Having complained of people posting off topic, it seems a reasonable solution to give an opportunity for people to discuss the topics I am banning from other threads – of which 9/11 seems the most popular.
I do not believe that the US government, or any of its agencies, were responsible for 9/11. It would just need too many people to be involved. Someone would have objected. There are some strange and dangerous people in America, but not in sufficient concentration for this one. They couldn’t even keep Watergate quiet, and that was a small group. Any group I can think of – even Blackwater – would contain operatives with scruples about blowing up New York. They may be sadly ready to kill people in poor countries, but Americans en masse? Somebody would say it wasn’t a good idea.
I asked a friend in the construction industry what it would take to demolish the twin towers. He replied nine months, 80 men, and 12 miles of cabling. The notion that a small team at night could plant sufficient explosives embedded at key points, is laughable.
The forces of the aircraft impacts must have been amazingly high. I have no difficulty imagining they would bring down the building. As for WTC 7, again the kinetic energy of the collapse of the twin towers must be immense.
I admit to a private speculation about WTC7. Unfortunately in construction it is extremely common for contractors not to fix or install properly all the expensive girders, ties and rebar that are supposed to be enclosed in the concrete. Supervising contractors and municipal inspectors can be corrupt. I recall vividly that in London some years ago a tragedy occurred when a simple gas oven explosion brought down the whole side of a tower block.
The inquiry found that the building contractor had simply omitted the ties that bound the girders at the corners, all encased in concrete. If a gas oven had not blown up, nobody would have found out. Buildings I strongly suspect are very often not as strong as they are supposed to be, with contractors skimping on apparently redundant protection. The sort of sordid thing you might not want too deeply investigated in the event of a national tragedy.
Precisely what happened at the Pentagon I am less sure. There is not the conclusive film and photographic evidence that there is for New York. I am particularly puzzled by the much more skilled feat of flying that would be required to hit a building virtually at ground level, in an urban area, after a lamppost clipping route – very hard to see how a non-professional pilot did that. But I can think of a number of possible scenarios where the official explanation is not quite the whole truth on the Pentagon, but which do not necessitate a belief that the US government or Dick Cheney was behind the attack.
In my view the real scandal of 9/11 was that it was blowback – the product of a malignant terrorist agency whose origins lay in CIA funding and provision. Also blowback in a more general sense that it was spawned in the nasty theocratic dictatorship of Saudi Arabia which is so close to the US and to the Bush dynasty in particular. As with almost all terrorist activity, I do not rule out any point on the whole spectrum of surveillance, penetration and agent provocateur activity by any number of possible actors.
But was 9/11 false flag and controlled demolition? No, I think not.
(Now I have given full opportunity to discuss 9/11 here, any further references on other threads will be instantly deleted).
Ehm, I haven’t posted as no one answered my query of 21 January. I was interested to see videos of controlled demolitions which show the initially taken out floor as low down, or as not obvious.
I asked because Kempe had posted a link to a video in which all the controlled demolitions looked v similar and quite unlike 9/11 WTC7 and where the control took out a high level floor and the upper floors then dropped down.
If there is a simple trade guide to the basic methodologies or structures of demolishing a high rise I would be interested to read it. Noddy level ideally.
Hhm, well I had a look around and there are indeed some curious examples of controlled demolitions which are not take outs of whole floors. Interesting.
There are also examples of things going wrong eg fall to one side, getting stuck and falling all the way down or just a side falling away etc.
With WTC all three towers managed to apparently fall by accident within a relatively small footprint. I say ‘apparently’ because I don’t have any data, but it sure looks that way i.e. they don’t fall at 45 degrees or fall half way and stop, or its not that just a side collapsed.
Those three accidents neatly falling into their footprints in a swift and efficient manner were therefore more competent than those expert professionally controlled demolitions, which went wrong.
That doesn’t mean anything. A monkey can pick stocks. If there is one thing we know about experts its that once they get to the top they know they are not experts – we are all beginners….
..nonetheless?
Fwl, I didn’t answer your query as I didn’t know of any such videos off-hand – I assumed you could search for them just as well as I could.
Beware the phrase you used “neatly falling into their footprints”. It has been put forward many times as an argument for controlled demolition, and it isn’t true. The Twin Towers made a hell of a pile of rubble, each covering several times the area of its building. Nearby buildings were severely damaged or destroyed by falling debris. I used to think that Building 7 “fell into its own footprint” but apparently that damaged nearby buildings, too, though the rubble pile was considerably neater than those of the Twin Towers.
Of course none of this proves that explosives etc weren’t used. I’m just trying to limit muddying of the water.
Fwl:
Well said. I wish more people around here would acknowledge the limits of their own understanding, but people read on the ‘net that the collapses were “physically impossible” and they just accept it, despite having insufficient technical expertise to check.
…which reminds me…
Glenn, what do you make of my conservation of momentum arguments dotted about the thread? Do you agree:
* that strictly, we can’t use straightforward conservation of momentum because the load-bearing columns were attached to the ground, which has effectively infinite momentum (a point I only touched upon within another argument)?
* that we can nonetheless make an estimate by assuming the load-bearing capacity of the floors to be relatively insignificant compared with the weight of the falling debris?
* and that by this latter reckoning, the instantaneous velocity decrease when the falling material impacts the topmost still-standing floor will be 10% or less if the falling material represents ten former floors?
This is the first time I have posted on this thread (thanks to Clark’s pointing out it’s existence elsewhere). 9/11 is my ‘specialty’, and I’ll happily use what I have learnt about it to reply to questions (though I don’t live in a cave spouting noxious, and doubtless mind-altering fumes, in Delphi, or even on Patmos, where as well as the fuming cave, ‘St.’ John also had the ‘benefit’ of hallucinogenic mushrooms growing on the island).
Here’s a starter, for anyone who believes the utter bilge and tosh we have been fed by governments and the MSM:
‘Physics doesn’t lie: tilting south tower gives away demolition of Trade Center’:
https://truthandshadows.wordpress.com/2010/11/26/tilting-south-tower-gives-away-demolition-of-trade-center-towers/
Why didn’t the tilt continue? If I remember rightly (it was quite a while ago I learnt of this) that top section weighed in at around a quarter of a million tons; what power, other than explosives, would shatter that huge, obviously intact, chunk into dust?
Paul Barbara, first I’ll just restate my position on this.
The 9/11 Commission Report is based upon confessions extracted under torture. That makes it inadmissible as evidence under international law, and also totally unreliable since torture is well known to produce false confessions.
That is all you need, right there, to demand another, independent, international inquiry.
To use the physics of the collapses to demand another inquiry, you need CONCLUSIVE PROOF that natural collapse was impossible, and even if you get that proof, it gives you no suspects to prosecute.
Now, to your point. Short answer; the force that destroyed the top of each building was it’s own weight, a quarter of a million tons, you say.
As we all know, the Twin Towers consisted of a core surrounded by very wide, open plan floor areas, in turn bounded by the perimeter columns. So immediately behind what we could see lay mostly empty space, or air to be pedantic.
Why would you expect such a structure to hold together as it lost support from beneath? It was never designed to have rigidity without support. Partially, randomly supported, with the top section of core presumably moving somewhat independently, it would have been subject to all sorts of massive twisting forces. The outer perimeter columns burst apart producing effectively a cloud of dust and debris, which shrouded from view the motion of the much more rigid core section, which may well have continued to tip.
What we see on the videos doesn’t look physically impossible to me. I’m not saying that explosives weren’t used, but what we see doesn’t prove it, and therefore is no use for demanding further investigation.
Clark, thanks for the reminder. May I confess, I do not recall having read those good questions before, out of sheer laziness and thus not reading every post here. May I address your points as a, b and c.
(a) – yes. Which actually only bolsters my original argument on the subject.
(b) – a partial yes, _after_ it was well underway, since so much of the building had become powerised already. As evidenced by the hydroplastic wave of toxic particles that engulfed such a lot of lower Manhattan.
(c) – Afraid not. You would have to look at the increasing inertia, as it progressed. Any collapse – even as you appear to imagine it – would become progressively slower, not reaching a frenzied climax as it got to the lowest floors.
*
About the load-bearing columns, attached to the Earth as you say – why weren’t they still standing proud, even as the floors disintegrated, in your supposed scenario? If all the floors just collapsed, why isn’t the core still there – stretching up to the very top?
My memory let me down on the weight: it couldn’t have been 1/4 million tons, as the whole tower weighed about 1/2 million tons.
Take a look at figure 3 in the following article, to get an idea of how large an area the core columns took up:
http://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/jom/0112/eagar/eagar-0112.html
They clearly weren’t still standing when the top tilted, yet the top section stayed intact. If the core columns were out of the picture, what forces would pull the top apart so violently as to turn it to dust? Those outer columns, all interconnected, were very strong in themselves: strong enough to handle hurricane force winds over a wide ‘sail’ area.
A reasonable supposition why they SUDDENLY turned to dust, is if the top had gone it’s (and Newton’s) merry way, it would have utterly destroyed the ‘Official Narrative’ of a pile driver effect (not that it has any credibility anyway).
Glenn,
(a) Yes, I was going to mention that this would remove some momentum (and hence velocity) from the falling material at each collision with an intact floor, but I’d already used one set of brackets.
(b) Yes, but when the falling material from above the aircraft impact zone encountered the first intact floor, a collapse already was under way. That falling material had already accumulated appreciable momentum.
The “dust”. A bag of cement or flour is full of “dust”. This isn’t like the “dust” you typically empty out of a vacuum cleaner bag; it’s far more dense. Imagine two cubic metre bags of cement; that has to be at least three tonnes. Each full bag is suspended, say, five metres up, by its own rope from some common anchor point another five metres above; the full bags nestle side-by-side like conkers on strings. Now with secondary ropes we pull the bags away from each other in opposite directions until the primary ropes are nearly horizontal, and then we release the secondary ropes so that the bags of cement swing back together and collide. Assume the collision is sufficient to rupture the bags. A big cloud of dust will be left hanging in the air five metres up, but would you be prepared to observe the collision from directly underneath? I wouldn’t.
A cloud of dust occupies a much larger volume than the pulverised material from which it originated. The dust-cloud was obscuring our view of debris that was falling more directly, including pieces larger than dust. The dust which became dust-cloud represents a loss of mass, and therefore momentum, from the falling debris. So to proceed we need an estimate of the proportion of total material becoming dust-cloud.
My momentum argument still seems to hold with 80% of the material becoming dust-cloud. I’ll disregard falling material from perimeter columns, core, hat-truss, lift pulleys, motors, water tanks, TV transmitter, dubiously-authorised server farms with remarkably heavy lead-acid UPSs and so on, some of which is unquantifiable but all of which would bolster my argument. Ten floors-worth of falling material becomes eight floors-worth of floating dust-cloud, leaving two floors-worth of falling material to share momentum with the first intact floor it encounters. After impact, the combined (now falling) material will have 2/3 of the pre-impact velocity of falling material.
The falling material then has some three metres of free-fall in which it gains velocity from gravitational acceleration before it hits the next intact floor, where it will this time lose less than 1/3 of its velocity – less than 1/3 because the mass of falling material has increased but the next intact floor has much the same mass as all the others. The falling material would have to lose at least half of the velocity it had just gained between floors for the collapse to decelerate. That could be estimated, but…
…but it’s me doing nearly all the work, nearly all the actual visualisation, estimation, calculation, description and detailed explanation. You, like Scouse Billy with vaccines, are making me run around by pointing to thing after thing. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. You can claim that the buildings just had to have been deliberately demolished. I could claim that the universe just had to have been deliberately created; who holds the burden of proof in each case? We all know that structures can collapse. No reference to construction materials is necessary; it’s simply a matter of weight versus strength.
…so I think it high time for you to either present a proper numerical proof of impossibility, or admit that the Twin Towers might have just collapsed.
Glenn, to take some more of your diverse points. Briefly…
I’ve already addressed this in my momentum argument, but What about avalanches and rock-slides? Acceleration or not depends on the gradient, doesn’t it? And it doesn’t get any steeper than vertical…
I suggest you look at a line-diagram of the Twin Towers; there are plenty shown in home-made collapse simulations on YouTube. The core structures were exceedingly slender. The floors were attached to it. As the floors were impacted by falling debris they’d have pulled outwards on the core, pulling it to pieces. Plus, these slender cores were in the middle of something like a rock-slide. And yet bits still standing were visible for a few seconds after the main collapse front had cleared enough to permit the view; there’s a colloquialism for them; “the spire”.
Paul Barbara, 2:46 pm; figure 3 makes the core look pretty stout, but the figure depicts less than a twentieth of the height of the towers. Seen in proper context, the cores seem just about sturdy enough to do their job – which is exactly how buildings are designed; the maximum volume and floor area for minimum material, plus a margin for safety.
Evidence please. Maybe some were severed by aircraft impact. Maybe they buckled under the weight above where they were softened by heat. Either way, the parts of the core columns beneath the fire zones were presumably still standing.
Did it? It retained its overall shape, briefly. But then, even you say:
I dispute both of these claims. Just because the top sections continued briefly to look contiguous doesn’t mean they retained their strength and rigidity. And the claim that they “turned to dust” is spurious. Certainly, much dust was suddenly released. But shrouded within that dust may have been much material in larger chunks. The dust obscured the view of coarser debris.
Sorry to say, the quality of argument I’m opposing is pretty poor.
Node argues that the collapse of Building 7 was provably a demolition, and therefore the collapses of the Twin Towers were also. That doesn’t follow, even if we accept the assertion about Building 7.
Glenn and Paul Barbara seem to be assuming demolition and arguing from there, just as creationists assume creation, and then argue from incredulity about eyes, flagella, flight, whatever… “This, that and the other couldn’t have happened without God/explosives”.
Exexpat just assumes.
Come on folks; Occam’s razor. Start from the simplest explanation – collapse due to impact damage, fire, and the buildings’ own weight – whip up a collapse model that can be tested, and disprove it. Eliminate all such models. Only then can you justifiably suggest explosives etc.
If you can’t do the above, admit you’re out of your field and withdraw your assertions.
I’ve looked at the last few days’ postings on this thread, and I see no satisfactory answer to Clark’s point about the fact that the official version of what happened on 9/11 is totally uncorroborated due to the fact that the official account depends critically on the testimony of tortured detainees.
I will only add to that the fact that the obvious explanation for the use of torture is that the authorities wanted to propagate a false version of what happened on 9/11 which could only be supported through the use of torture. Why otherwise why they use torture, which experts on interrogation are well aware is no way to discover the truth and which would make it impossible (or at least extremely difficult) to bring the tortured detainees to trial?
Lysias, yes. The US authorities corrupted their own investigation in a way that could never be rectified.
Somehow, a lot of very sensationalist theories about television coverage, aircraft and buildings suddenly appeared on the Web, submerging nearly all other debate. I wish we could get those out of the way and get back to campaigning to put torturers and illegal warmongers on trial, with public denouncement of all results of “investigations” obtained by the illegal and utterly discredited method of torture.
The war on Iraq was illegal. The war on Afghanistan was probably illegal if we consider that the US presented torture confessions to gain UN and international approval.
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/pressreleases/fake_video_dramatically
Exexpat, 6:11 pm; that’s an interesting piece of research, and the findings are as I’d have expected; people can be very impressionable.
Would you make a rough estimate of the number of conspirators necessary to have performed the 9/11 hoax as you see it please? Presumably, you must believe that there are tens of thousands of people who have been pretending to have lost a friend or relative ever since.
What actually makes you think 9/11 didn’t happen? The US neocons have covertly cooperated with very violent ‘islamist’ extremists for decades. We’ve seen them operating in Afghanistan, Libya, and many other places, and now in Syria and Iraq. 9/11 is just the sort of outrage they’d commit, and it was very convenient to the neocons. It would seem much harder, more expensive and more prone to exposure to have faked 9/11 than to have employed such terrorists to actually do it.
They corrupted the investigation because the last thing they wanted was for the truth to come out.
The NIST ‘model’ for the collapse of building 7, the only one in exsistence has always been refused access for peer review, and is now a state secret.
Is this true?
Clark : Sorry to say, the quality of argument I’m opposing is pretty poor.
Node argues that the collapse of Building 7 was provably a demolition, and therefore the collapses of the Twin Towers were also. That doesn’t follow, even if we accept the assertion about Building 7.
No I didn’t, I said it was a reasonable supposition that the Twin Towers were demolished, which is a very different thing. I began by providing scientific evidence for my claim that WTC7 was demolished. I then continued :
That’s twice now on this page that you have mis-stated my position, then gone on to denigrate me on the strength of your false assertion.
Node
“That’s twice now on this page that you have mis-stated my position, then gone on to denigrate me on the strength of your false assertion.”
Get used to it.
Clark I’m well aware of this latest “model” from oxford regarding conspiracies – it’s currently being pulled apart and laughed at here http://cluesforum.info/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=1859 🙂
I have actually told you before but will tell you again – I am not a conspiracy theorist. I am of course not privy to how many people are behind 9/11 or any of the other media hoaxes – Nor will I be drawn to speculate on that.
So do you agree with the conclusion of the academic research? Yes or no?
Can we rule out witness testimony for 9/11? Yes or no?
Have YOU ASSUMED that the video broadcast from that day is bona fide? Yes or no?
All I have assumed is that the towers are gone. Surely we can agree on that? 🙂
Node, OK, I acknowledge that you only asserted a reasonable supposition. Sorry about that.
Er, what was the point of demolishing Building 7 if the Twin Towers were rigged to be demolished? Surely, demolishing Building 7 would just jeopardise any Twin Towers scam?
Node, look, my main point all along is that none of this stuff really helps the objective of getting proper investigation done. It just seems too crazy to engage most of the population, and although all this “you cannot break the laws of physics” stuff seems at first like ideal, irrefutable argument, after fourteen years no one has come up with a cast-iron proof.
It’s actually much worse than that. The demolition and “no planes” arguments have come to dominate the general population’s impression of the 9/11 Truth Movement, causing them to dismiss it in total. At the other end of the spectrum we get people like Exexpat claiming that Sibel Edmonds is a spook! It’s a total mess.
Exexpat said it; “the only way to win is not to play”. Do you suppose Exexpat has insider knowledge and is taking the piss, you know, like NIST did with 9 seconds and 11 seconds? You a spook, Exexpat? Only joking. No, it really is best not to play. Mike Ruppert did warn us about this years ago…
Clark: I only took a look at your immediate reply to my own above, before doing several spins of the mouse-wheel, because I have to respond to one point immediately.
Of course the buildings _might_ have come down just like the Official Story said, that’s a definite possibility – one I had thought without thinking about it too much for a good couple of years. (That’s only to say, even an idiot like myself fully entertained the idea!)
_Of course_ it’s possible. Just pretty damned unlikely, IMHO only. Almost as unlikely as these blasted laser/CGI/hologram BS conspiracies.
*
About the clouds of dust – you might observe that bags of dust, once released, do not fall at anything like the rate of a brick, particularly not from a great height. Air resistance becomes substantially more pronounced with surface area, and the powdered form of anything has vastly surface greater area, and so greater resistance than free-fall gravity.
That, and some resistance that might yet have been offered by the ever so tenuous core of the building, not to mention the inertia of the entire structure on the way down.
I don’t think you’re seeing the momentum verses velocity point – even (for the sake of the discussion) allowing for the momentum to collapse each floor on the way down, what about the inertia of the standing floor? Why should that just assume the velocity of the rest of the “collapse”? Not to mention the energy required to release each floor from its bonds. I wish you could at least acknowledge you recognise that very obvious drag on the progression. As it is, you think it might be maybe 10% more restrictive than free air.
If almost free-fall speed sounds plausible to you, as if nothing was in the way (except fresh air!) of solid concrete at the top once it had decided to fall? Ok, fine. Maybe you’d like to demonstrate the sheer exasperatingly obviousness of such a thing mathematically.
I don’t see it as being a personal problem, I wish you would not see it as one.
Exexpat, you may have been aware of that study; I’d only seen it mentioned elsewhere in the comments, and only just now followed your link while writing my comment to Node. I’ve read the BBC article. I decided not to bother with the original on Plos. The numbers produced seem different to what I’d expect, and I note two are given as ranges and two as single numbers; why? Maybe the BBC report is rubbish – science journalism tends to be dire. At least Dr Grimes attempted a bit of calibration. The idea is interesting, but I think a lot more studies would need to be done before any conclusions could be drawn; what’s there so far isn’t really usable.
What I already thought before reading that article is that the higher the number of people trying to keep a secret, the sooner that secret is likely to leak.
I don’t think that eyewitness testimony should be ignored. Neither should any of it be accepted uncritically. Obviously there is much variation and contradiction between witness accounts.
No I don’t assume that all video of the event available to me is unaltered. But I expect that most of it is genuine. Again, it mustn’t be accepted uncritically.
But taken all together – witness testimony, video, records, court testimony, relatives’ statements etc. – I think it overwhelmingly likely that passenger aircraft hit the Twin Towers.
Sorry not to have answered “yes or no”, but I try to think in less restricted ways.
Ziggy, 8:02 pm; I have been told that the NIST collapse model for Building 7 was never published, and was then classified. I haven’t checked, though. But I think it looks very likely that NIST are covering up some things.
Glenn, I’ve already DONE the maths in non-technical language. Twice! OK, no LaTeX, in a WordPress comment, coming up in a few minutes…
Momentum is conserved in collisions. In non-elastic collisions, two bodies merge into one. We are therefore discussing non-elastic collisions. We will consider one collision, ie. the falling stuff entraining one floor.
Let M mean “mass”.
Let V mean “velocity”.
Let M1 be the mass of the falling stuff.
Let V1 be the velocity of the falling stuff.
Let M2 be the mass of an intact floor.
Let V2 be the velocity of an intact floor – this of course will be zero.
Let Mt be the mass of falling stuff after the collision – “t” for total.
Let Vt be the velocity of falling stuff after the collision.
Let x mean “multiplied by”.
Basic momentum equation: momentum = M x V
Conservation of momentum for an inelastic collision:
(M1 x V1) + (M2 x V2) = Mt x Vt
Now to make things easy, let’s take the mass of a floor as one unit:
M2 = 1
Let’s say that there were ten floors above the impact zone – this is the bit of the building that started to fall. In both cases, it was actually more than ten floors, so I’m erring on your side, Glenn. So:
M1 = 10
The falling stuff entrains the floor, so:
Mt = 10 + 1 = 11
So, let’s return to our conservation equation and then substitute in the figures:
(M1 x V1) + (M2 x V2) = Mt x Vt
(10 x V1) + (1 x 0) = 11 x Vt
(10 x V1) + 0 = 11 x Vt
10 x V1 = 11 x Vt
Divide throughout by 11
10 / 11 x V1 = Vt
Reverse the sides:
Vt = approx 0.91 x V1
——————————
Oh, I was wrong, the falling stuff only loses about 9% of its velocity when it entrains the intact floor.
I really didn’t want to bother with all that; it’s trivial. Do you accept it?
Glenn, also:
So, you’d be happy to stand under my 3 tonne cubic metre cement-bag conkers, would you? Just a load of dust…
Clark,
On 9/11/2001 A passenger aircraft penetrated a skyscraper and exited with its nose intact.
Is that “overwhelmingly likely”?