Gage's next debate

[R.Mackey]

Here's a Gage quote from his video: "The available gravitational potential in the whole building is about 110,000 kilowatt hours. That's the weight of the building times its height above the ground. But the expansion of that cloud has been calculated to require ten times that energy in heat, which produces the expansion. The energy [for the collapse plus pulverization and ejection] doesn't add up."

Huh? Did he get this from Gordon Ross? I have never once heard a physicist or engineer give me the formula of weight x height = kilowatt hours. I get simplified formulas like force = mass x acceleration, which quickly creates overwhelming force. Gage also quotes a static load of five times, when everyone but Gage and Ross says the static load design was 3x the weight... and of course, static loads can't compete against f = ma once things stop being static and start coming down at 100 mph.

How do I even come up with a question here? How do I even rebut this? I guess I can start by showing the height x weight = kilowatt hours formula and saying this makes no sense?

I cover this in my whitepaper, Appendix B. To first order the amount of gravitational potential in a standing Tower, not counting the part below grade, is 400 GJ, or about 111,000 kilowatt hours, as Gage computes.

This is hard number to visualize. It's equivalent to about the explosive energy of 98 tonnes of TNT, or the output of a large nuclear reactor for five minutes. All dissipated in a matter of seconds.

Comparing it to strength, however, is nonsense. I also explain this in Appendix B. Any given chunk of steel will only resist at full power until it deforms by about 1%, and then it fractures, and its strength goes to zero. The average strength, during the collapse, is a tiny fraction of its static strength.

In solid mechanics we speak of a parameter called "toughness," which is equivalent to the work required to fracture or otherwise destroy a piece of material. This is the quantity one needs to estimate, and it is a great deal less than the static strength of each member times its length.

Any upper-division structural engineer would immediately see that Gage is full of crap. He's talking apples and oranges. He may not know any better.

 

[DaveThomasNMSR]

Here's a Gage quote from his video: "The available gravitational potential in the whole building is about 110,000 kilowatt hours. That's the weight of the building times its height above the ground. But the expansion of that cloud has been calculated to require ten times that energy in heat, which produces the expansion. The energy [for the collapse plus pulverization and ejection] doesn't add up."

Huh? Did he get this from Gordon Ross? I have never once heard a physicist or engineer give me the formula of weight x height = kilowatt hours. I get simplified formulas like force = mass x acceleration, which quickly creates overwhelming force. Gage also quotes a static load of five times, when everyone but Gage and Ross says the static load design was 3x the weight... and of course, static loads can't compete against f = ma once things stop being static and start coming down at 100 mph.

How do I even come up with a question here? How do I even rebut this? I guess I can start by showing the height x weight = kilowatt hours formula and saying this makes no sense?

This would be an excellent question for Dave Thomas, and also Dave Rogers.

The question of gravitational potential of the towers came up a little while ago in a different thread. Oystein mentioned Gregory Urich's whitepaper "Analysis of the Mass and Potential Energy of World Trade Center Tower 1" as a good source of the gravitational potential of the towers, about 114 tons of TNT per tower. Urich's total potential energy was 480 Gigajoules (1 GJ = 1 billion joules), or 114 tons of TNT, or (by my calculation) 136,000 KWH per tower, over Gage's 110,000 KWH. My calculation uses Potential Energy PE= mgh for each floor (= mass of floor, times gravitational acceleration g, times height of that floor above ground level); where I assume a constant mass of about 2.1 million kg per floor, Urich's detailed calculation includes more weight per floor on the lower floors.

To get from joules (mgh, m in kilograms, g=9.8m/sec^2, h=height in meters) to KWH, just convert with 3.6 million joules = 1 Kilowatt hour (KWH); a watt is a joule per second, and a joule a watt-second. (1,000 watts times 3600 seconds = 1 kilowatt-hour = 3.6 million Joules).

The point I always make is that that is a LOT of energy. As I said here,

100 tons of TNT is still a whole lot of energy: according to Sublette 2006, 100 tons of TNT is bigger than a W-48 nuclear weapon (72 tons), about the same as five (5) W-51 nuclear weapons (22 tons), or 5 to 10 Mk-54 nuclear weapons (10-20 tons), and so on.

I used 4.18 GigaJoules = 1 ton TNT, and 3.6 million joules = 1 Kilowatt hour (KWH).

I don't know about the cloud expansion calculation, but remember, this is Gage we're talking about. He simultaneously claims high explosives were used (proved by hurled beams), and thermite was used instead (proved by silent demolition). The man can hold mutually conflicting positions. Goes to credibility. I asked this on the Coast-to-Coast debate, but Gage weaseled out of it.
G'luck, Dave

 

[Christopher7]

Started...not finished.....your fixation on minutia is typical of troofers looking to fit a round peg in a square hole. The girder was pushed off its seat.....it does not equate to instant failure of the column.

Your insistence on the NIST report being accurate to the Nth degree is also laughable, but then that is all troofers have left.

Interesting how deniers accuse others of what they are doing.

Chris Mohr is focusing on the minutia of Richard Gage's video while others try to downplay the fact that the NIST hypothesis is fatally flawed.

Chris tried to get around the truth by offering an alternate hypothesis but that ignores the problem. The girder was NOT pushed off its seat at 5:20 p.m. so the collapse that NIST posits never started.

 

[Dave Rogers]

Here's a Gage quote from his video: "The available gravitational potential in the whole building is about 110,000 kilowatt hours. That's the weight of the building times its height above the ground. But the expansion of that cloud has been calculated to require ten times that energy in heat, which produces the expansion. The energy [for the collapse plus pulverization and ejection] doesn't add up."

OK, I'll try and navigate you through these particular deep waters.

First of all, he's talking about the gravitational potential energy stored in the structure by virtue of its being raised above ground level. In that respect, as Ryan Mackey points out, he's correctly calculating the potential energy of the building as the sum of the weights of all the components, multiplied by the heights of those components above the ground, multiplied by the acceleration due to gravity; if you lower every part of the structure to the ground on a pulley that powers an electrical generator, and everything is 100% efficient, Gage's number gives you how much energy would be produced by the generator.

Now, on to the stupid bit.

What you need to understand - and believe me, the question will not make any sense until you've followed through all this - is that Gage, though he's neglected to mention it, is referring to a paper by Jim Hoffman, in which Hoffman calculated the energy required for the dust cloud produced in the collapse to expand to the size it attained shortly after the collapse. You'll find an out of date draft here. (I'll explain why there isn't any other kind in a minute.) Hoffman makes the following assumptions:
(1) The initial size of the dust cloud from the North Tower collapse is equal to the volume of air inside the North Tower.
(2) The initial expansion of the dust cloud cannot have been due to the dust mixing with the surrounding atmosphere.
(3) Therefore, the initial expansion of the dust cloud must have been due to either (a) thermal expansion of the air from energy provided by the collapse, or (b) expansion of the cloud by steam from some unspecified source of water, boiled by energy provided by the collapse.
Based on these assumptions, and a set of measurements that indicates that the dust cloud shortly after collapse occupied 3.4 times the volume of the tower, he comes up with the conclusion that the expansion of the dust cloud required in excess of a million kilowatt hours, and that this energy was not available from the collapse; it must therefore have come from explosives or incendiaries.

There are three very big problems with this result. Firstly, if the dust cloud expanded thermally by 3.4 times, this means that its absolute temperature must have increased by 3.4 times, giving a final temperature of over 700ºC in th edust cloud. This means that anyone caught in the dust cloud would have been instantly roasted to death. In fact, many people were caught in the dust cloud and didn't even sustain minor burns. Therefore, Hoffman's first alternative, thermal expansion, is impossible. Secondly, if the expansion was due to creation of steam, this requires over two million litres of water to have been boiled off during the collapse. Hoffman is unable, even by assuming that 1% of the weight of all the concrete in the towers was composed of freely available water for boiling off - a bizarre assumption given that the said concrete had over three decades to dry out - to come up with anywhere near that amount of water in the structure. Hoffman admits both of those drawbacks himself, and is working on a revised version of the paper which will address them. Don't hold your breath; he's been working on it since January 2004.

The third problem, though, is that the amount of explosives this predicts is utterly absurd. Hoffman's minimum figure, 1,145,000kWh, corresponds to about 4000GJ. To produce that much energy requires about 1,000 tons of thermite or explosives, depending on what type of explosive. And, of course, since that amount of energy is so much greater than the potential energy of the towers, a blast that big wouldn't have made the tops fall; they'd have gone up.

So basically Gage has taken Hoffman's incomplete, and self-admittedly impossible, conclusions as fact, and worked from there, conveniently ignoring the fact that it requires absurd conclusions. Trutherism 101.

How you can encapsulate that into a simple, comprehensible response is quite a problem, though. It's such a tortuous trail of stupidity that it's a problem even working out what the question is. I hope I've helped.

Dave

 

[TruthersLie]

actually dave, it helped me a lot. Thx.

 

[Oystein]

OK, I'll try and navigate you through these particular deep waters.

First of all, he's talking about the gravitational potential energy stored in the structure by virtue of its being raised above ground level. In that respect, as Ryan Mackey points out, he's correctly calculating the potential energy of the building as the sum of the weights of all the components, multiplied by the heights of those components above the ground, multiplied by the acceleration due to gravity; if you lower every part of the structure to the ground on a pulley that powers an electrical generator, and everything is 100% efficient, Gage's number gives you how much energy would be produced by the generator.

Now, on to the stupid bit.

What you need to understand - and believe me, the question will not make any sense until you've followed through all this - is that Gage, though he's neglected to mention it, is referring to a paper by Jim Hoffman, in which Hoffman calculated the energy required for the dust cloud produced in the collapse to expand to the size it attained shortly after the collapse. You'll find an out of date draft here. (I'll explain why there isn't any other kind in a minute.) Hoffman makes the following assumptions:
(1) The initial size of the dust cloud from the North Tower collapse is equal to the volume of air inside the North Tower.
(2) The initial expansion of the dust cloud cannot have been due to the dust mixing with the surrounding atmosphere.
(3) Therefore, the initial expansion of the dust cloud must have been due to either (a) thermal expansion of the air from energy provided by the collapse, or (b) expansion of the cloud by steam from some unspecified source of water, boiled by energy provided by the collapse.
Based on these assumptions, and a set of measurements that indicates that the dust cloud shortly after collapse occupied 3.4 times the volume of the tower, he comes up with the conclusion that the expansion of the dust cloud required in excess of a million kilowatt hours, and that this energy was not available from the collapse; it must therefore have come from explosives or incendiaries.

There are three very big problems with this result. Firstly, if the dust cloud expanded thermally by 3.4 times, this means that its absolute temperature must have increased by 3.4 times, giving a final temperature of over 700ºC in th edust cloud. This means that anyone caught in the dust cloud would have been instantly roasted to death. In fact, many people were caught in the dust cloud and didn't even sustain minor burns. Therefore, Hoffman's first alternative, thermal expansion, is impossible. Secondly, if the expansion was due to creation of steam, this requires over two million litres of water to have been boiled off during the collapse. Hoffman is unable, even by assuming that 1% of the weight of all the concrete in the towers was composed of freely available water for boiling off - a bizarre assumption given that the said concrete had over three decades to dry out - to come up with anywhere near that amount of water in the structure. Hoffman admits both of those drawbacks himself, and is working on a revised version of the paper which will address them. Don't hold your breath; he's been working on it since January 2004.

The third problem, though, is that the amount of explosives this predicts is utterly absurd. Hoffman's minimum figure, 1,145,000kWh, corresponds to about 4000GJ. To produce that much energy requires about 1,000 tons of thermite or explosives, depending on what type of explosive. And, of course, since that amount of energy is so much greater than the potential energy of the towers, a blast that big wouldn't have made the tops fall; they'd have gone up.

So basically Gage has taken Hoffman's incomplete, and self-admittedly impossible, conclusions as fact, and worked from there, conveniently ignoring the fact that it requires absurd conclusions. Trutherism 101.

How you can encapsulate that into a simple, comprehensible response is quite a problem, though. It's such a tortuous trail of stupidity that it's a problem even working out what the question is. I hope I've helped.

Dave

Thanks. That old Hoffman stuff is way before my time on 9/11 CTs, and so far I had not seen a good summary.

# oysteinbookmark

 

[Animal]

Interesting how deniers accuse others of what they are doing.

Chris Mohr is focusing on the minutia of Richard Gage's video while others try to downplay the fact that the NIST hypothesis is fatally flawed.

Chris tried to get around the truth by offering an alternate hypothesis but that ignores the problem. The girder was NOT pushed off its seat at 5:20 p.m. so the collapse that NIST posits never started.

Interesting how troofers ignore reality to protect their religious beliefs.

The girder could have been pushed off its seat at high noon, and the building may not have collapsed until 5:20

The initiating event was the buckling of Col 79, NOT the girder being pushed off its seat.

The only thing fatally flawed is the thinking of troofers.

 

[chrismohr]

Thanks Dave re energy of dust. Yes, I have already made it shorter and explainable to laypeople. That's my job here. I may add Ryan's comments as well if there is time.

 

[Christopher7]

Interesting how troofers ignore reality to protect their religious beliefs.

Interesting how deniers talk like children.

The girder could have been pushed off its seat at high noon, and the building may not have collapsed until 5:20

The initiating event was the buckling of Col 79, NOT the girder being pushed off its seat.

We have covered this. The NIST hypothesis is that the collapse "initiation" [buckling of column 79] occurred when the girder was pushed off its seat, beginning a cascade of floor collapses which left Column 79 unsupported laterally.

NCSTAR 1A pg 22
Fire-induced thermal expansion of the floor system surrounding Column 79 led to the collapse of Floor 13, which triggered a cascade of floor failures. In this case, the floor beams on the east side of the building expanded enough that they pushed the girder spanning between Columns 79 and 44 to the west on the 13th floor. This movement was enough for the girder to walk off of its support at Column 79.

The unsupported girder and other local fire-induced damage caused Floor 13 to collapse, beginning a cascade of floor failures down to the 5th floor . . . . This left Column 79 with insufficient lateral support, and as a consequence, the column buckled eastward, becoming the initial local failure for collapse initiation.

Chris Mohr is still arguing minutia because he cannot bring himself to acknowledge the fact that the NIST hypothesis does not explain the collapse, even though he does not deny that the fire had burned out in the area of the collapse over one half hour before the collapse.

 

[Jono]

Chris Mohr [/FONT]is still arguing minutia because he cannot bring himself to acknowledge the fact that the NIST hypothesis does not explain the collapse, even though he does not deny that the fire had burned out in the area of the collapse over one half hour before the collapse.

Well it was affirmed by super-comp simulations. What they did find was that WTC7 was prone to progressive collapse.

 

[NoahFence]

We have covered this. The NIST hypothesis is that thermal expansion, not structural creep due to thermal contraction, started the collapse. They say the collapse of floor 13 occurred when the beams expanded.

Perhaps they erred slightly?

I've read the report, and while it is entirely possible they miscalculated on some random minutiae, I think they did a fine job proving it wasn't a controlled demolition.

 

[Christopher7]

Well it was affirmed by super-comp simulations.

We have covered this already. The simulations do NOT match the photographs or the narration of the progression of the fire on floor 12.

 

[NoahFence]

Chris Mohr [/FONT]is still arguing minutia because he cannot bring himself to acknowledge the fact that the NIST hypothesis does not explain the collapse, even though he does not deny that the fire had burned out in the area of the collapse over one half hour before the collapse.

Then tell us what DOES explain the collapse.

(If you have the time, for extra credit - try to account for the rest of the day's activities)

 

[NoahFence]

We have covered this already. The simulations do NOT match the photographs or the narration of the progression of the fire on floor 12.

You mean the shot from the helicopter showing fire in 2 or 3 windows?

 

[Jono]

We have covered this already. The simulations do NOT match the photographs or the narration of the progression of the fire on floor 12.

People often mistake the simulation-shots from one of the several other tested scenarios they did, which either way led to a progressive collapse. Getting the exact collapse-pattern is not really necessary when you can see that the building was demonstrably prone to collapse like so, progressively.

 

[Christopher7]

People often mistake the simulation-shots from one of the several other tested scenarios they did, which either way led to a progressive collapse. Getting the exact collapse-pattern is not really necessary when you can see that the building was demonstrably prone to collapse like so, progressively.

A collapse cannot progress if it does not begin and the NIST hypothesis does not provide a beginning.

You need to come to grips with the fact that NIST said the fire on floor 12 caused thermal expansion after it had burned out and that is fraud.

 

[000063]

A collapse cannot progress if it does not begin and the NIST hypothesis does not provide a beginning.

You need to come to grips with the fact that NIST said the fire on floor 12 caused thermal expansion after it had burned out and that is fraud.

You're ignoring post 953, Chris7.

 

[Christopher7]

You're ignoring post 953, Chris7.

Yes. It's just an attempt to change the subject without acknowledging the point. Until you accept that NIST has not explained the collapse you will not entertain any other explanation so the question is just a diversion.

 

[Animal]

Interesting how deniers talk like children.

We have covered this. The NIST hypothesis is that the collapse "initiation" [buckling of column 79] occurred when the girder was pushed off its seat, beginning a cascade of floor collapses which left Column 79 unsupported laterally.

NCSTAR 1A pg 22
Fire-induced thermal expansion of the floor system surrounding Column 79 led to the collapse of Floor 13, which triggered a cascade of floor failures. In this case, the floor beams on the east side of the building expanded enough that they pushed the girder spanning between Columns 79 and 44 to the west on the 13th floor. This movement was enough for the girder to walk off of its support at Column 79.

The unsupported girder and other local fire-induced damage caused Floor 13 to collapse, beginning a cascade of floor failures down to the 5th floor . . . . This left Column 79 with insufficient lateral support, and as a consequence, the column buckled eastward, becoming the initial local failure for collapse initiation.

And there is your failure. You ASSUME that the buckling was immediate. The report you just quoted does not say that. Your lack of understanding regarding structural creep (by only associating it with thermal contraction) just compounds your inability to grasp the structural concepts of the report.

 

[Animal]

People often mistake the simulation-shots from one of the several other tested scenarios they did, which either way led to a progressive collapse. Getting the exact collapse-pattern is not really necessary when you can see that the building was demonstrably prone to collapse like so, progressively.

He also seems to think that the entire structural event happened at once, despite the fact that structural deformation was occurring house earlier as evidenced by the reports of a bulge in the exterior.

Hayden: "Early on, we saw a bulge in the southwest corner between floors 10 and 13, and we had put a transit on that and we were pretty sure she was going to collapse. You actually could see there was a visible bulge, it ran up about three floors. It came down about 5 o’clock in the afternoon, but by about 2 o’clock in the afternoon we realized this thing was going to collapse. "

Boyle: "We headed toward 7. And just around we were about a hundred yards away and Butch Brandies came running up. He said forget it, nobody’s going into 7, there’s creaking, there are noises coming out of there, so we just stopped."