Richard Gage Blueprint for Truth Rebuttals on YouTube by Chris Mohr

[ergo]

I'm just bad at learning things that aren't true.

Again. I'm speechless.

Chris, please tell me what law(s) of motion allow for a steel-framed and concrete building to fall, as a whole, through itself, or into the ground, at free-fall acceleration. Or even near free-fall acceleration.

Just name the law or laws. You don't need to describe it.

 

[grandmastershek]

Again. I'm speechless.

Chris, please tell me what law(s) of motion allow for a steel-framed and concrete building to fall, as a whole, through itself, or into the ground, at free-fall acceleration. Or even near free-fall acceleration.

Just name the law or laws. You don't need to describe it.

Ergo still thinks 66% is "near". Wow...stay away from investments.

 

[LSSBB]

Ergo still thinks 66% is "near". Wow...stay away from investments.

Is ergo talking of WTC7 or WTC1 and 2? WTC7 fell at varying accelerations, some above or at freefall. And the inside of WTC7 fell before the outside did.

 

[ozeco41]

Is ergo talking of WTC7 or WTC1 and 2? WTC7 fell at varying accelerations, some above or at freefall. And the inside of WTC7 fell before the outside did.

He's putting forward his own "Strawman" ---- or is it a "Reversed Strawman"

....certainly not WTC 7.

 

[LSSBB]

He's putting forward his own "Strawman" ---- or is it a "Reversed Strawman"

....certainly not WTC 7.

Double reverse backflip Strawman?

 

[DaveThomasNMSR]

...
Also, does anyone know how much strength is lost when a column buckles? I'm guessing a very high percentage, like 98% or so. That's why the idea that other forces like torquing and leveraging can bring the speed of collapse of one small part of the building to freefall acceleration.

...

Through air, sure. Through the rest of the building? No, never. Ever.

Ever.

What don't you guys get about this? After ten years.

What part of normal structural resistance, even of buildings on fire (as opposed to buildings on smoke) don't you understand? Five-year-olds understand this. Why don't grown-up internet "debunkers" understand this? What's the learning difficulty here?

Sheesh. I guess we have to show this one again:


The point, Ergo (Haven't you seen this already by now? Lack of comprehension much?) is that in this video, while the center of mass of the rod + cup is falling at an acceleration of precisely g, points on the rod closer to the fulcrum are accelerated less than g, and points on the rod farther from the fulcrum (such as the nice little Cup) are accelerated at more than 1 g.

Proof? Just before the ball impacts the cup, it is higher above the cup than at the start of the fall. Ergo, the cup falls faster than g, due to torquing and leveraging!

What does this have to do with WTC7? A lot. There were parts of WTC7 that we know collapsed first (the Penthouse), and which pulled on (and torqued and leveraged) other parts of the building.

And so, the fact that part of the edifice fell at ~g in no way precludes a gravitational collapse.

Freefall of WTC7 ≠ Controlled Demolition.

Gravity is up to the task. Everyone can see this. There's a nice little video proof right here.

Gosh, Ergo, you and C7 and Richard Gage have sure wasted a lot of time!!

 

[ergo]

Leverage provides a force, Dave. (Not that this has anything to do with the fact that a building cannot fall through itself at anything near free fall acceleration. Which is why there is a controlled demolition industry. This has been repeated hundreds of times on this forum, but it still doesn't sink in with the, uh, "bedunkers for science and reason" here.)


How many people do you actually have attending your NMSR meetings?

 

[Justin39640]

Leverage provides a force, Dave. (Not that this has anything to do with the fact that a building cannot fall through itself at anything near free fall acceleration. Which is why there is a controlled demolition industry. This has been repeated hundreds of times on this forum, but it still doesn't sink in with the, uh, "bedunkers for science and reason" here.)


How many people do you actually have attending your NMSR meetings?

But it rotated too. I think that's what Dave was getting at and you've conveniently missed all those hundreds of times. And if support in negligible, what's to stop it from accelerating as fast as it can? That sounds like a runaway to me, or the complete opposite of a controlled demolition.

 

[DaveThomasNMSR]

Leverage provides a force, Dave. (Not that this has anything to do with the fact that a building cannot fall through itself at anything near free fall acceleration. Which is why there is a controlled demolition industry. This has been repeated hundreds of times on this forum, but it still doesn't sink in with the, uh, "bedunkers for science and reason" here.)


How many people do you actually have attending your NMSR meetings?

Your first sentence is remarkable, in that it's not wrong from the get go. The remainder of your post just demonstrates the strawman, bandwagon, and appeal to ridicule fallacies.

The fact remains (and everyone can see how foolish you are to attempt to deny the obvious), in a complicated collapse like WTC7's, parts of the structure can actually pull on other parts of the structure, accelerating them.

Again: the fact that part of the edifice fell at ~g in no way precludes a gravitational collapse.

WTC7 didn't just "fall through itself." That's your strawman.

Now proceed to roll your eyes and mock me in new and clever ways; I don't have anything to add to what I've said, and don't expect I'll need to.

 

[ergo]

But it rotated too.

It doesn't matter if it does a double back-flip. It doesn't change the fact that buildings do not sink into their basements without having most of their structural resistance removed. This is why there is a demolition industry.

The fact that this has to be repeated so much, as if it's some kind of complex engineering topic, gives it the appearance of a being a complex engineering topic when it's nothing of the sort. I think that's part of the tactic by those who call themselves "debunkers", is to deny the obvious repeatedly, so that the obvious needs to be repeated over and over, making it seem like it's a much more complex subject than it is. It's like some kind of dumbing-down technique.

Buildings don't sink as a whole into their basements from localized damage. They never have and they never will. This is why there is a demolition industry, and why controlled demolition is necessary to bring such buildings down.

There is nothing else to discuss on this subject, and every one here knows it.

 

[tfk]

Does anyone have a more precise analysis of exactly when Building 7 began to tilt noticeably southward? My best guess was two seconds of straight-down, and based on eyeballing the windows lined up against the building silhouetted in front of it, the tilt began in the third second.

I really don't believe that this matters in the slightest. This does become "trying to calculate where all the matches land when the match box hits the floor" level of irrelavent detail.

The important question is "what knocked the match box off the table?"

The only significant inference from its tilt to the south (and possibly south-west) is that the external shell (not the whole building) failed first in the southern-most part of the west wall.

Also, does anyone know how much strength is lost when a column buckles? I'm guessing a very high percentage, like 98% or so.

Sure.

From Bazant & Verdue, Mechanics of Progressive Collapse.

Fig 3.

The "Crushing Force" (i.e., height of the curve, also called "Crushing Resistance F(u)) is equivalent to the force that the column can generate.

Buckling begins immediately after the curve has reached its peak, and the slope of the curve BEGINS to go negative. Essentially one iota to the right of the peak value F₀.

You can see that a fully formed, 3 hinge buckled column will support somewhere <5% of its straight load carrying capacity. Your 98% strength loss is a good estimate.

Note well that "buckling" is not the same as "breaking". A column (even a wooden stick) can buckle, but not break. There is a famous shot (in one of the BBC videos on 9/11, IIRC) that shows an MIT professor demonstrating buckling using 4 wooden sticks, a couple of spacers & iron weights. He shows that the sticks (columns) can support a certain weight as long as they are laterally supported 3 times up the side (representing the floors). But when he removes the lateral supports, the sticks cannot support the same weight, they buckle & drop the weight.

The slope of the force vs deflection curve went negative. That defines "buckling". The sticks did NOT break.

But be careful how you think about it.

Buckling is crucial to collapse initiation.

Buckling is relatively irrelevant to collapse progression, since the columns did not buckle. The connections fractured. Fracturing connectors takes a MASSIVELY reduced amount of energy compared to column buckling.

That's why the idea that other forces like torquing and leveraging can bring the speed of collapse of one small part of the building to freefall acceleration.

It's simple: Free bodies (those that have no forces other than gravity acting on them) will fall at a constant acceleration of g (decreased by air friction). See the red line in the graph below.

The external wall were NOT free bodies. They were attached at many points to the internal, already fallen core, by beams & girders.

There is NO law of physics, or Newton, that says that they cannot fall at accelerations less than g, equal to g or greater than g.

People like Gage, ergo & chris7 simply don't know what they are talking about.

Chandler knows what he's talking about. He simply oversimplifies the situation to the point that he is simply, completely wrong.

Also Tom, like you I have asserted in my video 18 that the lines connecting the data points show slightly faster-than-freefall for a total of around one second. Chris7 says that is within the margin of error of the measurements, which seems possible to me. That's why I'm always careful to say "possibly faster than freefall, but within the margin of error."

I do not believe that the "faster than g" segments are the result of data errors.

The use of 7.5x as many data points shows clear trends in the data.

Once again, the green line is the actual instantaneous acceleration, and the red line is something that is really falling at FFA.

Do those two lines look anything alike to you, Chris?

They don't to me.

Amazing how the correction of my minor mistake takes me even further from chris7's assertion, isn't it?

Not amazing in the slightest.

The more you understand, the further from Chris7's flawed opinions you'll be.

 

[tfk]

It doesn't change the fact that buildings do not sink into their basements without having most of their structural resistance removed.

Wrong.

Virtually any building will do exactly that, if you give enough of the building (in the case of WTC 1 & 2, about 6 stories) enough of a "running start" (about 1 foot of drop).

These numbers are different for every building.

In the case of the towers, they had about 12 & 20 stories of weight (more than enough), and about 12' of running start (more than enough).

It happens rarely because engineers don't like their buildings falling down. It gives them indigestion, heart-burn, that bloated feeling.

There is nothing else to discuss on this subject, and every one here knows it.

Agreed. There is nothing else to discuss on this subject.

And everyone here understands perfectly that you don't have the slightest clue what you are talking about.

;-)

 

[Christopher7]

TFK I think your two NIST quotes are new, at least to me, and very interesting. These minor verbal errors happen all the time in technical writing.

I'm still hoping you or someone can clarify my questions in my post here. These are some interesting ones for me, at least. But I'll admit that the question about whether moment frames are 100% rigid and inflexible is kind of, uh, rhetorical.

Moment frames are bolted and welded. They are inflexible. The exterior frame as a whole is somewhat flexible by design. It bends a little in high winds and returns to its original shape.

As for the fires on the south side: This diversion gets trotted out over and over again.
NCSTAR 1-9 Vol.1 pg 196 [pdf pg 240]
Due to the wind direction, it was common for smoke to “bank up” against the south face. For this reason, it was usually not possible to differentiate different types of smoke or to identify smoke source locations on the south face.

The final report lists all the fires and the ones at the SW corner had burned out by 1 p.m.

Here is the same phenomenon at the NE corner. There were no fires above the 13th floor.
http://img705.imageshack.us/img705/1710/figure5135.jpg

tfk's analysis of the period of FFA is incorrect. He is in denial about FFA. It was measured in two places and all the double talk in the world won't change this scientifically established fact.

 

[000063]

Double reverse backflip Strawman?

The rare and highly dangerous 2x double strawman combo.

/let me tell you about Homestuck

 

[GlennB]

Moment frames are bolted and welded. They are inflexible.

Utterly wrong. They are flexible by design. Perhaps you're thinking of braced frames, which are designed to be rigid.

Explanation.

including, for example:

"Moment frames: The Bad News:

Low stiffness."

You wil have encountered both in your own work, and know the value of diagonal bracing to achieve rigidity.

 

[chrismohr]

Again. I'm speechless.

Chris, please tell me what law(s) of motion allow for a steel-framed and concrete building to fall, as a whole, through itself, or into the ground, at free-fall acceleration. Or even near free-fall acceleration.

Just name the law or laws. You don't need to describe it.

I'll describe it in my limited way (since there is no named law I know of):

1.) I too had problems with the question of freefall acceleration of Building 7 at first. My problem was that I accepted Richard Gage's hidden assumption that in a collapse, there can be only two forces: a) gravity and b) resistance. So even if buckling columns eliminated 98% of resistance, even that would slow the building's collapse a little bit, right? Not necessarily.

2.) Depending on the way you define the "system" that is collapsing, a "boundaried" system can have other forces from outside the system acting on it, like torquing and leveraging. The "system" I am looking at is the northwest corner of the roofline, the only part that was measured (Chris 7 says two parts were measured but doesn't say what the second part is; if he's right, that part can also be considered in the "system" if their rates of descent are absolutely identical; otherwise, we are looking at two systems). Chris7 (and David Chandler, in emails he sent to me) is trying to assert that the "system" is the entire upper portion of the building, hence the impassioned arguments about 100% rigid (by C7's assertion) or flexible (by the dictionary definition) moment frames. Using the narrower boundaries of my "system," the interior of the building nearby etc. is outside the system. Therefore, other forces (torquing and leveraging) can be added to the system from outside of it. Those forces can cancel out the small residual resistance (around 2%) left behind by the buckled columns.

3) When a column buckles in an interconnected grid of columns like you see in Building 7, it shifts its load at almost the speed of sound. This is a good thing, because the buildings are designed with a redundancy factor of 3 to 5 times their static load-bearing capacity. One column breaks, the load almost instantly shifts to nearby columns and the building holds together. In the case of a catastrophic collapse, however, every time a load is shifted to nearby columns, those stressed-out columns take on more load then they can bear, and within a very short time they too begin to buckle. That's what Stage 1 of the collapse seems to be about: much less than freefall acceleration as loads shift and columns quickly buckle one at a time.

4.) Roughly Freefall acceleration happens for 2.25 seconds (NIST says at freefall within its margin of error; TFK says that his more accurate graph of collapse rates shows significant variations above and below freefall rates). During this time any residual resistance is being roughly canceled out by torquing and leveraging of attached beams and floors nearby. When the building encounters the resistance of its own debris pile and is well along the way into tipping over into its own badly damaged south face, it slows its descent in Stage 3. Not straight down. In fact, the entire north perimeter wall folds like a blanket over the top of the debris pile, and massive damage to nearby buildings makes the "into its own footprint" claim simply false.

OK you want laws? Try f=ma (force equals mass times acceleration). Using that formula, you end up with something like 30 times the static load when a single floor collapses onto one floor below. TFK, who just showed us the Bazant graph of crushing force and crushing resistance, can probably give you another law (from Euler), which would tell you about how quickly a buckling column loses resistance. Archimedes can help you with laws around leveraging and torqueing. A physicist or engineer (and I am neither) can put a series of laws like this together to show you the general principles of how this global collapse happened. In fact, every structural engineering body in the world has confirmed the basic findings of the NIST Reports. Universities and engineering schools around the world use the collapses of the three WTC buildings as objects of study for their students, and every single class in the world that does this comes up with the same results. These classes and these advanced students amount to countless thousands of independent confirmations of the basic findings of NIST, because each class goes through the exercise of carefully checking NIST's work. Don't ask me about these laws. Ask them. Take your questions to a school, not me. Don't trust me or my "debunker" friends. Do what I did. Long before I was on JREF I was asking physicists and engineers about these collapses, and every single one of the 14 people I personally asked said the same thing. Every single person on the politically neutral physics chat rooms I got onto said the same thing. They didn't even know I was asking about 9/11 in many cases because I wanted neutral, scientific answers. Not one person with qualified expertise that I found in local universities, the Colorado School of Mines, or customers where I work agrees with you. NOT ONE. ANYWHERE. My understanding comes from them.

Against that overwhelming array of physicists and engineers, there is a handful of people like David Chandler and Richard Gage who assert the exact opposite. For them to assert controlled demolition puts a very heavy burden of proof on them, and they have not met that burden.

 

[Christopher7]

So even if buckling columns eliminated 98% of resistance

You have no idea how much resistance a buckling H column will provide.

Depending on the way you define the "system" that is collapsing, a "boundaried" system can have other forces from outside the system acting on it, like torquing and leveraging. The "system" I am looking at is the northwest corner of the roofline, the only part that was measured (Chris 7 says two parts were measured but doesn't say what the second part is; if he's right, that part can also be considered in the "system" if their rates of descent are absolutely identical

Once they are in FFA, which they were, there are no internal forces.

You know absolutely NOTHING about steel failure modes or physics. You are talking thru your hat and trying to sound intelligent by using a lot of verbiage.

100% rigid (by C7's assertion) or flexible (by the dictionary definition) moment frames.

When something is welded, it is rigid.

When a column buckles in an interconnected grid of columns like you see in Building 7, it shifts its load at almost the speed of sound.

More double talk. Steel framework does not bend at the speed of sound.

Roughly Freefall acceleration happens for 2.25 seconds

No, it was at FFA. That's what Chandler and NIST said and you are not remotely qualified to say you know better.

It is morally reprehensible for you to make these proclamations in a video that purports to discredit Mr. Gage. He is only quoting people who do know what they are talking about and you don't know what you are talking about so stop pretending like you do.

 

[triforcharity]

I like how 7 apparently provided a chimney for 6, despite the latter being 8 stories, the former being 47 stories, and having a multi-lane street between them.

It's actually not that far fetched. But, in this case, we know that didn't happen.

 

[NoahFence]

You have no idea how much resistance a buckling H column will provide.

Both you and ergo have to accept the fact that no matter how wrong you think NIST is, they're far more right than you. Explosives of any kind can't survive for an hour inside a towering inferno, and sure as hell can't survive inside WTC 7 for SEVEN hours.

Given that FACT, what other explanation is there? None. Fire did in WTC 7. Damage and fire the other 2.

 

[000063]

I'd concur, except Chris7 would never see it. He's been ignoring me studiously since I added "Chris7 won't say whether a "misleading statement" is the same as a "lie"." to my sig. He said Mohr made "misleading statements", which would ostensibly be saying he lied, but I'd really like a straight answer.