It's designed to "demonstrate the impossibility of the collapse". That there is objective research if I ever saw it.
Hey, all the best researchers know the answer before they do the study, right? So instead of Principal Investigator we'll have a Principal Confirmer of Pre-Determined Outcome. Having already published the findings, they are pretty much handcuffs them to the need to play with the initial conditions and unknowns until the model doesn't produce a global collapse. And then shout "Eureka!" and proclaim that they've done better science than NIST, and that those "must" be the proper assumptions (if they discuss their assumptions at all).
As I told Major_Tom years ago, no math teacher ever asked me for a disproof. This is so basic -- you don't "prove" impossibility, you posit an alternative and prove that.
If you have something like
x + a = 3
a = 2,
you can disprove the proposition
x = 42 in this system. But as you said, you do it by showing algebraically that
x must be 1. And this, of course, under the vast array of tacit assumptions such as
x and
a being unremarkable integers and 2 and 3 having their customary values.
But yes, you're invoking math as a front-porch to the inferential deductive logic that we use in math, and which governs what conclusions can be drawn reliably from known facts. And an unshakable fact of that form of reasoning within an open-ended system is that you can't prove a negative.
I can prove a rudder actuator was not likely to be the cause of some crash, but that by showing that the power control unit was more likely a source of failure. No amount of bench testing, design analysis, or other investigative exercise lets me say it's
impossible for the rudder actuator to have failed.
To continue the math analogy, we have in this type of investigation a system that looks more like
x + a + b + c + d = 0
What are the values of the variables that aren't
x? They're unknowns. You must discover their values, estimate them, or find reasonable bounds for them. And differences in the values you choose for them vastly affect the outcome. Here in this algebraic system we have an infinite number of values to choose from for each variable. In the analogous modeling system, we can reasonably bound the values but they still have vastly non-linear effects on the model state.
Going through some large number of values for
a,
b,
c, and
d does not prove the system is impossible to solve. Since the problem is practically unbounded, at most you've shown that you have
not yet found a suitable set of values. Hence AE911T saying, "See, we ran our model and the building failed to collapse; therefore NIST fudged their results," is comically wrong.
Conversely, showing that one particular set of values for
a,
b,
c, and
d solves the system does not preclude other solutions or show that it is the best from among the possible values. Yes, it is
an answer, but it is not necessarily
the answer. For example, setting
a and
b to very small numbers (positive or negative), and setting
c to a comparatively very large positive number requires setting
d to a comparably very large negative number in order to solve the system. Depending on your reasons for setting
c as you have, you cannot plausibly say you have proven
d "must" be a large negative number. So AE911T saying, "See, our contrived animation looks just like the video!" doesn't prove the contrivance is what really happened.