No. Completely wrong. (And completely absurd.)
Take that tower of glass tables example. Let's say each table weighs twenty pounds. The glass surface weighs ten pounds and can support twenty pounds in weight, total, so it holds itself up just fine. The legs of the table weigh another ten pounds in total, and are solid steel, so they can support two thousand pounds in weight.
You can stack fifty of these tables up so long as you carefully position them so that the legs of each table are directly above the legs of the one below. And you can add up to ten pounds of weight to each and every one of the tables and it will still stay up.
But if you put a twenty-pound weight on one of the tables, it will break, and drop thirty pounds of weight on the table below (more if the legs fall inwards) which will break and drop forty pounds of weight on the table below that. Stack fifty tables up and you have a nice, solid, secure tower. Take the top table - weighing only twenty pounds - turn it at an angle, and drop it from even one inch, and the entire structure, easily capable of holding five hundred pounds of weight, disintegrates.
Nicely put. The only difference between the stacked tables and what I was considering is that I had the 4 legs as continuous columns with seats to bolt the glass 'floors' to. In this case if you load the top 'floor' with more than it can sustain it breaks and sends that mass plus the mass of glass debris down to the next floor.
Heiwa is ignoring completely that the falling mass will accellerate (in this analogy) between 'floors'. The only way for the collapse to arrest is for the decelleration of the falling mass that fails the first 'floor' exceeding the accelleration between floors by a substantial margin. Such decceration would have to negate the contribution of the added mass and the dynamic loading of that extra mass(it having gained velocity in the fall between floors as well), and reduce the velocity of the original mass such that its dynamic load plus gravitational load is less than the load that any one floor can sustain.
Now, if the original mass was dropped from a height equal to that of the distance between floors and that alone was sufficient to fail the 'floor' then even if that mass comes to a full stop as it fails that 'floor' its next drop will be exactly the same distance as its original drop. It will be joined by the mass of the failed 'floor'. In this case the only way for arrest the collapse would be for it to encounter a much more robustly built floor and it will have to do so soon since with every 'floor' failure more mass gets added.
In addition, and this could be somewhat minor in this scaled down analogy, with every floor failure the leg columns lose lateral support and will be prone to more sway or even buckling which would make the structure more susceptible to the effects of the mass falling down.
This analogy is a fairly basic first approximation of the WTC towers. Heiwa then wants to add detail such as the fact that the columns will hit first, punching through the floor pans, followed by the falling floor pan hitting the next lower one.
Well in this case you have an already violently damaged floor(columns having punched through) becoming loaded with the mass of an entire floor. So you have the case of a floor being suddenly loaded with approx twice the mass load at a time when its load carrying capacity will have been at least somewhat compromised given that its structural integrity has been compromised.( note to NB: this is qualitative phraseing in which I mean that the floor is no longer fully intact) Add to this mass loading the fact of the huge dynamic load.
(Now in the case of tower 2 the columns struck the floor at what angle? Punching not straight through. )
If this is not enough to immediatly fail a floor it is being followed by yet another floor.
Heiwa states that the falling floor will also become detached from the columns. True and in doing so it will not be robbing the rest of the upper section of a lot of velocity. Why? The truss seats are designed to hold a load acting in the other direction so the only thing holding a floor from moving upward(relative to the columns and truss seats, which are themselves moving downward wrt to the ground) are a few bolts. The first falling floor will be experincing a force that would be moving it upward wrt to the truss seat. That first floor will impact down on the yet-to-be-failed floor.
Heiwa states that the energy required to fail the lower section floor will equal that required to fail the first dropping floor, but since their failure modes are in opposite directions whereas the structure was designed for forces acting in only one of those directions, his contention is not true.
The next floor coming the way of the yet-to-be-failed floor will still be adding a large dynamic load as well as yet another floorspace's mass. It will do this well before the yet-to-be-failed floor springs back from the first impact meaning that the dynamic load of this next floor is impacting something already heavily deformed.
What would one see?
(start with WTC 1 as its upper section fell without a lot of tilt)
The perimeter columns of the upper section initially have no gravitational load on them at all. They are falling. They impact floor pans but the floor pans offer very little load compared to what they are capable of handling. However the floor pan of the first dropping floor tears away from its seats as it hits the first lower floor.
The upper section now has no connection between perimeter and core at that floor. However it does not require that lateral bracing since it has very little vertical loading. So initially we do not see the perimeter of the upper section come apart
No so for the lower section. Those perimeter columns are still experiencing weight, and they are unbraced for a two storey height, the top most floor having been violently torn from its seats.
