Or to just spend five minutes learning how the square-cube law means scale models are useless for more than purposes of approximation.
Interestingly enough, it's also relevant to why fantasy-style giants couldn't really exist.
63,
Models aren't useless at all. They are extremely useful, they can be constructed very accurately & you can gather enormous amounts of accurate info about systems.
Amateur models are useless, when large scaling factors are not considered carefully.
The accurate results from professionally constructed models are exactly why engineering companies approved the expenditure of trillions of dollars developing wind tunnel models of airplanes & wave models for ships, etc. over the last 100 years. (And continue to spend that money. Engineering managers require INTENSE justification for spending large amounts of money on what they are convinced are "just engineers' toys". They won't do it unless we can justify the expense.)
The issue is that the models MUST be constructed very, very carefully in order to compensate for the scaling factors.
The theory by which they are built is one of the most powerful in all of engineering. It goes by the name of Dimensional Analysis. The basis of the theory is called the Buckingham Pi Theorem. Both have fair synopses on wikipedia.
Ryan Mackey gave a very good basic review (of a pretty subtle & sophisticated topic) in his video in which he was encouraging people to actually do collapse models. But Ryan showed how to do them right, according to dimensional analysis.
One outgrowth of the theory is that "the greater the scaling factor, the more erroneous your results will be if you don't take this theory into account." And the towers were so huge, that the scaling factor for any practical model is going to be very large (on the order of 1/100th the original size). Some factors will scale as the square of this ratio, meaning that the calculated dimensionless parameters will be off by a factor of 10,000.
Not a trivial error. One might invoke a new unit of measure for this sort of error called the "DickGage".
Ignorance of this topic is exactly the reason that all the pizza box, plastic bin, wooden peg & washer, etc. models that you see on Youtube are irrelevant.
This is also why doing these models as computer models is so valuable, especially when examining very large or very small systems. In computers, you don't have to scale your experiments, and don't run into these problems.
tom
PS. One pretty funny, but illuminating, example of the results of ignoring scaling factors is all those Japanese Godzilla movies. Or any movie where they attempt to replicate the movement of large ships with models in a bathtub. Nothing looks natural, because at the very reduced scale, the behavior of the wind & waves, and their interactions with the models, is all wrong, and these errors are very visible to the eye.
