Randi - You've Been Had! TS1234 Email to Randi

Does BSer101 ever look at all the pictures that are posted for him or what?
 
TruthSeeker1234 said:
We shall see that a building cannot fall anywhere near free fall speed and still have enough energy left over to pulverize much of anything. This is the principle of conservation of energy.
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I thought we had to use conservation of momentum for inelastic collisions (as some energy is lost to heat and sound).

I admit the collapse of a building is probably very hard to model (ie, I haven't tried) and as such one cannot simply say: oh, the top of the building is a point mass that interacts inelasticly with the bottom (another point mass that is at rest).
 
I have not read every post on this thread, but...

Did anyone else notice that TS's letter completely fails to offer an any details as to how the "trick" was done?

He states that the collapses caught by lots of cameras could not have happened, as they violate the laws of physics.

If that is what you believe, than what is your answer to how the trick was done, besides a vague mention of "explosives"? Can you offer more details on how explosives can pull off collapses like that, and not just jets filled with fuel?
 
TruthSeeker1234 said:
Then where is the rest of it? Where are the 220 non-dust floor assemblies?
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As others have said, they're in the pile, that goes several stories deep and about 6 stories high, as smaller, but non-dust sized, chunks, covered in some dust and dirt, a lot of steel, and other debris.

How big would you expect the chunks to be after such a fall? "Acre sized" doesn't cut it.

Now, turn your question around. I've shown you the numbers that indicate that if all the concrete was turned to dust, we'd have a layer between 18 and 24 inches thick over an area of about 800m in radius. Show me this layer. Show me anything that even approximates this layer.
 
TruthSeeker1234 said:
Then where is the rest of it? Where are the 220 non-dust floor assemblies?
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Since the contractors who removed the debris from the site were paid by the weight, fairly accurate records were made of that: It was about 1.7 million tons. But that included all 7 buildings; a reasonable estimate of how much of that debris was from the towers would be something in the vacinity of 400,000 tons each, which is in pretty good agreement with the other estimates of the weight based on structural elements and contents -- close enough that there just isn't any "Mystery of the Missing Buildings" here that needs to be solved.

Something that CTers ignore about the concrete, BTW, is that it was NOT reinforced like a reinforced concrete structure, nor was it the type of high-compression concrete used for that type of construction. It was just "lightweight" concrete poured on corrugated steel decks, only 4" thick for the office floors and 5" thick in the core. Lightweight concrete has a specific meaning in construction: it is made from Portland cement and lightweight aggregates like pumice and expanded clay, and it's easily crushed compared to the high-compression stuff used for reinforced concrete structures. I don't know if this is the case (I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere), but that type of thin slab on metal decks usually only has a single layer of wire mess for reinforcement, not thick rebars like reinforced concrete.

I really had to laugh at your OP, when you went on about the "conservation of energy" then described situation after situation that demonstrated you have no idea what that means. According to your "theory," if you drop a big rock on your toe, is all of the potential energy used up in accelerating the rock, so there isn't any left to do any damage to your toe?

As for the "weight" of the building being enough to cause the collapse, you're ignoring the effects of momentum. Any given level of the building was designed to carry (let's be generous) five times the weight of the levels above. I dare say that you could carefully place a five-pound rock on the top of your head without doing any damage, but what would do you think would happen if someone drops a one-pound rock on your head from a height of 12 feet?

You're also incorrectly stating that the momentum is "used up" in crushing stuff, so there shouldn't be any left over to do any more damage. Some of the kinetic energy would be converted to heat, but most of it would remain as kinetic energy in the crushed pieces.

To make your "theory" more convincing, you also keep implying that all the crushing took place during the initial impact of one floor against another, when in fact it would continue all the way down, in a grinding action with the steel pieces.

As for the amount of energy available during the collapse, the easiest way to get at least a qualitative feel for how much energy was released just in the INITIAL stage it to imaging how much energy it would take to lift those top floors up 12 feet. That's precisely the amount of energy that was available to cause the next floor to fail, and it's estimated to be nearly an order of magnitude more than the amount required -- lots of energy left over to crush lightweight concrete and drywall. That's the reason why structural engineers aren't impressed with CTer "no way!" hand-waving on this issue.

As for material being ejected out the sides of the building, when structural components fail, they do so "explosively" because a lot of the internal stresses they have been carrying are converted to kinetic energy, rather suddenly. I've always been amused at the CTers who yammer on and on about "Watch the videos! It looks just like demolition with explosives!" No it doesn't (and not just because it collapses from the top); specifically, the material is ejected sideways at much slower speeds than would be expected from explosives. If you watch a video of a controlled demolition carefully (which CTers have apparently never done), you will first see a large cloud of smoke and dust from the explosions, which reach their full size in just a frame or two, and then the building starts to fall. By comparison, the smoke and dust from the tower collapses "rolls" out of the building, exactly as would be expected in a structural failure.
 
Welcome to the forums, Roger. [ETA: Oh, I see you've been here since June '05. Don't be such a stranger!]

TS1234 recently stated that he expected to see entire intact floor slabs from the towers, stacked up, like a doughnut with a hole in the center.

As an experiment, and for dinner, I made crepes. I measured some of them and came up with an average thickness-to-width ratio of 1:60. The thickness-to-width ratio of the 4" thick concrete in most of the WTC tower floors was 1:624.

The concrete in the floors was 10 times thinner in relation to its width than a crepe, much less a pancake.

I don't like the food analogy, but I think it's an effective visual image. The fact that most of it was lightweight concrete, as you mention, means it would fracture all the more easily.

Any traffic on the road to Christopheraville, TS1234?

As for the "squibs," I measured the most prominent one, near the top of the north tower, and calculated its average speed as 35 mph. I'd like to see a high explosive that can accomplish that.
 
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Roger_Harris said:
Since the contractors who removed the debris from the site were paid by the weight, fairly accurate records were made of that: It was about 1.7 million tons. But that included all 7 buildings; a reasonable estimate of how much of that debris was from the towers would be something in the vacinity of 400,000 tons each, which is in pretty good agreement with the other estimates of the weight based on structural elements and contents -- close enough that there just isn't any "Mystery of the Missing Buildings" here that needs to be solved.

Something that CTers ignore about the concrete, BTW, is that it was NOT reinforced like a reinforced concrete structure, nor was it the type of high-compression concrete used for that type of construction. It was just "lightweight" concrete poured on corrugated steel decks, only 4" thick for the office floors and 5" thick in the core. Lightweight concrete has a specific meaning in construction: it is made from Portland cement and lightweight aggregates like pumice and expanded clay, and it's easily crushed compared to the high-compression stuff used for reinforced concrete structures. I don't know if this is the case (I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere), but that type of thin slab on metal decks usually only has a single layer of wire mess for reinforcement, not thick rebars like reinforced concrete.

I really had to laugh at your OP, when you went on about the "conservation of energy" then described situation after situation that demonstrated you have no idea what that means. According to your "theory," if you drop a big rock on your toe, is all of the potential energy used up in accelerating the rock, so there isn't any left to do any damage to your toe?

As for the "weight" of the building being enough to cause the collapse, you're ignoring the effects of momentum. Any given level of the building was designed to carry (let's be generous) five times the weight of the levels above. I dare say that you could carefully place a five-pound rock on the top of your head without doing any damage, but what would do you think would happen if someone drops a one-pound rock on your head from a height of 12 feet?

You're also incorrectly stating that the momentum is "used up" in crushing stuff, so there shouldn't be any left over to do any more damage. Some of the kinetic energy would be converted to heat, but most of it would remain as kinetic energy in the crushed pieces.

To make your "theory" more convincing, you also keep implying that all the crushing took place during the initial impact of one floor against another, when in fact it would continue all the way down, in a grinding action with the steel pieces.

As for the amount of energy available during the collapse, the easiest way to get at least a qualitative feel for how much energy was released just in the INITIAL stage it to imaging how much energy it would take to lift those top floors up 12 feet. That's precisely the amount of energy that was available to cause the next floor to fail, and it's estimated to be nearly an order of magnitude more than the amount required -- lots of energy left over to crush lightweight concrete and drywall. That's the reason why structural engineers aren't impressed with CTer "no way!" hand-waving on this issue.

As for material being ejected out the sides of the building, when structural components fail, they do so "explosively" because a lot of the internal stresses they have been carrying are converted to kinetic energy, rather suddenly. I've always been amused at the CTers who yammer on and on about "Watch the videos! It looks just like demolition with explosives!" No it doesn't (and not just because it collapses from the top); specifically, the material is ejected sideways at much slower speeds than would be expected from explosives. If you watch a video of a controlled demolition carefully (which CTers have apparently never done), you will first see a large cloud of smoke and dust from the explosions, which reach their full size in just a frame or two, and then the building starts to fall. By comparison, the smoke and dust from the tower collapses "rolls" out of the building, exactly as would be expected in a structural failure.
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You utterly misstate what I was saying. Of course a cinder block dropped will injure your toe, it cannot injure anything on the way down. To the extent that the cinder block damages anything else on the way down, that energy must indeed be subtracted from available GPE, thus slowing the acceleration and adding to the fall time. Objects cannot remain in gravitational free-fall and inflict damage to other objects. Falling objects slow down in exact proportion to the amount of damage they inflict.

You imagine collapsing floors stacking up and accumulating mass and momentum. This bears no resemblence to any observations that are made.

You imagine steel floor pans full of concrete falling all the way to the ground and then pulverizing. This is evocative, but there is no evidence for this. None. Every picture and every video show the floors turning into powder, systematically.

All of your ideas about the collapse are evocative, but they do not match what we observe. At all.

Roger, suppose you explain to me what happened with the top 12 floors of WTC1. So 98 fails and the top 12 floors fall down one to 97, right? Then what? Does 97 break and the whole thing falls down another level to 96? Is that what you think? What do we observe Roger?
 
Bell said:
Does BSer101 ever look at all the pictures that are posted for him or what?
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Yes, I'm downloading them and collecting them for a piece I'm doing called "Hunt the Rubble". It's kind of a sequel to Hunt the Boeing and Hunt the Boeing II.
 
TruthSeeker1234 said:
Roger, suppose you explain to me what happened with the top 12 floors of WTC1. So 98 fails and the top 12 floors fall down one to 97, right? Then what? Does 97 break and the whole thing falls down another level to 96? Is that what you think? What do we observe Roger?
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There's pretty good evidence that the floors in and above the impact area had well and truely failed well before global collapse. It wasn't the floors that failed. It was the exterior columns.

-Gumboot
 
TruthSeeker1234 said:
You utterly misstate what I was saying. Of course a cinder block dropped will injure your toe, it cannot injure anything on the way down. To the extent that the cinder block damages anything else on the way down, that energy must indeed be subtracted from available GPE, thus slowing the acceleration and adding to the fall time. Objects cannot remain in gravitational free-fall and inflict damage to other objects. Falling objects slow down in exact proportion to the amount of damage they inflict.

You imagine collapsing floors stacking up and accumulating mass and momentum. This bears no resemblence to any observations that are made.

You imagine steel floor pans full of concrete falling all the way to the ground and then pulverizing. This is evocative, but there is no evidence for this. None. Every picture and every video show the floors turning into powder, systematically.

All of your ideas about the collapse are evocative, but they do not match what we observe. At all.

Roger, suppose you explain to me what happened with the top 12 floors of WTC1. So 98 fails and the top 12 floors fall down one to 97, right? Then what? Does 97 break and the whole thing falls down another level to 96? Is that what you think? What do we observe Roger?
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I hope you are only pulling our collective legs with this sort of thing, TS... ;)

OK, I'll bite, though.

What DID we observe? Perhaps you can tell us. Reference to video of the collapse would be nice, as a visual aide.

Looky here, for example. If you keep your eye on the TV tower on top, you can see that the top of the building does indeed "ride" down as the layers beneath collapse. So do you care to deny the obvious conclusion of what happens to it when it hits the ground going at that speed?
 
TruthSeeker1234 said:
Yes, I'm downloading them and collecting them for a piece I'm doing called "Hunt the Rubble". It's kind of a sequel to Hunt the Boeing and Hunt the Boeing II.
Click to expand...

but there was a 757 that hit the pentagon

so now you are wasting your time hunting the missiing weight?

what a dolt

sorry but you are nuts

the GPE was?

how much energy do you need for your ct dream to come true?

name the amount of explosive force you need to have to make your ct dream come true?

are you capable of rational thought and able to give up the number of joules of energy you need to account for the missing mass?

or are you incapable of calcualting your way out of a paper bag, let alone able to grasp a number of joules you need to do what you say happened?

the number and stop making this so painful, please give us a number to work with?

use numbers or you have no idea what you are talking about, and you can not recieve help on your ideas

estimate of time to complete your calculation on the energy you need?

hope you do not say bunches, please hurry
 
did this guy miss the fact the energy in the tower, each tower by it self is 248 tons of TNT

like 1,000,000,000,000 but yes some said NIST used 4x10^11

but give me 96 tons of TNT, it will do what TS needs

all in the building itself, darn, what real CD guys use the building itself to break the building up into little pieces and dust, not the explosives that do the destruction, it is the building, the explosives set it up

but there were just aircraft impacts like a a ton of TNT and fires to beat all fires, and the failing buildings did the rest

maybe he will post an energy he needs to make it happen

does he understand that wall board was used in the WTC and it does not require much energy to dust up the area? am I wrong on the fact I have observed lots of dust from just banging wallboard with a hammer???

darn there was an 1.5 inch (2 3/4 inch) of wall board all over the WTC core
 
joules left out joules, 1x10^12 joules in each tower

TS you can look up joules on line, it is not messed up like a search for WTC cause most CT guys do not understand energy

late good night
 
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