Hi Yurebiz,
No, I meant no sarcasm.
Thats a great question, I never thought of that.
Reasonably speaking, no of course it wouldn't. however thats not what happened. Because the towers fell, more people died. That requires an investigation to who made the towers fall at all. It is not self evident that it was the plane and the fires. It might be for us who are already informed by NIST's work, but it sure wasn't back then, and it sure isn't easy proving such thing as you know. Whatever the scenario would be, there has to be an investigation for whatever caused damage to the citizens. Even more so if it's was done by foreign matters in an act of war.
But the investigation you're describing sounds to me exactly the investigation that was done. The Commission Report was the investigation of who. The NIST report is an investigation of how, and that "how" extends from the planes right up to the moment that collapse became unstoppable. When we say that NIST didn't study "the collapse itself," that certainly doesn't mean it didn't study the
cause of the collapse. The cause of the collapse is what NCSTAR is all about. It just means it didn't study, or model, the details of what happened after the collapse was inevitably underway.
Thats an excellent analogy I think. Except that it isn't necessary to prove the overwhelming energy by the flood is enough to smash houses and whatever weak structures stood in its way. You know why. That is self evident. No one doubts that houses can get smashed by high speed, big masses of water.
But how much of that is based on historical experience? Suppose a flood of that type, natural or artificial in origin, had never happened before. Would you so readily accept that "just water" from a burst dam could smash houses and other buildings? Would I perhaps see YouTube videos of people spraying doghouses with garden hoses as proof that something else must have destroyed the buildings? In fact, I notice that you specified "weak structures." Am I then to gather that you would expect strong structures, modern concrete and steel buildings such as a parking garge or a six-story office building, to withstand the force of a 40-foot-deep outwash from a burst dam? Are you sure? I'd expect such structures to be obliterated with barely a trace.
Which brings me to what I think is the interesting point: the failure of intuition.
This isn't a new point here. It comes up every time a conspiracy theorist says "common sense!" and a skeptic replies that common sense is unreliable when applied to uncommon situations. In other words, physical intuition is useless; one must rely on applying physical (and other scientific) laws, and if one doesn't have the learning to "connect the dots" as you put it, then one must rely on the conclusions of experts who can.
But it's not really that simple. Scientists and engineers and skeptics apply physical intuation all the time. They don't rely on it; they check, and if the numbers don't add up they change their minds. But at the end of the day, I daresay most of them want and expect to "see it" in their minds just as much as a layman does. The only difference is that their ability to do so is trained. It's largely about applying appropriate models and examples and rejecting inappropriate ones. To do this one has to learn about the general effects of scaling over many orders of magnitude, not just in size but other factors such as strength, temperature, mass, velocity, and viscosity. When probability enters into it, intuition of the effects of scaling probability per trial and number of trials is also helpful. Eventually, the ability to choose an appropriate model for the scale in question can itself become intuitive (though it still must be checked).
Skeptics here make fun of the paper model and chicken wire model of the World Trade Center because they know that scaling factors will make the models, in effect, far stronger than the actual towers. So the behavior of the models (such as the top third falling off to the side in once piece) will not resemble the expected behavior. Bad models, wrong intuition. But how to convince someone of that, when the obvious retort is "Are you insane? Steel beams are way stronger than paper or chicken wire!"
The bad model here is the idea that a large building is a rigid body, like a cardboard box or perhaps a doghouse. But you don't have to scale a doghouse up very far before that's no longer true. You can tilt a doghouse by lifting one corner, with no problem. Take a normal size house, remove all adhesives and fasteners that attach it to its foundation, and try lifting up one corner with a hydraulic jack. What will happen? The whole corner will lift, but the walls and joists between the corner and the rest of the house will break. The lifted corner will detach, and most of the house won't move. Was that obvious?
Now take a 40-story office building and do the same test. Have Superman lift up one corner. What will happen this time? Like with the house, the corner will break off, but unlike the house, it won't break off in one piece all the way to the roof. Only the bottom portion near Superman will be lifted up. At some point above Superman's head, the columns being lifted will shear apart, so the upper floors won't lift. Instead, very likely, once their support columns have been broken, the upper floors above the broken corner will collapse onto Superman's head. Was that obvious? If not, then replace Superman with a bomb, and take a look at what happened to the building in the Oklahoma City bombing. It didn't knock the whole building over, because buildings aren't rigid. It blasted out a cavity, and then everything above the cavity, no longer adequately supported, collapsed downward.
But not this time. Here we have the NIST saying fires could do it. They prove fires could do it. But they don't address how could the massive upper floors could smash all the way down under 11 seconds. That is irrelevant to their investigation, as mentioned before. Is that a sound theory to prove it happened due to fire+crash? It might be for you who is able to connect the dots yourself, but I can't, I have to be spoon-fed all the way. I'm that pathetic.
How do people develop physical intuition for unusual scenarios? There are two ways, by no means mutually exclusive. One way is through the intenstive schooling and professional training needed to become a structural engineer. The other way is by being a nerd.
Think about it. Just about everything that nerds are stereotyped for doing, from building model rockets to reading science fiction to programming their own computer games to engaging in heated discussions about how many people could live on the Death Star or whether Superman could beat the Hulk in a fight, is helpful in learning to apply physical principles to unusual scenarios and unusual scales. (Everyone else is focused on only one scale, semi-rigid bodies of about 100-200 lbs at velocities of 0-12 mph.) I learned a lot of intuition about structural issues, at a very young age, from Tinkertoys. Once a Tinkertoy contraption reached a certain size, it was no longer possible to lift it by grasping parts of it with two hands. It would come apart instead. (Now who's the pathetic one?
)
Is it dishonest to think that the government failed to provide the american public with a conjunctive and complete report about what happened, or is everyone obligated to read into each every little separate report to be able to understand what really happened?
It's not dishonest, if that really is what you think. But it might not be reasonable either. What you seem to be suggesting is that beyond presenting the evidence and presenting the experts' conclusions, the government should be doing a better job of telling the story and "selling" those conclusions to the public. That is, presenting an all-encompassing official narrative and convincing the public that the conclusions are correct. But if the government did that, isn't that called
propaganda?
If you want a critically examined narrative for the layman, then channeling Ebenezer Scrooge, I could respond: "Are there no newspapers? Are there no libraries? Is there no Discovery Channel?"
I can't join this scientific community. I'm purposely too ignorant of scientific principles and common sense. I'll stick around though. Rather, lurk around.
Please explain why you say "purposely." What purpose are you speaking of?
Good, I didn't know that. There has to be a way to express the temperatures through scientific quotations though. There has to be a way to at least roughly measure the amount of heat energy present in those points.. then somehow calculate the ammount of metal debris located there... and finally calculate how high was the initial temperature at the spots on 9/11. This aint quite accurate since there's no way to tell the kind or ammount of metal present in the spots but still it might give us an idea. If it was anywhere over 1000 degrees Celsius, be it alluminum, steel, iron or whatever, then we know something is definitely wrong, eh. Fires can't elevate it that high.
I hope someone within the movement does that sometime because I have no idea how to even start. And because the NIST surely isn't going to do it, since it's not their job. Plus they didn't even reckon it's existance at all.
Unfortunately, the retroactive calculation you're suggesting, determining the origins of the fire by examining the behavior of the hot spots and projecting back in time, is not possible. I assume what you're getting at is showing conclusively whether the source of ignition was office fire initiated with jet fuel, rather than (much hotter) thermite. The problem is that once a fire is ignited, the ignition mechanism doesn't make much difference in how the fire behaves. If there was super-hot thermite residue in the debris, it would quickly have equalized with the temperature of its surroundings, whether those surroundings were cool debris or a red-hot hot spot.
I agree that a mathematical model of contained fire would be helpful in showing e.g. that the hot spot temperatures are a reasonable result of partially buried (but otherwise conventional) fire. I've looked for such a model online that I can point to, and haven't found one. Most models are for practical engineering purposes such as setting test standards for materials, which makes them unsuitable for various reasons. For instance, there are many room fire models to look at, which might be helpful in understanding the fires in the towers (and in 7) before the collapse, but even there, the adjustments for scale are tricky. (Treating the upper floors of a tower as one enormous "room," for example, requires recognizing that the thermal losses through the "walls" of the room, relative to the overall volume of the room, are much lower at the larger scale.)
For another example, there are models of wood stove performance, but those put a lot of emphasis on the radiative and convective transfer of heat from the outside surface of the stove (which makes sense, considering that's what a stove is for). But that makes them both more complicated than needed, and inaccurate, for a more thoroughly contained fire such as the wtc hot spots where heat cannot escape by those mechanisms.
I've resolved to develop such a model myself, and present it here for peer review, but I haven't had the time and won't have the time in the next week or two.
Say whether you think the government has fulfilled their burden of proof on topics such as I first listed, and any others you'd want to include. I reckon some topics may be irrelevant to the sequence of events which led to the damage and deaths suffered on 9/11, but certainly not all of them are irrelevant. And certainly not the collapse sequence, be honest now, geez. And there's many other issues left out, too. Please don't give me a "they don't have to" in every subject. I'll take it as you think they covered it all up and you worship Moloch. That's fair enough.
As best they can, they're covering up their errors and omissions and policy failures that improved the terrorists' chances of success, as all governments cover up all errors and omissions and policy failures as best they can. Other than that, my opinion is they've met their burden of proof on the sequence of events of 9/11.
The more interesting question is whether the public is adequately educated to understand how the world works, and if not, what if anything the government should do about it. Underfunding of PBS is one problem that might be considered, for it might be reasonable to imagine that "public broadcasting" would be one effective way of getting the kind of information out that you seem to feel was lacking.
Government organizations aren't very good at explaining why. They'll tell you (and most people know) to crawl when escaping a fire, but most people, I'd wager, don't know the real reason why: that the bottom two feet of a room can be a survivable environment, in a fire, when the atmosphere anywhere above three feet can kill you if you take a single breath of it. People think burning rooms are like they see on TV shows: a burning chair over here, some burning framing studs over there, and you'll be OK as long as you run between them, in the clear smoke-free air. So on a routine basis, people go running into burning houses (often for heroic reasons for which they deserve only praise; you'd have to physically constrain me to keep me out of a burning house if I knew someone was alive inside) but they don't think to crawl, they don't expect to be blinded by opaque smoke and burned by radiant heat nowhere near where the visible flames are, and they die.
Have you ever seen the "duck and cover" films for civil defense against a nuclear attack? Had a good laugh at how silly it was, I bet.
Would it surprise you to learn that in a nuclear attack, the majority of the casualties would not be from radiation poisoning or blast shock, but from thermal radiation? And that "ducking and covering" can completely protect you from that thermal radiation?
So it's not "they don't have to" prove these things to the public. It's "they don't know how to," and neither does anyone else. Look at how much trouble, and the exorbitant expense, the government incurs just trying to teach people to read, write, and do arithmetic.
As to the difference between static and dynamic loads being the underlying principle behind the tower collapse, what else is there to say or explain? An ordinary brick can bear the load of hundreds of other bricks stacked on top of it. Drop a single brick onto it from a height of ten feet, and it will likely break.
Respectfully,
Myriad
