurements of the supposed thermitic material showed results at about 450 degrees C below the temperature at which normal thermite reacts (Fana 2006). Finally, the scan of the red side of the “thermitic material” of Harrit/Jones is a dead-on match to material Jones himself identified as “WTC Steel Primer Paint” in his Hard Evidence Down Under Tour in November of 2009 (“Sunstealer” 2011).
• Harrit’s article describes the red portion of the chips as “unreacted thermitic material.” But while thermite may be slow, it does not stop its reaction once it has begun. Because thermite supplies its own oxygen (via iron oxides), it can even burn underwater. Suggesting that the samples show partially reacted thermite is preposterous. Claiming that thermite would explain molten pools of steel weeks and months after the attack is equally preposterous.
• The article’s publication process was so politicized and bizarre that the editor-in-chief of the Bentham journal that featured Jones’s article, Marie-Paule Pileni, resigned in protest (Hoffman 2009).
• Thermitic demolition should have created copious pools of melted steel at Ground Zero, but nothing remotely like this was ever found. Truthers say iron microspheres found in the rubble indicate thermite; since hot fires and spot-welding do produce very tiny spheres of iron, though, these “microspheres” are not unexpected. Pictures of cranes holding red-hot materials in the rubble are said to show molten steel. Had this been the case, however, the crane rigs would have immediately seized up (Blanchard 2006). No reports of “molten steel” in the tower basements have ever been credibly verified (Roberts 2008). Some Truthers claim that a few pieces of sulfidized “eutectic” steel found in the towers proves thermate (thermite with sulfur) usage, but this occurred because sulfur, released from burned drywall, corroded the steel as it stewed in the pile for weeks (Roberts 2008).

Claim Three:
“Tower 7, which wasn’t hit by a plane, collapsed neatly into its own footprint.”

Courtesy of the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress
The enigma of WTC 7 is becoming increasingly popular in Truther circles. We’re told that it wasn’t hit by a plane and was subjected to just a few “small office fires.” Yet it collapsed anyway, late in the afternoon of September 11, “falling neatly into its own footprint at freefall acceleration, just like a normal controlled demolition.” In particular, Truthers point to a brief period of freefall (2.25 seconds) that was confirmed by NIST in its WTC 7 final report (Sunder 2008; NIST 2010) as proving that the building was purposely imploded. However, WTC 7, too, fails to prove 9/11 was an “inside job”:

• What is often conveniently left out of the story are actual reports from NYFD firefighters at the scene, which describe huge, raging, unfought fires on many floors at once and visible deformations and creaking of the building prior to its collapse (Roberts 2008). Tower 7 was not hit by an airplane; however, it was struck by a 110-story flaming skyscraper, the North Tower. The fires raged for hours, and they eventually caused a critical column (#79) to fail because of thermal expansion; NIST determined that this column was crucial to the building and could even be considered a design flaw. Its failure would have collapsed the building even without the other structural damage from WTC 1’s collapse and the fires.
• WTC 7’s brief 2.25 seconds of free fall is now the Truthers’ best “smoking gun.” The claim usually goes like this: “The fifty-eight perimeter columns would have resisted and slowed the collapse to much less than freefall. The ‘freefall’ of WTC 7, admitted to by NIST, proves it was controlled demolition.” The problem is that this is a straw man argument. NIST found the collapse occurred in three stages. The first stage, which lasted 1.75 seconds, is when the fifty-eight perimeter columns were buckled; during this interval, the rooftop actually fell only about seven feet. This is because the breaking of columns saps speed, indeed making the collapse slower than free fall. In the second stage, which lasted 2.25 seconds, the already-buckled columns provided negligible support, and the north face of the structure free-fell about eight stories. (Try taking a plastic drinking straw and buckling it by folding it over and then pushing down on the bent straw with your hand. The crimped straw provides almost no resistance to vertical forces, and neither did the buckled columns of WTC 7.) The third stage described by NIST, which lasted 1.4 seconds, was again less-than-free fall, as the structure fell another 130 feet as it impacted more non-buckled structures toward the bottom of the building (NIST 2010).
• The other half of the equation is that WTC 7 resembles a “classic controlled demolition” because it supposedly “imploded, collapsing completely, and landed in its own footprint” (Gage 2011). In actuality, it twisted and tilted over to one side as it fell, and parts of the building severely damaged two neighboring buildings (the Verizon and Fiterman Hall structures). When challenged with the obvious fact that Tower 7 spilled far outside its footprint, however, Truthers will often change their tune and start saying that any resemblance to a natural collapse is part of the cover-up.

 

[pixelsmith]

wow. Muadib, by any chance are you a zombie?

 

[Muadib]

wow. Muadib, by any chance are you a zombie?

No, but I can see why you would believe in zombies, someone obviously had your brain for lunch a long time ago.

 

[Muadib]

I'm glad this thread is here, it's a great potential eye opener as to why people who believe in these goofy conspiracies do so, you can see over and over again in this thread that rational, logical explanations that answer some of the "unanswered" questions about 9/11 are discarded in favor of conjecture, generalization and increasingly silly scenarios in which planes disappear into thin air. You can see that when it comes down to it, there is no science, mathematics or real physics being posted by proponents of the conspiracy theory, just vague generalizations and conjecture backed up by a constant recital of conspiracy talking points and a refusal to acknowledge sensible answers to their burning questions.

Ultimately, people accept conspiracy theories for some of the same reasons that they accept religion, human beings abhor an explanatory vacuum, and we're almost always willing to accept a bad explanation in lieu of no explanation at all. Conspiracy theories let people view an increasingly grey world in black and white and consequently make it easier for them to understand. Whether it's actually true or not is ultimately irrelevant, as with religion, because it makes everything easier, there's no need to understand complex explanations or to think about the grey areas present in every facet of our existence, it's all boiled down to some epic battle between good and evil. What need is there to examine the often complex and multifaceted motivations that cause human beings to do what they do when you can just say "I already know why they do what they do, because they're Satan worshiping members of the Illuminati, they are evil and I am good!" Like most children's stories, it's simple, easy to understand and it makes you feel good about yourself, what else do you need? Right?

This isn't me passing judgement either, we're all guilty of this in different ways, myself included. I often find myself thinking that certain groups are just stupid or a bunch of liars, and I have to remind myself that they're interpreting the world the only way they know how, based on their life experiences, which are ultimately different than mine. I have to remind myself that diversity of all kinds has value, it has merit, even when we don't agree with what is being said. Some people are dishonest and there are stupid people 0ut there, but we can't use it as a blanket explanation, it's just to simplistic, and nothing about people or the world we inhabit is simple. Period.

 

[Goggs Mackay]

Just to underline one of the willingly idiotic comments above: comparing the B-25 Empire State building crash to the WTC crashes.

Some facts:

(approximations)

B-25

Wingspan: 67ft
Length: 52ft
Weight Empty: 20,000 lbs
Weight Takeoff: 34,000lbs
Fuel Capacity: 974 Gallons

767

Wingspan: 156ft
Length:180ft
Weight Empty: 189,000 lbs.
Weight takeoff: 350,000lbs
Fuel Capacity: 16,700 Gallons

It is hard to overstate the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the kind of person who would compare the two as though they were apple to apples.

Lance

Lance, 'moral' bankruptcy is a bit much don't you think? People are having debates over this point and that about all this and I don't think that means anyone on either side of the argument is morally bankrupt? Stick to the arguments please Lance, questioning members' morals is over the score I think.

 

[Pygar2]

Also to be considered- ESB was designed and (over)built long before the age of computers- the best way to be safe was to overspec *everything*. IIRC they didn't even use I-beams, but solid ones instead. And the Towers didn't even have support pillars inside- everything simply hung, optimistically, between an inner core and outer shell. Neither of which would stay up, like a smokestack, after the top of the building had collapsed on it- no matter what the twoowoofers say.

 

[pickles]

wow. Muadib, by any chance are you a zombie?

Facts suck, don't they?

Imagine you voted Obama twice.

It was a magical jam packed day of suspended physics. And a few people actually do believe the official story!

This is why people like you are happy that real names aren't required on the Internet. One phone call to your employer (should you have one) recounting this abject stupidity would be enough.

 

[stonehart]

This thread is getting personal guys... mellow down eh

 

[Bob Watson]

Name calling and insults add nothing to the debate. But shows ignorace and a childish mentality! For the record..I agree with pixel that the 9/11 report is properganda. Contolled demliton missles..inside job..no...I posted many vids others have done more. Now I will stand aside and let this play out.

 

[Burnt State]

Really Maudib? Why not look over the blueprints before posting funny stuff like this?

Yes, that funny stuff like math and actual equations that try to illuminate what took place should just be ignored. On the other hand talking about magic and "should'ves" is what should guide our thinking?

The fact is planes crashed into buildings and they collapsed the way that they did. It was an absolute tragedy and not an act of mass murder committed by neo-con profiteers in the gov't. However, this event was certainly used to leverage more power and wealth and paranoia by those same gluttonous power pornographers. That's undeniable. But the speculative confirmation bias, that ignores physical reality, and suggests that we didn't land on the moon or that Bush and O'Bama are reptilians are all in the same camp IMHO.

I think Muadib is onto something important. This thread epitomizes the act of belief. And in this space the rational and irrational collide, one arguing that aliens are creating a hybrid population to take over the planet, eventually (it's apparently a long term project), and others are convinced that those who believe in such things are morally & intellectually bankrupt, or whatever. Life's a spectrum of perception best defined by highly unusual events like 9-11 and UFO's. Such collisions don't always bring out our best but they do expose our psychology.

 

[boomerang]