THESE SHILLS ALWAYS TALK ABOUT THE FLOORS ONY BEING ABLE TO WITHSTAND SO MUCH WEIGHT. THAT MAYBE TRUE BUT THEY IGNORE THE STEEL SUPPORTING SUPERSTRUCTURE THAT WAS DESIGNED TO CARRY THE WEIGHT OF THE ENTIRE BUILDING.

http://www.journalof911studies.com/letters/ProfKuttlerWTC1CollapseTimeCa...

Gordon Ross has just published an article directly responding to Bazant:

http://www.journalof911studies.com/volume/200704/NISTandDrBazant-Simulta...

How the layperson is confused…

"The World Trace Center collapsed at free fall speed with resistance from below. Therefore it did not fall due to gravity alone.”

That statement is a strong argument for 911 Truth that is not disputable. HOWEVER are the assumptions that the towers actually collapsed at near free-fall speed correct?

Have the collapse times been measured correctly? For example, looking at a video of the North Tower it is hard to tell when the collapse ended due to all the dust, but it seems to take about 10 to 18 seconds (Starting at the 3:38 point in the clip and ending at about 3:58 when the last object outside dust cloud hits the ground or ending at about 4:06 if you take the point when the heavy dusty debris in the centre seems to reach the ground and the spire of remaining steel shakes from the impact at its base just before it collapses too). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kL6N66vPCAs

That lines up with statements at http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/analysis/proofs/speed.html , and the final two paragraphs of that “proof” are very powerful in an editorial (if perhaps not a scientific) way: “If air resistance is able to increase total collapse times by even 20 percent, then shouldn't the addition of the resistance of the buildings themselves increase the time several thousand percent, to at least tens of minutes?
Of course the idea of a collapse lasting minutes is absurd. So is the idea of a steel frame building crushing itself.” Exactly.

HOWEVER, there are potential challenges to making the “falling at free fall speed” statement. Take a close look at this video freeze frame at the 3:45 minute mark. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kL6N66vPCAs Here we see an object falling on the right hand side that was ejected laterally at about the 3:41 minute mark. Except that in that 4 second span of time it has fallen approximately 15 to 20 stories further than the collapsing floors within the building footprint. That tells me that there was at least some resistance from the lower floors. (This is a powerful argument for a debunker who takes issue with an unqualified “collapsed at free-fall speed” statement, but not powerful enough to convince me that the lower floors should have provided even more resistance than this video shows.)

Then there is this from “Taking a Closer Look: Hard Science and the Collapse of the World Trade Center” by Dave Heller at http://www.physics911.net/closerlook :
“The height of the South Tower is 1362 feet. I calculated that from that height, freefall in a vacuum (read, absolutely no resistance on earth) is 9.2 seconds. According to testimony provided to the 9-11 Commission, the tower fell in 10 seconds. Other data shows it took closer to 14 seconds. So the towers fell within 0.8-4.8 seconds of freefall in a vacuum. Just like WTC7, this speed seemed impossible if each of the 110 floors had to fail individually.”

What does he mean “seemed impossible”? That is not a convincing statement. A convincing statement would have been “was impossible”! “Seemed impossible” is a nice opinion and on face value it seems convincing, but it is NOT science and statements like that can be torn apart by critics.

I am also not convinced by the analysis that Stephen Jones provides for the free fall speeds on pages 27 and 28 of “Why Indeed Did the WTC Buildings Completely Collapse?” at : http://journalof911studies.com/volume/200609/WhyIndeedDidtheWorldTradeCe...

Why it is not convincing is that we have Bazant arguing that the energy (mass x velocity) of the falling upper section (what’s that, 47 floors of steel and concrete mass accelerating at 9.8 m/s2 through 2 stories or roughly 30 feet?), an incredibly huge force, totally overwhelming the resistance of the next floor (what’s that, a mass at rest that is but a tiny fraction, i.e. 1/47th, of the mass of the falling upper section plus the resistance of the supporting structure which is presumably not designed to effectively slow the descent of a massive 47 floor section falling upon it from a height of 30 feet?) and therefore, Bazant seems to argue, the fall is virtually unimpeded. Bazant goes on to say that the mass at the next point of impact has increased to 48 floors, so the downward force only grows as its mass increases and its velocity increases at 9.8m/s/s during each fall of 15 feet at which time there is a negligible (?) delay caused by striking the RELATIVELY tiny resistance of each lower floor). That sounds intuitively convincing, so THANK YOU for the link to the paper which thoroughly destroys the Bazant theory, i.e. http://www.911blogger.com/node/8484 . (Note to self, do not always believe intuitively convincing arguments.)

For the purpose of dissecting the initial attractiveness of Bazant`s theory to the layperson (like myself), and the theory`s failings, consider the following analogy. Imagine your arm is the supporting steel structure for a floor. Imagine you can comfortably hold a gallon of water over the railing of your apartment building balcony (in your upturned hand with your elbow resting on the railing and your hand cantilevered over the edge of railing). Now imagine that someone takes that gallon of water and drops it from two balconies above onto your outstretched hand and the force breaks your arm off. That seems to be the basic of his argument, but the failing of the analogy (and therefore the failing of Bazant’s theory) is that it is oversimplified (e.g. there are no supporting arms below holding up your arm, etc.), and this simple analogy is a stupid attempt to explain the complex pattern of a building collapse.

By the way, I think that 90% of what Stephen Jones presents is very convincing analysis, such as that starting in the last paragraph of p. 28 and on to p. 29 (of his paper at http://journalof911studies.com/volume/200609/WhyIndeedDidtheWorldTradeCe... )
“We observe that approximately 30 upper floors begin to rotate as a block, to the south and east.
They begin to topple over, not fall straight down. The torque due to gravity on this block is
enormous, as is its angular momentum. But then – and this I’m still puzzling over – this block
turned mostly to powder in mid-air! How can we understand this strange behavior, without
explosives? Remarkable, amazing – and demanding scrutiny since the US government-funded
reports failed to analyze this phenomenon. But, of course, the Final NIST 9-11 report “does not
actually include the structural behavior of the tower after the conditions for collapse
initiation were reached.” (NIST, 2005, p. 80, fn. 12; emphasis added.)
Indeed, if we seek the truth of the matter, we must NOT ignore the data to be observed
during the actual collapses of the towers, as the NIST team admits they did. But why did they
follow such a non-scientific procedure as to ignore highly-relevant data? The business smacks of
political constraints on what was supposed to be an “open and thorough” investigation. (See
Mooney, 2005.)”