You may not have claimed expertise, but you have implied competence. And you don't have that, as evidenced by your hanging paper analogy.
I'm not afraid of numbers. However, I have done enough mathematical modeling (though in areas that are not related to physics) that I realize that I need to understand how a model works before I can get usable data out of it. Each model has the area where it can be applied and if you try to use it outside it, you'll get wrong answers. If you treat models as black boxes you get a garbage in - garbage out situation.
I have studied enough mathematics to know that I could study ship stability to be able to give useful comments about that if I wanted to do it. But I'm not interested enough to spend the effort. It's been over 20 years since I last solved a differential equation and I don't want to spend the time to relearn doing that, it took enough hours the first time.
So, I freely admit that I'm not competent enough on ship stability to comment on JAIC findings.
And if you just plug the numbers in the simplest formula while ignoring the effect of water coming in, you'll get garbage out.
It is easy to explain in pure layman terms, that has been done many times in this thread. However, people like you don't believe it. And when it's demonstrated that physics agrees with the layman terms, that's snobbery and browbeating.
Yup. They shouldn't have used mathematics and physics to show that the scenario that they propose in the report is possible. They should have concluded that Estonia sunk because Russian smugglers opened the bow gate and visor while KGB blew the visor off and a Russian submarine torpedoed the ship that just hit a WWII mine and a Swedish submarine at the same time.
No, it is not necessarily easy to 'explain in pure layman terms'. When I did my accountancy classes the large element of maths graduates - the traditional recruiting ground - had a horrible shock when they were told they couldn't just stick to the numbers. Sure many exams were very maths based, but the final big proficiency exam, actually a case study, required a 4,000-
word report and writing skills. The maths content was less than half of the marks. So no matter how fancy your calculations, you got a big fat fail if you could not write a satisfactory report and one that was readable to a reasonably well-educated business layperson. Sure, there would be a huge data dump to plough through, in addition to the seen data in advance over a dozen or more pages, and the report could not be done without analysing it and carrying out complex
calculations. The big dilemma and headache, was how to do all of this
and write 4K words in three hours? So the beloved mathematics all had to be done in the twenty minutes reading time, scribbled on the exam paper, as the answer booklet had to remain shut until the twenty minutes were up. The beloved darlings of us (calculations, formulae, numbers) all having to be treated with great haste. The criteria used by the examiner was: Would anyone pay for this report? If the answer was yes, you passed. And this would be fewer than 50% of the candidates. IOW any report, whether for the courts or the public, has to pass the test of
clear logical communication. This is because running a business is as much an art as it is a science. Likewise, barristers have to keep their legal skeletons extremely short and their legal arguments in simple plain language at the level of a bright twelve-year-old reading level, because you know what? The senior judges just want the bottom line and to speedread through it. An accident investigations board being answerable to the public (=public inquiry) likewise as to be in a comprehensive form.
Do I think the JAIC fulfills these criteria? Would I pay for the JAIC report? On the one hand, the descriptive narrative is good (for example, list of helicopters, ships and aircraft), together with the description of the vessel and its history. However, it has been mired in controversy from the minute it came out, so I would argue it fails to convince in its conclusions.
Many questions are left unanswered. Many things are left out (for example, the violent list to fifty degrees before uprighting prior to the sinking). It doesn 't explain how it knows the bow visor and car ramp fell off prior to the sinking (given two Estonian athletes affirmed they climbed down the car ramp as they escaped the ship) or how it knows the cause of the accident was a few strong waves.
It tries to blind the reader with hundreds of pages of fancy calculations re wave impact and bow visor specifications but without establishing these are relevant as to the cause.
The other big problem with the JAIC report is that you have to refer to lots of different places if you want to look something up. For example, the issue of the EPIRB's. You have to do a word search as it is covered in several different places. The report lacks continuity and cohesion.
It is all predicated on a fake premise so it is really a report masquerading as one. It is a facsimile simulacrum of an accident investigation report.
