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.
If a falling object hits something on the way down, it will slow down in exact proportion to amount of kinetic energy that's converted to heat, which might be all of the energy, most of it, or just some of it, depending on the circumstances. Look at this example: Two cars of the same weight moving at the same speed crash head-on and come to a stop where they collided. Both cars stop moving because all of the kinetic energy is converted to heat. On the other hand, if a line of cars is stopped and then another car crashes into the rear car, some of the kinetic energy is converted to heat, some of it is transferred as momentum to the car that was hit, sending it crashing into the car in front of it, and some of it remains in the car that caused the accident, so it continues moving forward with the car that was hit, so the momentum of BOTH cars is available to do damage to the third car. If the rear car was moving fast enough, that process can continue in a chain reaction through several more cars until all of the kinetic energy has been converted to heat. Figuring out precisely how the energy got divided up in that situation is extremely complicated, but the conservation law simply tells us that none of the energy disappeared.
Now, the biggest difference between that situation and the collapse of the towers is that gravity kept feeding that process as the supporting structure failed.
You imagine collapsing floors stacking up and accumulating mass and momentum. This bears no resemblance to any observations that are made.
On the contrary; that's exactly what I see happening in the videos, except that there's no rational reason to think that the floors should be either neatly stacked up or completely pulverized. The most rational expectation would be something in between -- pulverized stuff and big pieces all falling together.
You imagine steel floor pans full of concrete falling all the way to the ground and then pulverizing.
Nope, as I said, I would imagine some of it being pulverized immediately, some of it being pulverized on the way down as the moving mass crashed through the standing structure, and some of being pulverized when the whole mass hit the ground and all of the remaining kinetic energy was converted to heat.
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.
Sorry, but that's total baloney, and I see that you've been called on that before. What the videos show is that both powder and big chunks are being ejected in the cloud you can see, and there's no way to tell from the videos what percentage of each is present in the cloud, much less what's going on inside the building, at any given point. You're the one making totally unsupported assertions here.
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?
I have no idea what you're getting at. The videos show the top sections of each tower crashing through the next floor, as would be expected if the momentum greatly exceeded the carrying capacity. It's clear that the resistance of the towers is slowing the fall, somewhat: The debris that's falling away from the towers is obviously falling faster than the towers are collapsing. The fact that the falling mass isn't slowed very much is simply an indication that its momentum greatly exceeds the carrying capacity, precisely as predicted by calculations. It's absurd to suggest, as Judy Wood has, that the mass should come to a stop, then the next floor would "break free," then begin accelerating at G. As more and more mass gets moving faster and faster, the carrying capacity becomes a smaller and smaller fraction of the momentum present, so the falling mass is slowed less and less as the collapse progresses, until it's crashing through the remaining structure at "near" freefall speeds. But no matter how many times CTers demand an explanation for the "freefall" speed of the collapse, there's no need to explain things that obviously didn't happen. If you and Judy Wood want to convince people that the towers fell "too fast," based on absolutely nothing but your own assertions, you really need to start by convincing people that you have some minimal understanding of the physics involved. When you start off by demonstrating that you don't, your argument is dead in the water.
