The Aluminum Foil Hat Thread: Conspiracy Theories

Boring7

The Ender wrote:

Oh there's another conspiracy theory. That the White House disclosed Valerie Plame's identity to punish her and her husband for not politically supporting them.

That's not really a conspiracy theory. Someone most certainly did stick a knife in Plame's back as a result of the op-ed her husband wrote; it's just a matter of debating who did the stabbing.

And JFK got shot in the head, the question is who done pulled the trigger. The answers, of course, are Dick Cheney and Lee Harvey Oswald. That jerk Oswald manages to fake his death and then infiltrates the CIA, what a dick.

What?

Lord_Snot

Edith_Bagot-Dix wrote:

Another good set of Catholic Church related conspiracies are those around the Three Secrets of Fatima. For those note familiar with the story, back in 1917, some kids in Portugal are supposed to have seen the Virgin Mary. One of the children goes on to become a nun, and in 1941 she writes two of the secrets down. The first secret involves lots of people going to Hell. The second secret is that the First World War is going to end, but a worse one is going to break out (keep in mind, this potent revelation is disclosed in 1941). The secret also reveals that the night will be lit by an "unknown light" if people keep pissing off God, and then He's going to punish everyone. In order to prevent this, the Virgin Mary wants people to "Consecrate" Russia and convert them all to Catholicism, and if that doesn't happen, there will be wars and the "errors" of Russia (presumably communism) and persecution of the Church will spread throughout the world.

So that covers two. There's a third, which isn't disclosed with the other two. The local bishop orders the nun to write the secret down in 1944, because she has been sick with influenza and obviously won't live forever. This creates a conflict, because she is sworn to obedience, but she also claims the Virgin Mary told her not to tell people the Third Secret. Eventually she decides to obey the bishop and writes it down, and it's sealed in an envelope and then sent to the Vatican in 1957. The nun who originally saw the vision said that it would be safe to let everyone know what it was in 1960, but the Church kept it under wraps until 2000. When it finally comes out, it's pretty anticlimatic: the big secret is about priests climbing up a mountain and getting sprinkled with blood.

Now, here's where the conspiracy stuff comes in. In 1960, when the secret was supposed to come out, the Church said they were never going to disclose it. This led to a bunch of theories about what it was. Since the second secret could be interpreted to correspond with the end of World War II and the spread of communism (certainly on everyone's mind in 1960), there was a lot of speculation that the third secret was also a prediction of the future. Over the years, some information about it did leak out: that it was a one page document in the form of a letter, that the information in it was sensational and about apostasy in the church and the apocalypse, etc. Due to the pedestrian nature of what was eventually released, there are conspiracy theorists who believe the real secret is still hidden and the "third secret" that was released in 2000 was a hoax.

Interestingly enough, there was an unknown light that lit up Europe from the Alps to London, in, I think 1937. I think that I once read that it was the Aurora just much further south than usual. I don't believe the Secrets of Fatima thing, and it was almost certainly a hallucination.

Also, I find the Prophecy of Malachi quite creepy, since you can link the mottos to the popes, but I suspect that's because of hindsight.

The Ender

And JFK got shot in the head, the question is who done pulled the trigger. The answers, of course, are Dick Cheney and Lee Harvey Oswald. That jerk Oswald manages to fake his death and then infiltrates the CIA, what a dick.

What?

...How is the JFK second shooter theory comparable with Plame's case? Plame really was an undercover agent, and her name really was leaked. Only a few people had the necessary knowledge to leak her name, and the fact that they did so immediately after her husband wrote his op-ed is more than a little bit suspicious,

Boring7

The Ender wrote:

And JFK got shot in the head, the question is who done pulled the trigger. The answers, of course, are Dick Cheney and Lee Harvey Oswald. That jerk Oswald manages to fake his death and then infiltrates the CIA, what a dick.

What?

...How is the JFK second shooter theory comparable with Plame's case? Plame really was an undercover agent, and her name really was leaked. Only a few people had the necessary knowledge to leak her name, and the fact that they did so immediately after her husband wrote his op-ed is more than a little bit suspicious,

Because Lee Harvey Oswald was the one that leaked Plame's identity, obviously.

No, seriously though, they are comparable in that with both we know WHAT happened (someone was hit for saying the wrong things) but the argument as to who caused it remains. My whole point was that a conspiracy theory doesn't have to be ridiculous or even that unlikely to be a conspiracy theory. If you were to say to a Bush supporter right now that Bush II disclosed classified information to the world just to punish his political enemies and that a case could be made that such actions are treasonous they would scream at you that it's not true, you can't prove he did and you're a crazy conspiracy theorist.

It's like the conspiracies Reagan was involved with, we are pretty sure he did secretly negotiate with Iran, we are pretty sure he was in on Iran-Contra, but officially he's innocent because other people took the fall. Hell no one even took the fall for Bush, Scooter was convicted and commuted for perjury, not leaking classified documents.

Bersheli

The Ender wrote:

Oh there's another conspiracy theory. That the White House disclosed Valerie Plame's identity to punish her and her husband for not politically supporting them.

That's not really a conspiracy theory. Someone most certainly did stick a knife in Plame's back as a result of the op-ed her husband wrote; it's just a matter of debating who did the stabbing.

Did anyone bring up Bay of Pigs yet?

Bersheli

The Ender wrote:

dbrock270 wrote:

I love when truthers say that the World Trade Center was designed to handle a plane impact. Actually, when they designed the building in 1963, they had in mind a small plane hitting the towers, like the bomber that crashed into the empire state building in 1945. Plus, there was no jetliner around in the 60s as powerful as the ones that hit on 9/11/

Well, that's not totally true: WTC 1 & 2 were designed to withstand the kinetic impact of a DC-9, traveling at cruising speed, which would deliver roughly equivalent force to a 747. Fire was not factored-in, because the assumption was made that the fire-retardant insulation & sprinkler system would prevent a long-term burn.

You'll note that the buildings did withstand the impact itself, which means the impact-resistant design was successful. Ultimately, it was a combination of the structural damage and fire, over a longer period of time, that caused the collapse.

That certainly is a different angle than the usual squared off perspective that many conspiracy documentaries use. Still, since you quoted me, I don't think you'll mind me quoting myself when I ask; does that make it "relatively neat"? Relative to the fact that it is still a buildng that has a plane lodged in it. I would also have to consider that even if there were other factors other than the impact of the planes - that does not necessitate a perfectly controlled demolition. If you wanted to attach intent behind it (which I really hate to do to be honest), there is no need to assume that a perfectly controlled collapse was the goal. Even if we start to assume those kinds of goals, just enough to sufficiently collapse the buildings and remove them from the landscape would be enough.

Sigh.

The 747 was not 'lodged' in the building. The aircraft were traveling around 400~ mph and blew right through the towers, only leaving behind what little that wasn't sprayed-out onto the streets below (the engines were found on different buildings throughout Manhatten) or liquefied on impact.

This is what an actual explosive-based demolition looks like:



Explosives produce bursts of light, very audible bangs and immediately compromise the entire superstructure as a whole. Note how the entire building falls at once, rather than collapsing from the top down as WTC 1 & 2 did.

It someone had planted TNT in either of the towers and started setting it off, there would be no ambiguity about what happened.

I think that we both agree that even if a controlled demolition was the intent, the plane flying into the side of the building would affect how neat even the most controlled demolition looked. It was really only the part above the point of impact that fell off to the sides, anyway.

I never even mentioned explosives explicitly. Ultimately, I will never know what happened, but I am trying to imagine a hypothetical situation in which I am forced to have an opinion on whether I think it is plausible that more than just the impact of the planes and the subsequent fires brought down the buildings (or in the case of WTC 7, the impact of some debris and fire).

I understand that even at only 1400 degrees, steel can lose almost 80 percent of it's strength, but it is as if I am being asked to believe that the fire was either so widespread or that it just managed to hit almost all of the fundamental points of integrity (and burned hot enough in all those areas at the same time) to cause that kind of collapse: a collapse that took only ten seconds once started (less in the time of WTC7), and I am supposed to believe that this happened three times in one day, and with WTC 1 and 2 burning for less than an hour and somewhat over an hour respectively.

If you were to plug our gravity of 9.8 m/s/s and the height of WTC 1 or 2, which is about 415m into the standard formulae you would find that it would take an object being dropped from that height 9.2 seconds to hit the ground. The 9/11 Commission Report said it took ten seconds for WTC South to hit the ground and leave not one floor standing. I am supposed to believe that there was almost zero resistance?

durandal4532

Man

You're not like

Skeptically enquiring. You're not just checking if maybe you might think something ... more might have happened. You think that. You're now saying a series of statements to try to prove that while having the escape valve of not really believing it. But you do believe it, because you think you're incredibly bright and observant and hard working, and not just a goose.

The Ender

I never even mentioned explosives explicitly. Ultimately, I will never know what happened, but I am trying to imagine a hypothetical situation in which I am forced to have an opinion on whether I think it is plausible that more than just the impact of the planes and the subsequent fires brought down the buildings (or in the case of WTC 7, the impact of some debris and fire).

I understand that even at only 1400 degrees, steel can lose almost 80 percent of it's strength, but it is as if I am being asked to believe that the fire was either so widespread or that it just managed to hit almost all of the fundamental points of integrity (and burned hot enough in all those areas at the same time) to cause that kind of collapse: a collapse that took only ten seconds once started (less in the time of WTC7), and I am supposed to believe that this happened three times in one day, and with WTC 1 and 2 burning for less than an hour and somewhat over an hour respectively.

If you were to plug our gravity of 9.8 m/s/s and the height of WTC 1 or 2, which is about 415m into the standard formulae you would find that it would take an object being dropped from that height 9.2 seconds to hit the ground. The 9/11 Commission Report said it took ten seconds for WTC South to hit the ground and leave not one floor standing. I am supposed to believe that there was almost zero resistance?

The building collapses took much longer than ten seconds. Count it out yourself using one of the many gratuitously graphic videos on YouTube; it's roughly 15~ seconds, and that's just what parts of the building you can actually observe (most of the collapse is being obscured by the debris cloud).

The current understanding, if I'm still up to date, is that the central support superstructure, which was bearing most of the building's weight, was overwhelmed by truss failures due to increasing temperatures at the floor of impact. This caused a sudden runaway chain reaction, as the weight load quickly transferred to the next segment of the superstructure, which failed, then the next, which failed, etc.

It's not a matter of 'belief'. It's a matter of consulting expert opinion.

If you don't understand how the fires would've been so widespread, consider:

a) The point of impact would've been showered with aluminium shrapnel & burning kerosene.

b) Not only is it likely that the aluminium quickly became molten, we see it happening in a few videos. This molten material would've spread fire to everything it slithered across.

c) Three words: lithium ion batteries. If you expose most laptop batteries, or even cell phone batteries, to extreme temperatures & fire, they will cause out-of-control electrical fires.

DarkPrimus

Skeptical Inquirer had an issue last year devoted to 9/11 Truthers. There's a discussion of the collapse in one of the articles that is available online, with a nice diagram, even.

EDIT: The diagram nicely summarizes the chain reaction of floor collapse that Ender mentions in the post above.

Let me quote the relevant section. Spoilered for length.

Spoiler:

Dave Thomas wrote:

Claim One:
“The Twin Towers collapsed at free-fall accelerations through the path of greatest resistance.”

Perhaps the most bizarre aspect of September 11 was the rapid destruction of both 110-story Twin Towers: after the collapses began due to cascading structural failures at the airplane impact locations, each tower fell completely in just fifteen to twenty seconds. Mainstream scientific analyses, including years of work by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), generally looked at the cause of each collapse: the intense fires (started by jet fuel and fed by office contents and high winds) eventually caused floor trusses to sag, pulling the perimeter walls inward until they finally snapped. At this instant, the entire upper section of each tower fell the height of one floor, initiating an inevitable, progressive, and utterly catastrophic collapse of each of the structures.

While the mainstream explanation (dismissed as the “official story” by 9/11 Truthers) usually ends with the initiation of these unstoppable collapses, the 9/11 Truth movement’s attacks begin there. Gage of AE911 Truth says on that group’s website, “Destruction [of the Twin Towers] proceeds through the path of greatest resistance at nearly free-fall acceleration” (Gage 2011; emphasis added). Many 9/11 Truther pundits drop the “nearly” and say simply that the collapses were at free fall. Truthers then insist that free fall acceleration indicates a complete lack of resistance, proving that the structures were demolished with explosives. We are also told that the sheer mass of the towers, “80,000 tons of structural steel,” would simply resist collapse.



How could the buildings fall so quickly? It’s been explained very well in the technical literature by Northwestern’s Zdenek Bazant, PhD, and others (see, for example, Bazant 2008). I’ve developed a simpler physics model of the progressive collapses that agrees quite well with the main points of Bazant’s more rigorous results (Thomas 2010b). Here are some of my findings:

• Each floor of the towers contained over two million kilograms of mass. The gravitational potential energy of a standing tower with twelve-foot floors extending upward 110 stories can be calculated straightforwardly; it comes to over 420 billion joules of energy, or the equivalent of 100 tons of TNT per tower. This energy, which was released completely during the collapses, is more than the energy of some of the smaller nuclear weapons in the U.S. arsenal, such as the W-48 (72 tons TNT) (Sublette 2006). This is where the energy required to break columns, pulverize concrete, and expel debris through windows came from. (Truthers often compare such expulsions of air and debris, visible several floors below the collapse fronts, to “squibs,” explosive devices often used in demolitions. However, they are readily explained by pressure changes as the towers, acting like a gigantic bicycle pump being compressed, collapsed.)
  
  
• The Twin Towers used a “tube within a tube” architectural design, which provided considerable open office space in the interiors of the Towers. Much of the structural support was provided by a dense grouping of thick central core columns in the interior and the perimeter walls on the outside. When the towers began to collapse, large parts of the inner cores (called “the Spires” in 9/11 Truth circles) were actually left standing, briefly, before they, too, toppled over. The perimeter walls were largely forced to peel outward in large sections, producing the iconic images of Ground Zero with which we’re all familiar. Between the outer perimeter and the inner core, the weight of the upper sections plowed through one floor after another, breaking the floor connection brackets and support columns, pulverizing concrete decks, and gaining momentum and mass with each additional floor failure. Had the buildings been constructed differently (the Port Authority was allowed to circumvent some existing New York buildings requirements for the Towers), the collapses might not have even happened (Young 2007).
  
  
• Even the 9/11 Truth movement’s most eminent physicists are confused about the basic principle of the difference between static and dynamic forces. A piece of paper, taped across a jar’s opening, will support a heavy coin such as a quarter indefinitely (static load). However, if the coin is dropped from just a few inches up, it will tear right through the paper (dynamic load). Given the information at hand—for example, the mass of the upper section of the north tower (fifty-eight million kilograms), the distance it fell (3.8 meters, about twelve feet), and the stiffness/rigidity of the lower structure itself, the dynamic force imparted on the lower section can be estimated as some thirty times the upper portion’s weight. This is many times the lower structure’s safety margin, which explains why it was quickly overwhelmed.
  
  
• Once progressive collapse began, there were decreasing time intervals of free fall (between floors), punctuated by very brief, incredibly violent collisions—decelerations—of the upper mass, for each floor in turn. There was resistance at every step of the collapse, as the upper section collided with and incorporated each floor below. Conservation of momentum shows that the reductions in falling speed were slight as each floor was impacted, going as the ratio of floors before to floors after (e.g. 14/15, or about 94 percent, for the first impact). Accordingly, the upper section fell from rest to about 19 mph, was slowed down to 18 mph by the first impact, continued to fall until a speed of 26 mph was reached, was then slowed down to 24 mph by another impact, and so on. While the first plunge lasted about nine-tenths of a second, the upper section took only four-tenths of a second to fall through the next floor, three-tenths of a second for the next one, and so on until the bottom floors, which were crushed at a rate of just seven-hundredths of a second each, at speeds of over 100 mph. Yes, there was resistance at every step, as many tons of structural steel was demolished; yet the entire process, like an avalanche, lasted only fifteen to twenty seconds, about 50 to 100 percent longer than true “free fall” would have lasted.
  
  
• Physics teacher David Chandler’s measurements of the first seconds of the collapse of the North Tower (WTC 1) showed that it fell with increasing speed but at only two-thirds of gravitational acceleration (g) (Chandler 2010). Chandler argues that this means the bottom section exerted a constant upward force of one-third of the upper section’s weight upon its mass, and he declares that this force should have been much larger, indicating that “some sort of controlled demolition was at work.”
  
• Second, Chandler argues that being a Newtonian action/reaction pair, the impact force of the upper section on the lower section was only a third of the upper part’s weight. However, I’ve found that his estimate of the downward impact force was too low by a factor of one hundred. In addition, I found that the actual process—a series of twelve-foot free falls punctuated by violent and brief collisions with each floor—would have resulted in an average acceleration of precisely what Chandler measured for the start of the collapse of WTC 1, namely 2/3 g. (By the end of the collapse, my calculations indicate an average acceleration of only 1/3 g, but this can’t be measured in dust-obscured videos.)

The Ender

Had the buildings been constructed differently (the Port Authority was allowed to circumvent some existing New York buildings requirements for the Towers), the collapses might not have even happened (Young 2007).

I really dislike Young's opinion on this specific issue. The WTC complex was perfectly safe & structurally sound, and that's what the architects' & engineers' jobs is to ensure. It's not their job to make their buildings invincible against any conceivable threat.

DarkPrimus

Relaxing the building code during the construction of the WTC is not something that can just be left unmentioned, though I agree that but for the extraordinary circumstances which occurred one could still have labeled the building structurally safe.

The Ender

DarkPrimus wrote:

Relaxing the building code during the construction of the WTC is not something that can just be left unmentioned, though I agree that but for the extraordinary circumstances which occurred one could still have labeled the building structurally safe.

I'd say the buildings were exceptionally safe, building code be damned. A 400 mph aluminium projectile smashed right through the towers, and they didn't just immediately crumble. I mean, can you imagine what would've happened if the Empire State Building was hit? It would've been ripped in half.

DarkPrimus

I don't want this to turn into a tangent, Ender.

CptHamilton

Bersheli wrote:

If you were to plug our gravity of 9.8 m/s/s and the height of WTC 1 or 2, which is about 415m into the standard formulae you would find that it would take an object being dropped from that height 9.2 seconds to hit the ground.

This is wrong, by the way. It would take 6.5 seconds. A 9.2 second fall would require an initial height of 829m. The formula is extremely straight-forward and can be plugged directly into Google for your edification:
x(t) = x_0 + at^2
With x(t) the position after t seconds, x_0 the initial position, and a the acceleration. Solving for t with x(t) = 0 (the ground) yields:
t = sqrt(x_0/a)
Plugging in x_0 = 415m and a = 9.81 m/s^2 yields 6.50 seconds.

Bagginses

Of course, even if we grant that the buildings went down more easily than expected, that's only evidence that that they were at least partly built by contractors, something we already knew.

Bersheli

CptHamilton wrote:

Bersheli wrote:

If you were to plug our gravity of 9.8 m/s/s and the height of WTC 1 or 2, which is about 415m into the standard formulae you would find that it would take an object being dropped from that height 9.2 seconds to hit the ground.

This is wrong, by the way. It would take 6.5 seconds. A 9.2 second fall would require an initial height of 829m. The formula is extremely straight-forward and can be plugged directly into Google for your edification:
x(t) = x_0 + at^2
With x(t) the position after t seconds, x_0 the initial position, and a the acceleration. Solving for t with x(t) = 0 (the ground) yields:
t = sqrt(x_0/a)
Plugging in x_0 = 415m and a = 9.81 m/s^2 yields 6.50 seconds.

I just want to be clear. You are saying this formula is incorrect: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080915200936AANX0tq

This ignores wind resistance, which really is giving the benefit of the doubt.

Bersheli

The Ender wrote:

I never even mentioned explosives explicitly. Ultimately, I will never know what happened, but I am trying to imagine a hypothetical situation in which I am forced to have an opinion on whether I think it is plausible that more than just the impact of the planes and the subsequent fires brought down the buildings (or in the case of WTC 7, the impact of some debris and fire).

I understand that even at only 1400 degrees, steel can lose almost 80 percent of it's strength, but it is as if I am being asked to believe that the fire was either so widespread or that it just managed to hit almost all of the fundamental points of integrity (and burned hot enough in all those areas at the same time) to cause that kind of collapse: a collapse that took only ten seconds once started (less in the time of WTC7), and I am supposed to believe that this happened three times in one day, and with WTC 1 and 2 burning for less than an hour and somewhat over an hour respectively.

If you were to plug our gravity of 9.8 m/s/s and the height of WTC 1 or 2, which is about 415m into the standard formulae you would find that it would take an object being dropped from that height 9.2 seconds to hit the ground. The 9/11 Commission Report said it took ten seconds for WTC South to hit the ground and leave not one floor standing. I am supposed to believe that there was almost zero resistance?

The building collapses took much longer than ten seconds. Count it out yourself using one of the many gratuitously graphic videos on YouTube; it's roughly 15~ seconds, and that's just what parts of the building you can actually observe (most of the collapse is being obscured by the debris cloud).

The current understanding, if I'm still up to date, is that the central support superstructure, which was bearing most of the building's weight, was overwhelmed by truss failures due to increasing temperatures at the floor of impact. This caused a sudden runaway chain reaction, as the weight load quickly transferred to the next segment of the superstructure, which failed, then the next, which failed, etc.

It's not a matter of 'belief'. It's a matter of consulting expert opinion.

If you don't understand how the fires would've been so widespread, consider:

a) The point of impact would've been showered with aluminium shrapnel & burning kerosene.

b) Not only is it likely that the aluminium quickly became molten, we see it happening in a few videos. This molten material would've spread fire to everything it slithered across.

c) Three words: lithium ion batteries. If you expose most laptop batteries, or even cell phone batteries, to extreme temperatures & fire, they will cause out-of-control electrical fires.

I just want to be clear. You are saying that the 911 Commission Report was incredibly incorrect?

The Ender

I just want to be clear. You are saying that the 911 Commission Report was incredibly incorrect?

Uh, nope. At least, not to the best of my knowledge: if memory serves, the Commission report used data from NIST, acknowledged that the models were still a work in progress, and provided a general outline for the collapse that matches the description I wrote & the analysis posted by Dark Primus. I believe NISt & the Commission both described the collapse as a 'pancaking' effect.

Which parts of the 911 Commission do you think I' contradicting?

DirtyDirtyVagrant

Has anybody read this book 'Crossing the Rubicon?"

It's pretty crazy.

Bersheli

The Ender wrote:

I just want to be clear. You are saying that the 911 Commission Report was incredibly incorrect?

Uh, nope. At least, not to the best of my knowledge: if memory serves, the Commission report used data from NIST, acknowledged that the models were still a work in progress, and provided a general outline for the collapse that matches the description I wrote & the analysis posted by Dark Primus. I believe NISt & the Commission both described the collapse as a 'pancaking' effect.

Which parts of the 911 Commission do you think I' contradicting?

http://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report_Ch9.htm

If you use "Ctrl + F" for the word "seconds" you will find it quickly.

The Ender

DirtyDirtyVagrant wrote:

Has anybody read this book 'Crossing the Rubicon?"

It's pretty crazy.

*Reads synopsis of book*


It's garbage.

CptHamilton

Bersheli wrote:

CptHamilton wrote:

Bersheli wrote:

If you were to plug our gravity of 9.8 m/s/s and the height of WTC 1 or 2, which is about 415m into the standard formulae you would find that it would take an object being dropped from that height 9.2 seconds to hit the ground.

This is wrong, by the way. It would take 6.5 seconds. A 9.2 second fall would require an initial height of 829m. The formula is extremely straight-forward and can be plugged directly into Google for your edification:
x(t) = x_0 + at^2
With x(t) the position after t seconds, x_0 the initial position, and a the acceleration. Solving for t with x(t) = 0 (the ground) yields:
t = sqrt(x_0/a)
Plugging in x_0 = 415m and a = 9.81 m/s^2 yields 6.50 seconds.

I just want to be clear. You are saying this formula is incorrect: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080915200936AANX0tq

This ignores wind resistance, which really is giving the benefit of the doubt.

Oh, my bad. I left off the 1/2. That's what I get for going from memory instead of integrating.

Ignoring wind resistance isn't much of a stretch, though, unless the object has a large surface area relative to its mass, is falling over a long distance, or has a large initial velocity. You'd have to drop a building a lot more than a few hundred meters before wind resistance had a significant impact.

I'm not sure what your point is, though. Is there a reason why a collapsing building should collapse more slowly than it takes for parts of the building to fall, once it has started actively collapsing? The buildings stood there for a good long while on fire and with their integrity compromised prior to beginning to collapse. I'd say it's a mark of good design that the whole thing held together fairly well right up until the moment that the structure became too compromised to support it, at which point it all went down together. Steel is a pretty good thermal conductor; by the time that any section of the interior structure reached a temperature sufficient to weaken it past the point that it could no longer hold the load it was supporting, the entire steel skeleton would have been heated to some degree. Further: the heating and damage were asymmetric and partway down the structures, meaning that portions of the steel skeleton weakening more quickly than others would introduce significant torsional and sheer stress on the parts of the building below and to the side of the damaged section. Under the circumstances, the whole thing essentially caving in at once is pretty much what anyone with even a passing familiarity with engineering statics would expect.

hanskey

Never mind.

Bersheli

CptHamilton wrote:

Bersheli wrote:

CptHamilton wrote:

Bersheli wrote:

If you were to plug our gravity of 9.8 m/s/s and the height of WTC 1 or 2, which is about 415m into the standard formulae you would find that it would take an object being dropped from that height 9.2 seconds to hit the ground.

This is wrong, by the way. It would take 6.5 seconds. A 9.2 second fall would require an initial height of 829m. The formula is extremely straight-forward and can be plugged directly into Google for your edification:
x(t) = x_0 + at^2
With x(t) the position after t seconds, x_0 the initial position, and a the acceleration. Solving for t with x(t) = 0 (the ground) yields:
t = sqrt(x_0/a)
Plugging in x_0 = 415m and a = 9.81 m/s^2 yields 6.50 seconds.

I just want to be clear. You are saying this formula is incorrect: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080915200936AANX0tq

This ignores wind resistance, which really is giving the benefit of the doubt.

Oh, my bad. I left off the 1/2. That's what I get for going from memory instead of integrating.

Ignoring wind resistance isn't much of a stretch, though, unless the object has a large surface area relative to its mass, is falling over a long distance, or has a large initial velocity. You'd have to drop a building a lot more than a few hundred meters before wind resistance had a significant impact.

I'm not sure what your point is, though. Is there a reason why a collapsing building should collapse more slowly than it takes for parts of the building to fall, once it has started actively collapsing? The buildings stood there for a good long while on fire and with their integrity compromised prior to beginning to collapse. I'd say it's a mark of good design that the whole thing held together fairly well right up until the moment that the structure became too compromised to support it, at which point it all went down together. Steel is a pretty good thermal conductor; by the time that any section of the interior structure reached a temperature sufficient to weaken it past the point that it could no longer hold the load it was supporting, the entire steel skeleton would have been heated to some degree. Further: the heating and damage were asymmetric and partway down the structures, meaning that portions of the steel skeleton weakening more quickly than others would introduce significant torsional and sheer stress on the parts of the building below and to the side of the damaged section. Under the circumstances, the whole thing essentially caving in at once is pretty much what anyone with even a passing familiarity with engineering statics would expect.

Yes, I do believe that a building collapsing without some sort of organized means to take out all the major points of strength should take longer than free fall speed to do so, especially when it mostly collapses in on itself (not toppling over or shearing off).

That's basically what I began with, and I have shown why that makes no sense, and backed it up with sources that should be more believable than I. I really don't have anything else to say.

Thanks.

DarkPrimus

Bersheli, did you see the article from Skeptical Inquirer that I had quoted? I hid it all behind a spoiler tag because it was rather lengthy, but it addresses the collapse of the buildings at near-free-fall speeds.

Lemming

Bersheli wrote:

Spoiler:

CptHamilton wrote:

Bersheli wrote:

CptHamilton wrote:

Bersheli wrote:

If you were to plug our gravity of 9.8 m/s/s and the height of WTC 1 or 2, which is about 415m into the standard formulae you would find that it would take an object being dropped from that height 9.2 seconds to hit the ground.

This is wrong, by the way. It would take 6.5 seconds. A 9.2 second fall would require an initial height of 829m. The formula is extremely straight-forward and can be plugged directly into Google for your edification:
x(t) = x_0 + at^2
With x(t) the position after t seconds, x_0 the initial position, and a the acceleration. Solving for t with x(t) = 0 (the ground) yields:
t = sqrt(x_0/a)
Plugging in x_0 = 415m and a = 9.81 m/s^2 yields 6.50 seconds.

I just want to be clear. You are saying this formula is incorrect: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080915200936AANX0tq

This ignores wind resistance, which really is giving the benefit of the doubt.

Oh, my bad. I left off the 1/2. That's what I get for going from memory instead of integrating.

Ignoring wind resistance isn't much of a stretch, though, unless the object has a large surface area relative to its mass, is falling over a long distance, or has a large initial velocity. You'd have to drop a building a lot more than a few hundred meters before wind resistance had a significant impact.

I'm not sure what your point is, though. Is there a reason why a collapsing building should collapse more slowly than it takes for parts of the building to fall, once it has started actively collapsing? The buildings stood there for a good long while on fire and with their integrity compromised prior to beginning to collapse. I'd say it's a mark of good design that the whole thing held together fairly well right up until the moment that the structure became too compromised to support it, at which point it all went down together. Steel is a pretty good thermal conductor; by the time that any section of the interior structure reached a temperature sufficient to weaken it past the point that it could no longer hold the load it was supporting, the entire steel skeleton would have been heated to some degree. Further: the heating and damage were asymmetric and partway down the structures, meaning that portions of the steel skeleton weakening more quickly than others would introduce significant torsional and sheer stress on the parts of the building below and to the side of the damaged section. Under the circumstances, the whole thing essentially caving in at once is pretty much what anyone with even a passing familiarity with engineering statics would expect.

Yes, I do believe that a building collapsing without some sort of organized means to take out all the major points of strength should take longer than free fall speed to do so, especially when it mostly collapses in on itself (not toppling over or shearing off).

That's basically what I began with, and I have shown why that makes no sense, and backed it up with sources that should be more believable than I. I really don't have anything else to say.

Thanks.

What reasoning is there for this, based on your knowledge of civil engineering, materials science, and basic physics?

Fallout2man

Just stumbled onto this today, I'm not done reading it yet. Still, seems very interesting as far as conspiracy fair goes. A ton of supplementary material is provided to "verify" it supposedly. Although with how long this is that may take forever to read. x_x;;

Thought I'd share since it seems so well made. I dunno entirely why but I've been on a conspiracy bent lately. It's fun to see what other people think about the world though. You never know what you'll find.