Unfortunately, I got caught up in a comment exchange about the collapse of the World Trade Centers. There are certainly some intriguing questions, and parts of the official story that seem fishy. Scores of stupid questions and ideas are also present. The answers are simple and straightforward. Yet they aren’t accepted. Folks harping on those details are doing a grave disservice to their cause. Unless the cause is to maintain a conspiracy theory. In that case rationality has no place in the discussion.
So what really bugs me?
1.) “The temperature of the fire wasn’t hot enough to melt steel.” True and fine. But you don’t have to turn steel into a liquid for it to be weakened significantly.
2.) “The buildings fell into their own footprint, which shouldn’t have happened.” Why not? For them to have fallen over (think of a tree cut at the base), you’d need a moment (ie. rotation force for you non-engineers) and a point for rotation. This works for a tree, because the wood is fairly incompressible. But when you try to apply that principle to the buildings, I bet you’ll find that the elements needed to provide rotation, will be completely overloaded. Thus they will fail due to compression and be unable to be the pivot. Thus, with the force of gravity and no other external forces applied, the building will fall… anyone? anyone? Straight down.
3.) “It looked like a controlled demolition.” Has anyone seen an uncontrolled demolition of a skyscraper? I didn’t think so. But in a controlled demolition, you’ll usually see explosions starting at the bottom of the structure and moving up. Did you see any explosions anywhere in the building? I didn’t think so.
4.) “It fell in 9 seconds, as if there was no resistance. A fall of that speed is impossible without explosives.” A fall in that amount of time is of course just about impossible. The simple response is that the fall was timed wrong. (Junk in, junk out ya know.) Let’s pretend the the building was rigged with explosives (which would be a major undertaking in and of itself). To bring the towers down as quickly as the time above suggests, each floor would have to be weakened to zero by explosions before the impact of the floors above. This means that all the exterior columns, as well as those on the interior, would have to be rigged with explosives and detonated. Any explosions on those outer columns would have to be easily visible.
5. Bonus) “Eyewitnesses said…” An extreme minority of eyewitnesses does not make a convincing argument. As an exercise, consider a sporting event with 100,000 attendees. Without the benefit of replay, try to get everyone to agree on every call made by the referees. It won’t happen. Why should we expect a better performance from people in other situations? Oh yeah, I forgot. People are SO perfect at making observations.
ZaMoose Says:
*fist bump*