You're failing to indicate what and where these "mistakes" are occurring. You're just saying this in the hopes that anyone else reading this will take your word for it. You have also not explained how "forces can be counterintuitive".
The forces you're attempting to describe, and their application are counter-intuitive. Students get them wrong when they try to let their intuition direct the problem solving, rather than let the mathematics direct it. It's counterintuitive to think of forces as vectors, and as vector sums being integrated over a variety of directions. That's what you're getting wrong.
If you can't get your words right, your argument will not be understood.
I don't care about the mistakes your students made.
You should, you're making them. But you're providing a far less cogent defense of them than they did.
I have clearly provided my explanations with my objections. You have not indicated specifically what and where I make these so-called "mistakes" in my arguments. I sincerely doubt you have the expertise you claim to.
You make 4 mistakes. Those 4 mistakes have caused you to ignore the falling mass of the towers as an energy source. Additionally, you've made a 5th mistake causing you to believe that structures are designed according to codes you've imagined based on your vast experience not being in collapsing buildings.
My bowling ball argument is based on reality. How the impact from the bowling ball refers through the person's body to the ground is irrelevant to the point I was making. The bowling ball falling on someone's head clearly will fracture their skull. The fragments of bowling ball will not. There is no unconsidered factor here. If there is, please identify it specifically.
The bowling ball has the same kinetic energy and momentum whether it is broken or intact. When it falls to the floor, the structure must absorb the same energy.
Please specify what you mean by "falling towers". Are you referring to an upper block crushing through 80 and 90 storeys, or are you referring to rubble?
The towers were once standing, they are no longer. The normal person concludes that they fell. The smart person concludes that all of the mass fell to the ground. The truther concludes that once the mass turned to rubble, it ceased to have mass and was carried off by magical unicorns.
I already pointed out where energy is lost in the system.
This will be exceedingly easy for you to prove with mathematics. Prove that the energy acquired by the structure during its fall was equal to that required to destroy the structure and eliminate all of the remaining mass. Remember, you have to get rid of the mass and the energy. Show your work.
To say that it was only converted into "heat" and "sound" is too stupid to comment to.
When two thinks strike each other, the noise it makes is called sound. This is a place where energy is lost. If the strike causes friction, heat will also be an inevitable result, causing further loss to the system.
Do civil engineers not have to know any physics? I don't think you're an engineer. If you are, you are knowingly lying.
Your opinions on this matter are irrelevant.
Please re-read my post. If you understand the math, please provide the calculations showing that rubble alone can crush through 80 and 90 storeys of intact highrise.
Rubble has mass. That mass was moving. It had a kinetic energy equal to 1/2*m*v
2.
You're asserting that rubble has less capacity to do damage than an intact block. I'm asserting that the shape doesn't matter, only the mass and the velocity matter. You need to show a calculation that proves shape matters. Get to it.
