Goodbye, Mr Roberts

[Ghent12]

Re: Goodbye, Mr Roberts

Or maybe we could find many examples of modern steel and concrete skyscrapers falling down from fire damage alone, learn why it occurs so frequently, and alter new construction to prevent it.

Fire damage alone? You're done.

[Ghent12]

Re: Goodbye, Mr Roberts

Again, you failed to understand the Third Newton Law.

The reverse is also true: kinetic energy overpowers the UPPER FLOOR structure's ability to support that force. So the UPPER FLOOR structure is being destroyed at the mean time when it is destroying the lower section! During a collision, you cannot ONLY focus the effects on the collided object, you have to consider the effects on the colliding object too!

I am not arguing if the upper structure could collapse part of lower structure, I am arguing that the upper floor structure is subjected to the same force, therefore it will disintegrate in the process. At the end the upper floor structure will exhaust before it totally destroy the lower floor section, because it is 5 times smaller than the lower section!

Hence, NO TOTAL COLLAPSE!

Simply put: your car cannot totally destroy a trailer truck in a normal collision! Not even when you drop your car onto the truck from the top of WTC1!;)

These words you use, they do not mean what you think they mean.
Let's take the word "destroy" and find out what you mean. You also use the word disintegrate, meaning you think its matter either dematerializes or becomes vapor or some other substance which no longer falls. This is demonstrably erroneous. Any quick glance at the video shows lots of dust, but every single analysis done by anyone and everyone concludes that the total amount of dust produced by the entire event is a tiny, tiny fraction of the total mass of the buildings involved. Therefore your concept of the upper section being "destroyed" is an unusable fallacy.

I don't understand how you can continue to believe that matter is simply vanishing! You think the entire upper section just disappears as it gets "destroyed" as you put it?

Repeat after me:
The only things of importance that are being destroyed are the load-bearing structures within the building itself.

Don't believe me? Drop a "destroyed" metal girder on your head and see what happens. (Please don't, because although you are vehemently ignorant, I don't wish for harm to befall you.)

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: Goodbye, Mr Roberts

In fact it is very unlikely that these levels were in several pieces because then it assumes the failure was simultaneous at multiple levels/areas - a truly unlikely scenario.

Yes, quite unlikely.

Could you do me a favor, and spell out carefully what you think happened in the first second of the collapse of WTC 1 & 2?

By "first second" I mean thus. For some period of time after the planes hit, there was some damage to some floors, some steel ripped out, and some fires. Then (if I understand your thesis correctly) the top portion of the building dropped onto the lower portion and all hell broke loose. In the second or so before the top hits the bottom and begins destroying the (until then) relatively undamaged floors below the impact zone, what happened?

Up until a couple of seconds prior to the total collapse, there was enough structure standing near the impacted floors to continue supporting the top of the building. Then, poof, that impacted and burnt structure ceased supporting.

I'm thinking, by your thesis, it must have been a simultaneous failure across an entire floor. I'm thinking that is, as you observe, truly unlikely. A partial or asymmetric failure would have the top fall this way or that (actually, didn't we see that in one case -- what stopped that toppling top from falling to the side of the tower base?)

Anyhow, I'll be curious to see if you can provide a plausible scenario that does not involve (the truly unlikely, in my view at least) simultaneous failure across an entire floor.

[flintlock]

Re: Goodbye, Mr Roberts

I think that it was the sight of those buildings falling that galvanized American (and briefly even world) sentiment. That was a substantially more powerful image than the sight of two plane wrecks and rather ordinary subsequent building fires would have been.

Look at people's faces. It was the sight of those buildings coming down in a cloud of dust that caused them to gasp in shock.

Besides, the discussions of physics free fall and metallurgy do matter. By some accounts (ones I find credible) such discussions provide convincing evidence that someone, somehow, pre-planted a large amount of high explosives.

Tell me this if you choose. If tomorrow you somehow came to know as fact certain to you that such explosives were pre-planted, then would that alone cause you to seriously reconsider your conclusions as to who did it and what the role of the U.S. government was?

Thanks for answering my question. And your answer makes sense to a degree.

I'm 98% certain of no government conspiracy. The 2% I chalk up to life experience that shows almost anything is possible. Of course if I somehow miraculously knew as a fact explosives were pre-planted, I could believe a conspiracy existed. I just think the logistics and detail required would be almost impossible. I do know that some men are capable of heinous acts. But I certainly don't believe in the hogwash stories of duplicate airliners, Jews being warned in advance, the Pentagon was not actually hit by a plane, etc.

I just happened to watch a National Geographic special on 9/11 tonight. I'll admit, the buildings do look to be dropped. I can see how some would suspect that. I know when it happened I told the people I was watching it with on TV that it looked like a demolition. But then how many of us have seen a 110 story building collapse from the 90th floor before? That's the trick that plays on our minds. The fact that something so unnatural to our brain is actually occurring. Truly a once in a lifetime experience.

A conspiracy was simply unnecessary. I think the last few years have shown how little it matters to TPTB what the people think. The "powers that be" could already pretty much do whatever they wanted to. Rob the treasury? No problem. Buy votes? Easy. Deficits don't matter. I can imagine them sitting around smoking cigars and laughing at the accusations that they conspired to blow up the WTC. As if they needed to to that when they could just take what they wanted and then buy off the voters/politicians the next year.

Nobody throws away all that power and wealth. They are too careful. Certainly George Bush wouldn't. Do you remember him getting the word about 9/11 while speaking to the school kids? The politician in him wouldn't let him quit speaking. He spoke for several more minutes before leaving. Terrorists just blew up NY and he goes on talking.:eek: They are trained to never ever let down that campaigning facade. It obviously caught him off guard. He continued to act as he normally would. A lame politician. Have to look cool for the cameras. If he knew in advance of the plot then he'd have had a more scripted and appropriate response. Instead he looked like a confused idiot.

[flintlock]

Re: Goodbye, Mr Roberts

Or maybe we could find many examples of modern steel and concrete skyscrapers falling down from fire damage alone, learn why it occurs so frequently, and alter new construction to prevent it.

Yes, that 500 mph 150+ ton plane slicing through the building was irrelevant.

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: Goodbye, Mr Roberts

Yes, that 500 mph 150+ ton plane slicing through the building was irrelevant.

For WTC7, yes, irrelevant .

Even for WTC 1 & 2, the plane impacts did what damage they did early on (in the first few seconds.) If the building outside the impact zone still stood relatively undamaged after the initial impact, then that means the steel had held and rebounded. From that point forward, you were dealing with (1) some broken steel beams and (2) fires, both on the impacted floors, with the heat and potential damage from the fires rising to floors above.

The entire buildings below the impact zones were essentially undamaged until the buildings collapsed (except for the repeated and thunderous explosions that occurred withing the buildings, from the basements upward, which are unaccounted for by any official reports and which we have made no attempt to consider in this thread that I recall.)

When you hit a piece of steel, if you don't hit it hard enough to bend or break it, then it still has its original strength. Also fire on a high floor of a steel frame building presents essentially zero risk to the floors below. People walked around, carried on their business or phoned home on their cell phones or took to the stairs in the buildings below the impact zones.

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: Goodbye, Mr Roberts

Thanks for answering my question. And your answer makes sense to a degree.

You're welcome. Thanks for responding. Your answers too are sensible enough (heck, I'd have mostly agreed with them in years past.)

Of course if I somehow miraculously knew as a fact explosives were pre-planted, I could believe a conspiracy existed.

Ok - good.

I just think the logistics and detail required would be almost impossible.

So there's a key point. We are faced with two impossible things, and we are not the White Queen of Alice in Wonderland (who could accept six impossible things before breakfast.)

1. It can't be explosives because the logistics of pre-planting tons of explosives were essentially impossible.
2. It must be explosives because of various reasons and for various evidence presented by the "truthers."

One of these has to give. Only one of these can be the Real Impossibility.

For most people, the manner and means of taking down the two world's tallest buildings (at the time) are sufficiently outside the ordinary experience that one accepts [a] the official story rather than either [b] the weird and conflicting conjectures from a band of dubious conspiracy theorists or [c] one's own examination of the evidence (physical, video, etc). Impossibility [1] remains as the Real Impossibility (along with other Impossibilities, such as the notion that there is no way that such a large conspiracy could be carried out successfully, or that there is no way our government could be so evil.)

I have actually seen one (unsubstantiated) conjecture of a means to get the explosives pre-planted. The thermite could have been embedded in acoustic ceiling tile and independently controlled by wireless receivers and detonators, each tile a separate remote controlled bomb. The WTC towers had tons of acoustic ceiling tiles, which required wholesale replacement every few years as they aged and yellowed and crumbled.

Personally, after looking at this more carefully in the last year or two, I decided that Impossibility [2] was the Real Impossibility. The evidence of a planned demolition convinced me. I did not have a specific conjecture (until the radio controlled ceiling tile bomb idea noted above) as to how the explosives were pre-positioned, but that seemed "less impossible" to me. In a big building such as the WTC Towers, it is like a medium sized city, with various maintenance and facilities work going on in other parts of the building more or less constantly. No one expects to know the details of all they might observe.

I do know that some men are capable of heinous acts. But I certainly don't believe in the hogwash stories of duplicate airliners, Jews being warned in advance, the Pentagon was not actually hit by a plane, etc.

If you plan something outrageous enough, no one will believe you did it.

One of the common propaganda tactics to discredit the oppositions story is to spread overlapping but more outrageous stories, leading most sensible people to just throw up their hands at it all and dismiss the truth along with the fabrications.

In the particular case of the Pentagon, I have to walk carefully however. Some, not myself but some truthers I tend to trust, found the evidence that something smaller than a commercial jetliner hit the Pentagon to be the evidence that "changed their mind" on this controversy. I find the manner of the failure of the three WTC buildings to be the most compelling evidence, but others start their disbelief elsewhere.

Truly a once in a lifetime experience.

Yes, but not grounds for abandoning trust in one's own analysis.

A conspiracy was simply unnecessary. I think the last few years have shown how little it matters to TPTB what the people think.

Perhaps you were not close to the radical student movement of the late 1960's that led to the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam.

There is no way in my view that those in power could have enacted the many tyrannical measures of the Patriot Act and since without first energizing the populace against some deeply threatening external enemy. Nor could we have gotten wide spread support for two major foreign wars of aggression in Afghanistan (the plans for that war were on the President's desk, ready for him to sign when he returned from Florida, the morning of Sept 10!) and Iraq without widespread and long lasting public fear. Those wars are currently spreading to Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia.

The American people have supported or at least tolerated these wars for far longer than we tolerated the Vietnam War before it became a major political issue.

To this day, it is an active concern of the CIA to manipulate public opinion in support of the wars in Afghanistan and thereabouts. A google search for "CIA paper reveals plans to manipulate European opinion" will show you recent news on this effort.

Before the Islamo-Fascist Terrorists it was the Commies. Before that it was the Japs and the Nazi's. The use of wide spread public fear of some external threat is a major tool for keeping the populace in control.

Today I read that Michigan police are fingerprinting for instant identification anyone stopped in a routine traffic stop. Recently we've added "naked body scanners" to the list of indignities that air travelers undergo. Calls can be listened to without search warrant. Arrests, indefinite detainment and even assassinations of "high value terrorists" (even U.S. citizens) can be made without rights to judicial process. The list of violations of our (former) Constitutional Rights keeps growing. A day or two ago, Homeland Security (remember when that major Federal organization did not exist?) and other unspecified Federal forces raided some "Christian Militia" group in Michigan (apparently a group called the Hutaree, with little effort at public explanation or justification.

Nobody throws away all that power and wealth. They are too careful. Certainly George Bush wouldn't. ... If he knew in advance of the plot then he'd have had a more scripted and appropriate response. Instead he looked like a confused idiot.

Pretty clearly the events of 9/11 were arranged to demonstrate that George Bush was not involved. The "tactical commander" for the day was apparently Cheney. Bush was kept "clean". I suspect that Bush was not one of the main organizers, but rather a complicit accomplice, doing his part in his speeches afterward. Bush's role the day of 9/11 was to look like a confused idiot (some would say he was a natural for that role.)

[Ghent12]

Re: Goodbye, Mr Roberts

For WTC7, yes, irrelevant .

Even for WTC 1 & 2, the plane impacts did what damage they did early on (in the first few seconds.) If the building outside the impact zone still stood relatively undamaged after the initial impact, then that means the steel had held and rebounded. From that point forward, you were dealing with (1) some broken steel beams and (2) fires, both on the impacted floors, with the heat and potential damage from the fires rising to floors above.

The entire buildings below the impact zones were essentially undamaged until the buildings collapsed (except for the repeated and thunderous explosions that occurred withing the buildings, from the basements upward, which are unaccounted for by any official reports and which we have made no attempt to consider in this thread that I recall.)

When you hit a piece of steel, if you don't hit it hard enough to bend or break it, then it still has its original strength. Also fire on a high floor of a steel frame building presents essentially zero risk to the floors below. People walked around, carried on their business or phoned home on their cell phones or took to the stairs in the buildings below the impact zones.

More hodgepodge from you, sigh...

1) I suppose the twenty-story tall gaping hole in WTC 7 was also irrelevant?

2) For an individual steel piece, what you say is mostly true. For a building built to a safety factor of 4, the loss of any of the structure permanently reduces its load-bearing capacity.

3) An explosion is essentially a forceful movement of air. You would expect, using a previously mentioned description, that a glass tube 95% filled with air would have lots of forceful movements of air as it collapses.

Also, please delineate the difference between the sound of a nano-thermite "explosion," the sound of a standard chemical-reaction explosion such as TNT (but of some explosive substance that leaves no chemical trace, as none was found), and the sound of all the various materials in the building colliding at high speed (such as one floor onto another). Also please tell me which of these witnesses describing explosions have been in or near prior high-rise structural collapses, so that we know the extent of their expertise in differentiating sources of aural input.

[Ghent12]

Re: Goodbye, Mr Roberts

I have actually seen one (unsubstantiated) conjecture of a means to get the explosives pre-planted. The thermite could have been embedded in acoustic ceiling tile and independently controlled by wireless receivers and detonators, each tile a separate remote controlled bomb. The WTC towers had tons of acoustic ceiling tiles, which required wholesale replacement every few years as they aged and yellowed and crumbled.

Personally, after looking at this more carefully in the last year or two, I decided that Impossibility [2] was the Real Impossibility. The evidence of a planned demolition convinced me. I did not have a specific conjecture (until the radio controlled ceiling tile bomb idea noted above) as to how the explosives were pre-positioned, but that seemed "less impossible" to me. In a big building such as the WTC Towers, it is like a medium sized city, with various maintenance and facilities work going on in other parts of the building more or less constantly. No one expects to know the details of all they might observe.

The thousands of tiles, meticulously inventoried and placed in order, all remote-controlled, yet not a single shred of evidence to support that conjecture. No detonator, no evidence of a fake company used to re-tile, no nothing. Hell, not even a burnt-up cell phone or computer circuit board made out to be the "smoking gun" just like everything else taken out of context and falsified by the "Truther" movement.

The only thing you have, supposedly, are four samples of "nano-thermite." I'll humor you TPC. Let's say these tiles were actually nano-thermite, all programmed to go off in the correct sequence to make it look as if it were a collapse. How does nano-thermite work on the ceiling tiles? How did they cut, at all, through anything vertical?

[radon]

Re: Goodbye, Mr Roberts

Fire damage alone? You're done.

You are too cunning to be understood

[radon]

Re: Goodbye, Mr Roberts

Yes, that 500 mph 150+ ton plane slicing through the building was irrelevant.

I didn't know any hit building 7.

But yes, for the humor impaired, my original comment was tongue in cheek.

I don't even know what the prevailing theory is on this matter. Is it that the fires heating the superstructure produced a failure?

I suppose that for the prevailing theory to be correct there should be other examples of similar collapses. Fires happen occasionally and sometimes they burn uncontrolled until they burn themselves out. We could study the reasons for failure and design better buildings.

On the other hand if no such examples exist then there must of been something special about the WTC incident; however, I have no opinion on what that might be nor have I bothered to look for any other examples.

[c1ue]

Re: Goodbye, Mr Roberts

It is not about how big the upper section is, it is about how big it is comparing with the lower section.

Sorry, but your respect is neither desired nor warranted.

You still cannot understand that there are differences between small homogeneous objects and large building pieces.

You still cannot understand that the relatives sizes of the objects are irrelevant because this isn't a collision between 2 moving objects - momentum transfer is irrelevant.

You still cannot understand the difference between kinetic energy imparted by an outside force and potential energy due to gravity.

So please, by all means sign off.

Could you do me a favor, and spell out carefully what you think happened in the first second of the collapse of WTC 1 & 2?

My understanding from what I've read is as follows:

The impact of the plane likely broke a few of the steel supports in the structure on one or more floors.
The resulting mishmash of aluminum, jet fuel, office furnishing, etc then caught fire.

The fire weakened a number of other (or even most of the) supports to the point where failure occurred. Logically this would be near the areas where supports were broken by impact, but it is not guaranteed.

Once enough failures occured such that the transferred load was enough to warp the remaining intact supports, the collapse ensued.

This could easily have been effectively simultaneous.

As I noted in a previous post - the top 6 floors in the Madrid fire collapsed without even having any load on them whatsoever. Certainly there are differences - no jet fuel yet 800 degree temperatures, as well as 32 story building with fire on top 8 floors vs. 110 story building with fire on floor 90 or so.

But I don't see anything in the 'accepted' reason for collapse that seems ridiculous or implausible.

As I've noted before, it isn't that nano-thermite is impossible. It is that it is impossible to prove or disprove given the restrictions placed on the examination (government coverup, etc etc).

Occam's razor dictates that the simplest explanation is the most likely - and nano-thermite is far from the simplest.

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: Goodbye, Mr Roberts

More hodgepodge from you, sigh...

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: Goodbye, Mr Roberts

Once enough failures occured such that the transferred load was enough to warp the remaining intact supports, the collapse ensued.

This could easily have been effectively simultaneous.

I will have to agree with an earlier distinguished post above, who wrote that such a simultaneous failure would be " a truly unlikely scenario."

I was hoping you could elaborate on the second or so in which "the collapsed ensued". In particular, what happened in the brief time during which the floors in the impact zone went from load bearing to not load bearing. The theories (which I believe you have been a proponent of) which have the upper building (above the impact zone) smashing down onto the lower building sufficiently to cause catastrophic failure seem to require that a floor or more in the impact zone quite suddenly fail across the entire floor, going from load bearing to providing approximately no resistance at all, in substantially less than the free fall time in gravity over the vertical height of a floor (10 or 20 feet.)

I am at a complete loss as to how such could happen. Indeed, agreeing with that earlier distinguished poster, I find that scenario truly unlikely.

Occam's razor dictates that the simplest explanation is the most likely - and nano-thermite is far from the simplest.

In reply, allow me to quote Albert Einstein:

It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: Goodbye, Mr Roberts

yet not a single shred of evidence to support that conjecture

Not a shred of evidence was made public.

How does nano-thermite work on the ceiling tiles? How did they cut, at all, through anything vertical?

The detonation of tons of some of the highest energy explosives available, distributed throughout the buildings, would pulverize the buildings, including their steel and concrete and everything contained therein, into clouds of rapidly spreading, very fine, dust.