AZCat
Graduate Poster
- Joined
- Feb 6, 2007
- Messages
- 1,672
I'm sure that after all of their computer modeling, this was the one column, that if by some miracle is weakened just enough, could in some hypothetical scenario, cause the complete collapse of the building.
Not that they ever bothered to present this evidence. It's entirely hypothetical.
No, it isn't. The basis for the simulation run by NIST is (as a number of people have pointed out) at least partly empirical. The properties of the various materials, the behavior of fires, the construction of WTC 7, the visible locations of damage and fires - all this is data collected, not hypothesized (with a few exceptions - the temperature dependence of properties of steels is still a bit uncertain). Just because you don't have the debris from the building doesn't mean you can't produce a valid collapse hypothesis.