But there is.
And for one to deny that Bazant could have gone wrong is against scientific inquiry.
Where could he have gone wrong?
And, why do you believe that although he could have gone wrong in certain areas, his calculations are reasonable?
This is a serious question and it leaves me suspicious if no one can comment on this.
The Bazant model is a simplified model. The calculations in it are conservative, in that the assumptions are "all the impact forces go into the columns and are distributed among them equally". the actual collapse certainly was not that neat, and the impact forces were likely not applied to the verticals so neatly. They certainly were not equally distributed.
Lets take a very simple structure-a bookshelf. Make it out of whatever you want to.
Now, we are going to load it along one of the vertical edges. If our load causes the book case to collapse, when placed directly over a vertical support, would you not agree that it will cause the bookcase to collapse if you placed the same load in the middle of a shelf?
What Bazant and Zhou did was
bound the problem by showing that there was sufficient energy to collapse the building if that energy was applied in the most conservative manner (by conservative, I mean least likely to cause failure).
There is nothing wrong with the calculations in that paper, based on the assumptions stated in the paper. All the calculations are there, all the equations are there--and the science is right, repeatable, and traceable ffrom basic materials and physical science. Any quibbling is over minor points, except by people who have no clue as to what happens to steel under strain, at temperature, and who have no idea that dynamic events and static events are different games.
