A couple of threads over the past few days made me finally realize something. Maybe this is old news to most (or all) of you, but it hit home for me.
Anyway, one of the inspirations for this is
Morgan Reynolds's "request for correction", arguing that the impact of the planes, and the subsequent movement of the towers, proves that the planes could not have been real. In a nutshell, the argument is that the towers bend more in a strong wind than they did being hit by loaded jetliners. The forces, the argument goes, could not be that terribly strong if they did not cause even as much bend as the wind does. In fact, one post on another thread calculated the force that should have been carried by fully loaded jetliners and calculates (if memory serves) the amount of bend that we should have seen--the amount we did see is considerably less.
Sounds pretty damning. I had never heard this particular argument before this week, and I don't know that I would have found it particularly convincing or not...but something in these couple of threads triggered a memory. I don't know much about the towers (compared to the folks here), but this thing I do know about.
I have a bed of nails in my office. I use it for "mind over matter" demos, and to show that the physics behind it, rather than any bioenergetic force field, is what keeps me safe. One of the things I do is lay a concrete block on my stomach and have someone hit it with a sledge hammer. This is the part that is important to this thread. Twice, people have been a bit hesitant, and have hit the block with insufficient force to break it. This has the effect of pushing my back against a couple hundred nails, and is not terribly comfortable. Most times, though, people are pretty enthusiastic about swinging a sledgehammer at me, and the concrete block shatters in two, in a cloud of dust and concrete chips. When this happens, I don't feel any pressure at all. The energy is put into breaking the concrete block apart, and cannot be used to push me into the nails.
Exactly the same thing, I think, was at work at the Twin Towers. Of course the buildings did not sway as much as the calculations predict; that energy was being used tearing columns, walls, floors, elevator shafts, apart. Reynolds claims it proves there were no planes; rather, it proves that this energy was spent in destroying the building. The same energy that, if distributed as wind is, would have bent the towers significantly, was distributed in the much smaller "footprint" of the plane, causing more localized and much more significant damage. Like a high-speed bullet disintegrating and spending all its energy in a body, the plane spent all its energy in tearing apart a couple of floors. Reynolds has convinced me of precisely what he claims is not the case.
Sorry if everybody here but me already knew this. I knew that at least one (Reynolds) did not.
This sparked much concern that the designers of tall buildings hadn't quite nailed down the problem of wind loading.