"Multiple failures elsewhere in the structure" is a duplicitous statement intended to imply
structural failures some distance from the point in question.
You know very well that NIST was referring to failures of steel where it was joined to column 79 over several consecutive floors.
There's nothing duplicitous about my statement. You were speaking of a single demolition charge. How do you intend to destroy the
many connections of Column 79 with a single charge?
If you don't want to use a single charge, but instead want to sever all of these connections, how do you propose to do so without leaving the absolutely unmistakble firecracker-string sound of such a demolition?
It can't be done. You cannot create a hypothesis that makes sense in light of these simple facts. That's what I was trying to explain to you.
The point remains that the NIST believes collapse initiation was due to the failure of column 79, followed less than a second later by columns 80 and 81.
The NIST tested with the amount of RDX that they determined would be required to sever column 79 and achieve the same result.
... to achieve the same result
given the state of the structure. Once they identified the terminal failure mode that actually existed, they tried to envision how else it could be accomplished. Their conclusion, it would be too loud, and
it would look totally different. You seem to have ignored the latter point.
Thus NIST believed the same result could be achieved if column 79 was severed, regardless of the cause.
No, not the same result. You could destroy the building, yes, this result would be the same. But it wouldn't match the collapse that we saw. There is no way to replicate that with a single charge. None.
You wish to argue the "butterfly effect" now?
This is not "the butterfly effect." The point is very simple. WTC 7 would be hit by debris, set on fire, and would burn for several hours. This fire would also involve the very area that you would have explosives. Whomever planted them would have to know their explosives would be at risk. Why would they do that? How would they protect them? You've offered no explanation.
One can imagine all kinds of nuances if you wish to speculate on how non-structural damage may or may not have influenced the fires. There is simply no evidence that the existing damage made any significant difference to how the fires performed.
This is completely false. NIST goes into detail about the effect on airflow, which is one of the major inputs to the fire simulation.
Why?
The first order of business would be to make sure of a successful demolition.
The second order would be to build-in redundancy and install in a secure, protected location (the core was damn safe as well as being the necessary location).
"Why" is because if you don't count on weakening, you need a vastly higher quantity of explosives. Timing becomes critical, as does placement. This means a more complicated ignition sequence and extreme sensitivity to damage, fire, and vibration.
The point is that you cannot construct a hypothesis involving explosives that makes sense. Nobody ever has. Even the most tenative hints you've given at one can be shown to be self-inconsistent and implausible. If you disagree with this point, I invite you to provide one. I invite anyone to come up with a valid explosives hypothesis.
No one ever has. Ever.
NIST never proved anything.
You're arguing semantics. In your previous post, you said, and I quote,
"There is no credible evidence, or theory, that explains how a 7 second major internal core failure would occur as a result of column 79 buckling, followed by columns 80 & 81 less than a second later."
This is wrong. NIST provided a credible theory that explains this in detail.
Is this scientific
proof of what happened? No. But that standard is unattainable. NIST has a theory, much as we have a "theory" about gravity. It's valid and it matches all known experimental tests. That's as good as it's ever going to get.
You cannot discount NIST arbitrarily, as you have done, by saying
"it's not proof." That is the same tactic used by Creationists, and it is scientifically incorrect. In order to discount NIST, you
must find critical errors in the theory or you
must provide a competing hypothesis. If you can do so, then we have a sufficient amount of scientific uncertainty. Alas, you cannot.
Had they proved their point, we wouldn't be having this discussion and possibly the world wouldn't be currently on the verge of another Depression.
I fail to see how any content of the NCSTAR1A report would materially affect the economy. Even had it contained a comic strip, the impact on our markets would be negligible...
In other words, if 9/11 had not been an inside job, I don't think the U.S. and the rest of the world would be in the current financial predicament.
We've explored, in another thread here, how no one on your side can yet produce a single piece of evidence that 9/11
was an "inside job." As for you personally, rather than address that, you are content to try, without relative expertise, to cast doubt on the finest scientific details of an engineering performance report. That falls very, very far short of proving or even supporting your premise above.
All NIST did was present "a" theory and gave their reasons for supporting it.
No, they did more. They also presented examples of competing hypotheses and gave their reasons for not supporting those.
Honestly, this is all they were asked to do, and all they could meaningfully be asked to do. This is how science works.
It would appear that the last argument protecting the NIST theory is; "well it had to be the fire
because we didn't hear the explosions on the videos".
It isn't the only argument, but it is sufficient. The noise, as already remarked, would be unmissable. Explosives are very loud and characteristic.
Well the validity of that point is in dispute and it certainly is a weak case for the NIST to present
after so many years of vacillation.
You can't just say "it's in dispute." You have to actually dispute it.
I wasn't aware that I had presented what you believed to be my attempt at a hypothesis?
Well, you keep saying that such-and-such is possible, or that I'm misinterpreting your claims, both things that suggest you actually have one. If you don't have a hypothesis, then you cannot say your objections are valid, because you haven't explained them in sufficient detail for them to be examined. If you do have a hypothesis, why will you not state it?
I termed what Barry Jenning's experienced as "the appearance of a preparatory explosion"
because no other rational explanation has been proffered.
This is false. Rational explanations have indeed "been proffered." Furthermore, your own explanation -- that it must have been a "preparatory explosive" -- fits absolutely no narrative that I can imagine, and should therefore be discarded as spurious and absurd. Apparently you can't provide one either.
This is another instance of a powerful explosion, powerful enough to blowout a concrete and steel stairwell, experienced firsthand by two people, and yet unheard by firefighters and camera crews outside the building.
Pure speculation on all of the above.
We have no evidence of debris or fire damage to WTC7's core, and little reason to have expected any.
We do have evidence of fire damage; that evidence is in the form of simulation. NCSTAR1A. We certainly have the expectation. The above is totally wrong.
Therefore, there appeared to be little risk to any core configured demolition.
Beyond actually having evidence, there is
certainly the risk of fire affecting explosives in the core. The logical fallacy is
post hoc ergo propter hoc, but compounded in that you've also made a false assertion about the
post hoc evidence. Sorry.
Again, what theory did I present?
I'm questioning the validity of the NIST WTC7 theory.
You don't appear to understand NIST's WTC 7 theory, given the confusion about Column 79 explored above.
Providing an alternative theory is not a prerequisite for challenging an existing theory.
If you want to talk about explosives, then yes you do. One way to challenge an existing theory, the best way, is to offer a competing hypothesis. The only other option, again, is to find critical errors in that theory. Thus far you have not done that, either. But if you follow the second option, you should not be mentioning explosives at all, but instead showing where
their approach makes a mistake.
Choose a strategy and stick to it, or else you cannot make progress.
Sonic evidence?
How valid is that when it's known that much sonic evidence was there but never recorded.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. There are recordings, those recordings would have picked up the explosion, they did not. QED. There's no point talking about "unrecorded" evidence, because even if you are right, and even if it would contain what you speculate it would claim, it still does not explain away the data that we have in hand.
The NIST is using the absence of recorded sound as proof that it did not exist. There are witnesses that claim otherwise.
Not really. And witnesses cannot trump recordings. All you're doing here is exercising confirmation bias.
If Barry Jennings and Michael Hess could experience a loud destructive explosion in the 6th floor core which no one on the street heard, or recorded as sonic evidence, is it not possible that additional core explosions occurred throughout the day leading up to a final core failure at 5:20 p.m.?
That's a pretty darn big "if." Since you have neither (a) proved it was an explosive, (b) proved nobody else heard the event in question, nor (c) estimated the size and loudness of the alleged explosive and shown it to be comparable to the event you refuse to state as a hypothesis, you cannot claim this as a valid precedent.
It was the NIST that concluded that a failure of column 79 was the initiating cause for the complete collapse of WTC7.
Fallacy of the Single Cause. NIST's hypothesis is quite a bit more detailed. See above.
Therefore according to the NIST, logically, anything that achieved that failure would cause the same result.
Again, only if you oversimplify the meaning of the word "result." There would be marked visible differences.
That does not mean that a controlled demolition of WTC7 was based on the NIST's theorized collapse initiation cause.
You've spent a lot of time describing what your non-hypothesis is not. It would be a lot more helpful if you described what you
do believe or suggest, rather than making me guess.
A plan that required a total core failure from controlled demolition, would still result in the failure of column 79 and would not require any pre-knowledge of column 79's vulnerability in order to succeed.
I don't agree. You may attempt to prove this by providing an example of such a plan.
The NIST is saying column 79's failure would bring about the core's collapse and I'm saying a demolition of the core would by necessity force column 79 to fail.
If you destroy the entire core, then any element of the core would have to fail, yes. But I don't see any relevance here. NIST's hypothesis is quite specific. You have to match
that behavior. A total core demolition does not match at all.
You appear to be confused, deliberately or otherwise.
I've never said the plan centered around the failure of column 79.
I've merely addressed the point that NIST theorized that WTC7 collapsed because of column 79's failure.
There is no contradiction unless you feel writing the words is enough to make them legitimate?
Let me try again. Your unstated non-hypothesis is that WTC 7 was deliberately destroyed by explosives. In this variant of it, you propose that the demolition was
not designed to collapse WTC 7 by focusing on Column 79, but that Column 79 was the initiating event anyway.
That's a contradiction. How can the demolitioneers
not know what their own initiating event would be? Or are you claiming that it wasn't Column 79 at all?
You don't, or won't follow my logic?
What reason would the demolition planners have for expecting the core to be damaged placing their work at risk?
Presumably the demolitioneers were aware that two WTC Towers were coming down in close proximity to their structure. There is the possibility for direct impact to the core, internal collapses caused by debris landing on WTC 7, and sheer vibrational damage. Simple.
The NIST never observed or noted any core damage.
The NIST never proved that fire significantly weakened the structure but postulated that it must have, since
their theory is solely fire-based.
NIST never observed core damage due to impact, correct. But this was not obvious, and it could have happened.
You are using the word "postulate" incorrectly. NIST provided
scientific evidence that fire not only significantly weakened the structure, but weakened it to the point of collapse. You cannot throw out their evidence without addressing it.
There is nothing "inherently obvious" that proves WTC7 was so significantly weakened by fire that total
collapse was a reasonable expectation, unless one was already suspicious about the collapses of WTC1 and WTC2..
The FDNY begs to differ with that assessment, as does the result from NIST.
I don't understand your confusion?
As a NASA engineer you must be quite familiar with system redundancy?
Some systems have redundancy, others do not. WTC 7 did not have much in the way of structural redundancy. This is standard practice in structures. You do not design buildings that will stay standing if you take out a major support column, unless you have a specific requirement to do so, which WTC 7 did not. Instead, you design buildings such that the odds of any major element failing are vanishingly small. However, exceed the performance envelope of the structure, and all bets are off.
You are speculating about redundancy that WTC 7 did not have. On what basis do you do so?
Who said anything about "accidental"?
You did. You said, again I quote,
"The failure of column 79 could very well have been an unforeseen consequence of the planned demolition." How can one have a deliberate unforeseen consequence..?
And I doubt I can explain it to you because I'm not convinced that your mind is open to anything contrary to your beliefs.
Basically, you are stating that you don't believe it was possible to devise a means of surreptitiously gaining access to the building core prior to 9/11.
Fallacy of the Single Cause again. I can imagine access to the core. What I don't understand, and you are stubbornly reluctant to provide, is any notion of what you think was done
after gaining "access." Just because you can get into an elevator shaft doesn't mean you can devise and implement a foolproof, fireproof method of stealthily demolishing the building. Access is perhaps the easiest of many steps, and it is these other steps that I indeed do not believe are possible. Again, you can prove me wrong by providing an example.
This is old ground and I really don't wish to list the possible methods such a covert operation might employ.
I know your an engineer, but use some imagination. This isn't rocket science.
If you can't provide a hypothesis, that isn't a failure of
my imagination.
Talk to Frank Greening and John D. Wyndham, PhD (Physics) for starters.
I've seen their objections. Dr. Greening appears to have fixated on the exaggerated scale used in NIST's depiction of displacements during collapse. This was pretty easy to deal with. There are other minor complaints about the accuracy of the fire simulation, but absolutely nothing that disproves the theory.
Again, if you disagree, feel free to present your understanding. Thus far you have not demonstrated knowledge either of NIST's hypothesis
or any valid objection. You cannot just point to someone whom you've arbitrarily decided is correct, and expect that to stand.
That's an interesting point you raised there.
"No explosive sounds."
7 seconds of complete internal carnage of the steel core and no sonic evidence.
... of
an explosive. As NIST reported, a sufficient explosive would mean a
shock wave of 130 dB SPL at 1 km. Nothing in an ordinary collapse would create this kind of sound. This sound was not heard, though the ordinary collapse was.
Also, I'm talking about more than a subtle pattern of window breakage.
The pattern, had there been an explosive, would not be subtle. What you describe does not fit this pattern.
It's theorized by NIST, that the interior is totally collapsing for 7 seconds, and in spite of all the connectivity to the outside perimeter, you feel outside the building, a pattern of window breakage is the only logical view to be expected?
I never stated this.
Not even a few 'bowed perimeter columns'?
No. You have to understand that, in NIST's WTC 7 hypothesis, the core failure is
total. All of the surviving connections would be strained at once, and in similar degree. This does not produce visible bowing. Instead it produces a displacement over the entire perimeter, until connections shear, at which point those connections no longer exist.
The bowing seen in WTC 1 and 2 is very, very different in nature.
Again, unless you have some
evidence that conflicts with NIST's hypothesis, you have nothing.
Or maybe the real total collapse occurred after that 7 seconds?
Please do not state your hypothesis in the form of questions. This is tedious enough as it is.
Now that is truly incredible.
You are in effect saying that we have a building inside a building.
That, even though the two are firmly connected to each other, it's supposedly credible that the inside structure underwent 7 seconds of collapse without visibly pulling in any of the the connected exterior walls.
And you are an engineer?
Yes, to all three questions. NCSTAR1A describes the structure's design and its anticipated response, and their hypothesis is consistent with my expectations and my statement. Furthermore, you have yet to provide any evidence that the above is wrong. Yet, curiously, you still seem to disagree.
