Anyone who wants some more good information refuting bullshit elements of 9/11 conspiracy theories can check this out:
Nutty 9-11 Physics
Steven Dutch, Natural and Applied Sciences,
University of Wisconsin - Green Bay
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No amount of evidence will dissuade a conspiracy theorist, but when they appeal to scientific evidence, they're fair game. And the 9-11 conspiracy sites have some very strange science.
9-11 conspirators seem to be a mix of liberals still smarting over 2000 and ultra-conservatives angry that George Bush Jr. hasn't opened the national parks to a land rush. But if Dubya orchestrated a massive conspiracy to bring down the World Trade Center as a pretext for launching a Mideast War, why didn't he pull off the far simpler trick of faking the discovery of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? Think of it - his biggest political liability could have been avoided with a piddling investment in special effects, Bush would be seen as America's savior, his strategy would be completely vindicated, and he'd be politically unassailable. All it would take would be spritzing an empty factory with the ingredients for nerve gas, with just enough cross-contamination to create a whiff of the real thing. Yet for some strange reason he didn't do it.
Cause and Effect
We live in a universe of patterns. Once a pattern is established, the burden of proof is on people who claim the pattern does not hold. When some philosopher of science points out that we cannot
prove that the sun will rise tomorrow, I say he's absolutely right. There is no way to prove axiomatically that the sun will rise tomorrow, and nobody in science cares in the slightest. When the sun doesn't rise as scheduled, call me. Until then I absolutely refuse to waste time worrying about it. When Immanuel Velikovsky claimed the planets underwent wild disturbances in their orbits, the burden of proof was on him to show that it happened. The burden was not on scientists to show it didn't.
In the case of 9-11, we have planes hitting the World Trade Center and the buildings failing at precisely the level of impact. The observational evidence clearly shows a cause and effect relationship.
It Looks Like A Controlled Demolition
What else is a large building collapse going to look like?
Until 9-11, our only experience in bringing down very large buildings was controlled demolition. The highest buildings (apart from broadcast towers) brought down were in the 30 story range. Once the building starts to fall, the physics is going to be the same regardless of the initial cause. So alleged similarities between 9-11 and controlled demolitions prove nothing. You might as well argue that the collapse of Mount St. Helens in 1980 was set off by explosives because it looked just like a landslide caused by explosives.
One thing radically different about 9-11 is that controlled demolitions always set off charges
low in the structure and let the weight of the building do the rest. Nobody ever set off charges
high in a building to pancake the stories beneath. So why resort to a radical and unproven method if you want to bring down the World Trade Center?
Probably the most revealing commentary on the controlled demolition theory is
Bringing Down The House by Michael Satchell in US News and World Report (June 30, 2003). This article describes the work of Controlled Demolition Inc., far and away the world leaders in controlled demolition, and Mark and Doug Loizeaux, who run it.
Like most Americans, the Loizeauxs were transfixed by the televised scenes of destruction shortly after the first jet struck. But as experts in buildings' vulnerabilities, they knew right away what few Americans realized. "I told Doug immediately that the tower was coming down, and when the second tower was hit, that it would follow," remembers Mark.
Horrified, the Loizeaux brothers watched first responders streaming into the doomed towers and tried frantically, and unsuccessfully, to phone in warnings. In the following days, CDI was called to ground zero to consult on safety and develop plans for demolition and debris removal. What if the twin towers, though badly damaged, had somehow remained standing? Without doubt, the Loizeaux family would have been called upon to bring them down. "Quite simply," says Mark in a rare moment of introspective uncertainty, "I don't know how we would have done it."
So according to the world experts on building demolition:
- It was immediately obvious that the towers were going to fall
- They have no idea how they would have brought down the towers in a controlled demolition.
Of course, you can always claim the Loizeaux brothers were in on the plot. Some sites link to a story about Controlled Demolition later being charged with illegal campaign contributions, which certainly proves something. Or other.
Actually, the collapse
doesn't look like a controlled demolition. Real controlled demolitions try very hard to avoid flinging debris far beyond the building itself. They blow the lower stories and the center of the building to cause the building to collapse in on itself. The collapse of the World Trade Center doesn't look remotely like a controlled collapse, apart from stuff falling down.
Implosion World, a site dedicated to controlled building collapse, agrees (
ImplosionWorld.com)
DID THE WORLD TRADE CENTER TOWERS ACTUALLY “IMPLODE”? No. They collapsed in an uncontrolled[emphasis added] fashion, causing extensive damage to surrounding structures, roadways and utilities. Although when viewed from a distance the towers appeared to have telescoped almost straight down, a closer look at video replays reveal sizeable portions of each building breaking free during the collapse, with the largest sections--some as tall as 30 or 40 stories--actually “laying out” in several directions. The outward failure of these sections is believed to have caused much of the significant damage to adjacent structures, and smaller debris caused structural and cosmetic damage to hundreds of additional buildings around the perimeter of the site.
HOW DOES THIS EVENT COMPARE WITH A NORMAL BUILDING IMPLOSION? The only correlation is that in a very broad sense, explosive devices (airplanes loaded with fuel) were used to intentionally bring down buildings. However it can be argued that even this vague similarity relates more to military explosive demolition than to building implosions, which specifically involve the placement of charges at key points within a structure to precipitate the failure of steel or concrete supports within their own footprint. The other primary difference between these two types of operations is that implosions are universally conducted with the utmost concern for adjacent properties and human safety---elements that were horrifically absent from this event. Therefore we can conclude that what happened in New York was not a “building implosion.”
Check out the videos of the demolition of the Stardust Hotel in Las Vegas. Fireworks. Big pyrotechnic countdown clock. None of that on 9/11. Not even remotely similar. Silly? Yes, but still above the intellectual level of most 9/11 conspiracy theories. I mean, the similarities the conspiracy buffs point to are on the same level of superficiality as whether or not there were fireworks.
Jet Fuel Doesn't Get Hot Enough to Melt Steel
For the umpteenth time, nobody ever claimed the steel
melted. It got hot enough to lose its strength.
So Where Did All The Molten Steel Come From?
There are lots of accounts alleging that rescue workers encountered molten steel. The first question that comes to mind is whether these witnesses know the difference between
incandescent and
molten. Steel can get hot enough to
glow long before it gets hot enough to
melt. The fact that glowing steel was pulled out of the rubble doesn't mean it was molten.
One particular red herring that crops up frequently is that temperatures in the rubble were high enough long after the collapse to melt aluminum. Since aluminum melts at 660o C (1220o F) I don't have the slightest doubt of it. Since a backyard trash fire can melt aluminum, so what?
Apparently, the melting of steel signifies the use of explosives or thermite cutting charges. But the purpose of either is to
cut steel, not
melt it. A controlled demolition simply does not produce large amounts of molten steel. You might as well argue that all the concrete dust shows the buildings were taken down by an army of gnomes armed with grinding wheels.
If the World Trade Center was hot enough to melt steel, where's all the molten
concrete? Iron melts around 1500o C but so do many of the silicate minerals in concrete, and a mixture of silicate minerals would melt at a temperature lower than any of the individual minerals (I'm a geologist - I get paid to know about stuff like that). The fine particle size of the concrete dust would facilitate melting. So why wasn't there a huge puddle of molten concrete at Ground Zero? (There was some, but about what you'd expect from a large fire; certainly not what you'd expect from something hot enough to melt large amounts of steel.)
In a paper by Steven E. Jones, who bills himself as a "Physicist and Archaeometrist," there are pictures of glowing material falling from the World Trade Center, together with this comment:
Who can deny that liquid, molten metal existed at the WTC disaster? The yellow color implies a molten-metal temperature of approximately 1000o C
1000o C, is about 500o C
below the melting point of iron.
Oh, by the way, there would have been cutting of steel during the construction. And there's another construction process that melts steel. Welding.
No Steel Frame Building Has Ever Collapsed Due To Fire
So if something happens for the first time, it can't happen because it never happened before?
No 110-story buildings were ever hit by fuel-laden airliners hard enough to strip the insulation off the structural steel before, either. Steel-frame buildings are incredibly strong. They have survived major earthquakes and fires, and the Twin Towers merely rocked when hit by airliners at full throttle. But the towers were not designed to survive an impact by fully-laden airliners at full throttle, then a fire in contact with unprotected steel. An impact from a jet approaching JFK at 200 miles an hour, with nearly empty tanks, and one slamming into the building at 450 miles an hour with full tanks, are two quite different things.
Free Fall
According to Roedy Green's
How You Know 9-11 Was an Inside Job:
All three World Trade Towers fell faster over the first half of the collapse than physics allows by free fall. That meant they had to have an assist, e.g. an explosive push from pre-planted demolition charges, not just gravity pulling them down. The maximum collapse for free fall is computed by
distance = g t
where g is the acceleration due to gravity 32 feet per second per second, and t is time in seconds. In other words, free fall collapse should start out slowly and accelerate faster and faster for the big finale.
This is just plain weird. Whether a building falls by deliberate demolition or catastrophic failure, the collapse will be governed by gravity. Even if you used a teleporter to magically make several stories vanish, the part above would only fall as fast as gravity would accelerate it. Only if there was some kind of thruster pushing the building
down could it fall faster. Why install a useless Rube Goldberg device? Once the building begins to collapse, who needs anything to accelerate it? Gravity has a pretty reliable record of pulling things down. And where's the evidence for faster than free fall collapse?
The videos show that the towers took 15 seconds to collapse. The free-fall time for something to fall 400 meters is about 9 seconds. So, no, the towers did
not fall faster than free fall.
911Research claims:
This rate is still much too fast to be explained by a gravity-driven collapse given that the descending rubble would have to crush and accelerate almost 1000 feet of vertical intact structure. It is especially revealing that each tower disappeared at about the same rate as the rubble fell through the air, as if the tower's structure provided no more resistance to the descent of rubble than did air.
All photos of the collapse show a plume of debris extending far below the main level of collapse. So the debris
did fall appreciably faster than the building itself. The building provided little more resistance than air for the simple reason that a skyscraper
ismostly air.
In the photo at left the collapse is about where the cloud fills the entire width of the picture, but the debris in free fall has almost reached the ground.
Note that the debris is at least a building width beyond the building itself. No competent controlled demolition flings debris that far.
The fall doesn't have to
crush the stories beneath. It merely has to stress the structural elements until the fasteners pop and the welds break. The impact of that pancaking material will cause the outer vertical members to bow outward, then fly outward violently when failure occurs. There's no need to appeal to explosives to fling material outward from the buildings.
If a story is 4 meters high, it will take an object about 0.9 seconds to fall one story, by which time it will be going 9 m/sec. So once the collapse starts, the overlying structure will be falling at 9 m/sec by the time it has fallen one story. If we crush the collapsing story into rubble half a meter thick and expect the collapse to stop at that point, what kinds of forces are involved? We go from 9 m/sec to zero in half a meter, or 1/18 of a second. However, during that deceleration the velocity is decreasing, and the average velocity turns out to be half of the initial velocity, so the crunch time is 1/9 second. So the acceleration is -9 m/sec divided by 1/9 sec = -81 m/sec2, or about 8 g's.
This is the difference between a
static load and a
dynamic load. In the north tower, with about ten stories above the impact, the dynamic load was about equivalent not to ten stories but to
eighty, nearly the total height of the building. I doubt if the tower at that level was engineered to support eighty stories - why waste the steel? Actually the loads are much greater because the initial collapse involved a fall of about three or four stories, not just one, and the dynamic loads on the points that actually resist the fall - the welds and the rivets, will be far greater. If you try to stop the collapse in the millimeter or so a rivet or weld can deform before failing, you're talking
hundreds of g's. In the south tower, where the top 25 or so stories fell, the impact load at eight g's would be equivalent to 200 stories, or
twice the total height of the building. Some conspiracy buffs argue that engineering standards require a safety factor several times the actual load on the structure, but the dynamic loads would far overwhelm those standards.
This, by the way, is the reason controlled demolition works at all. If physics worked the way 9-11 conspiracy buffs think, once you blew the lower stories of a building, the upper part would just drop and remain intact. Of course it doesn't because once the building begins to fall, the dynamic loads are far beyond the static strength of the building.
911Research devotes a lot of effort to debunking what it regards as disinformation campaigns designed to deflect attention from the theory of controlled demolition. But we keep coming back to the fundamental issue how any building can fall
faster than gravity or why a conspirator would feel the need to set up a mechanism to do something so useless.
(cont.)
