I don't pretend to have all the answers and it is no doubt easier to invalidate a given hypothesis than to formulate an alternative. Initially when I looked, with others at the drawings for 7 the first thing to do was to check what NIST said against the drawings and see if they accurately reflected each other. This was clearly not the case with particular respect to the very connection that NIST homed in on at C79. Straight away, that set alarm bells ringing. ie If NIST can make such glaring errors at the connections they were putting under most scrutiny, then that does not bode well for the rest of their analysis.
NIST did admit some of these errors but failed to account for the difference that these errors could make to their analysis. The right thing for them to do would have been to redo the analysis at that point but they did not.
I am with you (in agreement) up to this point, and that means I am siding against the majority here.
A disclaimer applies: I have NOT looked with great care at the available structural drawings, nor NIST's rendering of it, and so I am taking your claims of fact at base value. It seems no one here outright denies their veracity.
So, given that NIST ran their models on premises, some of which later turned out to be (probably) false, and noting that the CTBUH also mentioned this with some concern, I agree with your conclusion that, ideally, some of the analysis ought to be redone (provided a favorable cost-benefit ratio).
Given adequate resources, I would like to replicate the observed collapse in a model by removing connections at a given number of columns until the result mirrored the observations of the collapse in reality. At that point we would then know the extent to which the fire would have to attack the building structurally in order to reproduce the observed collapse.
Sounds smart. Although I am not sure that this sort of trial & error could prove, or even just render plausible, that the "connection removal sequence" was the only possible one, or even the true one. Just a possible one.
But there's one aspect that makes this approach attractive for debate here: The very same "connection removal sequence" would immediately provide us with a candidate hypothesis for "explosive CD charges" placement and timing. One would then just have to compute the respective necessary charge sizes - and the resulting BANG.
AND also describe a range of probable fire sequences at each such charge location, so we can assess the possibility of charges surviving the temperatures (most monomolecular explosives don't survive >320 C, many burn, melt or go off far below that; and even Harrit's fake "active thermitic material" had started decomposing by 270 °C).
My gut feeling, based on what I have seen in the drawings is that there is just no way for an organic process such as fire is, to reproduce the effects that we see, but having not exhausted the alternative fire scenarios I am hesitant to hang my hat on the CD peg. I prefer to keep an open mind as to what actually caused this and that means that controlled demolition cannot be ruled out as a cause at this point.
Understood
Yes, it would be difficult to do on the day, and it would be a major undertaking and there are questions for sure about why anybody who had this intention would not just let the building burn out, but that alone does not invalidate the hypothesis that CD is a possibility.
In other words, there really does not exist yet a CD theory with enough flesh to predict anything, let alone falsifiable claims.
After all, anybody who believes the official account that we are offered already believes that something that we have formerly believed to be impossible occurred to result in the buildings demise.
STOP!!
Say what? Who is "we"? And what did those "we" believe to be impossible? That a steel-framed high-rise could undergo progressive collapse caused by fire? I for one never thought this was impossible, and the only structural engineer in my circle of friends is extremely strong when he expresses his belief that OF COURSE EVERY steel frame structure is, as a matter of principle, in danger of collapsing due to fires.
In those circumstances it would be foolish to believe that which is less possible, over that which is less probable.
There is no "less possible". "Possible" is a digital thing - something is possible, or it is not.
Probabilities are also not necessarily a good measure when determining facts about a singular historical event. The WTC7 did, im fact, collapse, and that collapse did, in fact, have a cause, on whatever level you want to look at it. So no matter how improbable the actual cause was ex ante, its probability ex post is 1. If you have, say, 3 candidate causes, one has (by whatever methoid you compute it) a 66% probability, the other 33%, and the third 1%,
this does not help you much to rule out the 1% candidate.
In Karl Popper's scientific epistemology, such probabilities step back behind the
explanatory power of a theory. So even if some fire-scenario is deemed to have a low probability of causing the observed events, it may still explain everything that needs explaining better than any other.
The alternative to NISTs explanation that fire did it is controlled demolition, and NIST have yet to prove that their theory holds water.
No and no.
The first is a false dilemma - you are forgetting alternatives such as structural impact damage, corrosion, poor workmanship, bad materials, etc., all of which might improve the probability of fire to cause the required failures.
The second an epistemological issue: "Fire" is the null-hypothesis, and NIST's scenario explains a lot. The NIST-opponents have yet to provide an alternative theory that has better explanatory power.
That in itself does not mean that fire couldn't have done it, but it does mean that it would be foolish not to consider the alternative cause to be controlled demolition.
I am okay with that - but have yet to see even prima facie evidence of it. Almost all of the alleged
prima facie that truthers like AE911T like to trot out have been debunked for a long long time.
For the record, I would also like to state that CD is a far less comfortable possibility for me personally to entertain than NISTs "fire did it" theory.
To imagine that potentially any steel high rise could be prone to collapse due to fire actually scares me more than the thought that we haven't been told the truth about what happened to this building.
I got bad news then for you:
It is true: Potentially any steel high rise could be prone to collapse due to fire!
That's why people have to study structural engineering before they are allowed to design steel structures, metallurgy before they produce structural steel, etc. That's why they put fire-proofing on naked steel. That's why they usually prefer concrete-encased steel supports. That's why sprinklers are so damned important.
You see, if I or you were to build a steel-frame highrise, we'd have huge trouble doing oit such that it doesn't collapse within a few days, if not minutes, and I can guarantee you absolutely that any highrise I could ever build WILL collapse duue to the next-best fire. It is damned hard to build highrises that don't collapse.
