Can we have even *more* hard facts of physics and chemistry, please?

From 9th of September 2001, for nearly four and a half years, I was more or less a believer in the official conspiracy theory. You know, the one that says: it was a gang of 19 arab Muslims (plus their puppet masters hiding in Bagdad and an Afghan cave) who managed to make the 2 WTC towers collapse with the help of 2 airplanes crushing into the buildings and burning lots of jet fuel. (Uhmm, the only thing where I had my doubts from the beginning may be summarized as follows: "Probably not even in their wildest dreams would the hijacker-perpetrators have imagined they could completely bring down the towers themselves. The most they may have hoped for was an irreparable damage, and a globally visible wound they inflict on these symbols of Western capitalism... No-one, not even structural engineers could have predicted these total collapses").

Anyway, it was only half a year ago that I encountered for the first time a story about WTC7 (the third WTC building to collapse on that very day, also a high-rise steel structure, albeit only 47 storeys high) -- and that one additional fact made me re-consider the whole story. By now, I've seen most of the videos available on the 'net, read most of the articles, am familiar with most of the unofficial conspiracy theories...

What I am missing are a few more hard facts. Proofs based on the laws of physics that will shake the official theory to pulverized dust. Facts that can be verified by any student of physics or chemistry.

What I found and saw so far was merely "common sense physics" applied. Arguments like "Why did the collapses happen in near-freefall speed?", "What did transform all the buildings concrete into very fine dust?", "Why were there these 'squibs'?", "Why did that pulverized dust originate from the top?" etc.

I'm very familiar with the fact that a solid piece of concrete will *not* pulverize into dust if you throw it out of the 7th floor window onto a yard with a concrete surface -- it will only shatter into a few dozen (still solid concrete) pieces and very little "dust". Because I tried it....

However, I feel this is not convincing enough for still many, many people. Can't we do better?

Aren't there knowledgeable people, scientists, engineers around, who could just start to calculate the required amounts of energy to cause all the evidence that can be seen in the videos, in the satellite pics taken of Ground Zero, etc.? So that the argument "At least for 9/11 in 2001, Almighty Allah changed the universal laws of physics for one spot of the earth in New York, to let happen once what elsewhere and at other times is impossible to happen" can be admired in its full beauty?

To make it more specific:

* Take a 1 kg cube of concrete: how much energy is required to transform it into pulverized dust of [use appropriate figure]-sized mini particles? Hence, how much total energy would be required to pulverize 50% of the concrete that was built into WTC2? What about 100%?

* How much energy would one have to put into that created concrete dust in order to make it behave like a "pyroclastic flow" and spread over all of Manhattan as a 1 inch layer of "snow"? (That one will probably have to make use the "ideal gas law", PV = nRT ...)

* How much energy is required to heat all of the steel columns (built into one WTC twin tower) to 100° Celsius? To 200° C? To 300° C? To 500°, 800° C? How much of its load capacity does steel loose at 300° C? What temperature is required to make it loose 50% of its load capacity?

* How much "potential energy" was in one 110 storey WTC building that would be transformed into kinetic energy and released if it came down in freefall speed? How much energy could the jet fuel release if it burnt under "ideal conditions"? How much was the kinetic energy of the planes flying at 500 mph? How much energy can the standard office equipment/furniture/paper/files release in a fire conflagration?

* What other major providers (and consumers) of energy would need to be covered to explain the evidence experienced during 9/11?

Such an overall balance sheet of energy released and consumed on 9/11 will probably lead to many new surprises if conducted in a sober way... Just apply this one fundamental law of physics about the conservation of energy to the situation.

Of course, these calculations would not need to be totally exact. They could be made with different ("optimistic" and "pessimistic") assumptions, covering upper and lower ends of a possible range of outcomes.

Is there anybody up to this task? Engineers, physicists, chemists, vulcanologists?

Science profs should assign experiments to students...

I think science/engineering/architecture professors throughout the world should assign experiments & research papers to their students regarding all the phenomena observed at the WTC that day. What better real-life example could there be to study science than the world-renowned WTC?

"No, you can not"

"No, you can not"

If you have not read this article for SC911t you should....

http://www.911blimp.net/prf_FreeFallPhysics.shtml

......"The scientists who've concocted this "pancake theory" made a fatal error: they forgot to check their work! Which is an easy thing to do, even without any physical evidence to forensically examine. Anyone, at any time, can check the work of the scientists -- that incredible pancake theory of theirs -- using simple, high-school physics!

And that's what we're about to do here. We're going to check the work -- something every grade-schooler is taught to do -- of those "scientists".

We will use a simple, unassailable, incontrovertible conservation-of-energy analysis to perform a simple, basic reality check that establishes, once and for all, that the U.S. government, PBS, Popular Mechanics, and Scientific American have misrepresented the true nature of the events of 9/11.....

The biggest problem with

The biggest problem with evidence is, it was shipped away to fast, and the government owns all the rest, no one can get any of it to test...

Sometimes, the most clear and obvious evidence is much more important than the complex scientific equations. Here's a couple points I like to make...

The bottom 1/3 of the WTC was clearly strong enough to hold ALL of the load of the upper half of the building, and all the extra force from wind+surface area.

Without the top 1/3 of the building, the bottom third would be even stronger, able to hold much more than it's weight.

If you then dropped the top third of the building from 30 feet above the lower 2/3 (giving it more momentum than in real life), what would you expect to happen to the bottom 2/3 of the building, which was built to handle the weight and load of the upper 1/3?

it would crush a few floors, stop, tilt, fall...

not piledrive it's way through 70 floors of a building, that was designed to support another 30 floors!

I know that many physicists can and will prove this, but it is a career threatening, privacy destroying, painful path right now. Until the political + cultural implications of dissent change (which they are right now), not many professional scientists will risk their life's achievements.

When it comes to the scientists the back the official explination, they are as bad as the scientists that backed cigarette companies, lead, asbestos, etc.

Bad + politically/corporately corrupt science has been around for a while.

Janus, you are spot on...

Your points are well made. Someday people will look back and be amazed at how so many of us "fell for the fall".

The Profile of Collapse

Re: 10 best pieces of evidence for public debate
I have a colleague who has had a lot of trouble with the "free fall" speed of the collapses of WTC's 1, 2, and 7. I mean he glosses over this issue and I have never pressed it, per se. Mainly because while I thought about it a bit a year+ ago every time somebody references it (like Griffin, etc) I barely note it. But then I read the article noted above. And a person like me... while I am a neuroscientist, I don't usually think in terms of physics... And I am sure he doesn't really think through those implications either. Because he does not really want to believe for psychological reasons. But when you do think through the physics.....

Here is the reason why. Think of it this way. Every single floor of any of the WTC tower would offer what kind of resistance to a falling body? You know, the upper floor(s) falling down? Remember that each floor is a spider web of trusses, beams, the central core connecting all together at -each- level, each floor. Do you suppose each floor might add a second's worth of resistance over that encountered if there were simply -air- there instead of all those bolts, trusses, beams etc.? Or might it be 2 seconds? 3? or 4? For the sake of argument let me say, absurdly, that all of that steel and structure would add only .5 second over the resistance of air alone. Air just by itself. On average. Remember, the upper floors would have provided more resistance as the mass and its velocity was just getting started, I suppose. How many seconds would it take for the entire building to collapse into rubble? Well, how many floors were there in WTC 1?

110 floors in WTC 1. So at .5 second per floor that is what, 55 seconds? How long did it take for the entire thing to come down?

10 + or - a few milliseconds. Just 10. Free fall speed. How can that be? There can be but one conclusion. It thus appears incontrovertibly true that *all* the resistance of the lowers floor had to be removed (removing all structural resistance - but not air resistance of course) as the upper structure fell. And the resistance not only * removed* but removed mostly equally across all of the surface at each level (otherwise the building might have toppled over sideways) during the collapse.

The only falling buildings that have * ever * fit that profile of collapse are buildings undergoing controlled demolition.

And as an aside, I wonder that part of the reason some folks get into thinking of energy weapons and the like being used is that the falls of WTC 1 and 2 almost seems too damn fast for physics to explain. Along with the pulverizing, *dematerializing* of the lower structures, glass and stuff as the building fell. That stuff is way past my measely knowledge of physics but the "controlled demolition" - however accomplished, appears to be solid scientific fact.

Thus, at least this part of the government's conspiracy theory fails. Miserably.

Pyroclastic flow calculations

I've now found this paper, that tries to calculate the amounts of energies involved (sources and sinks) that could produce dust clouds (or pyroclastic flows, as some name it) like was observed for WTC1+2.

I've not yet read and studied it in detail; just passing the link here for others to examine as well:

http://911research.wtc7.net/papers/dustvolume/volumev3.html