Hello David, Gretavo and all:

Again, I would like to encourage everyone to have a look at the NIST
report I linked to in the last study. It supersedes other studies and
articles written on the subject. One of the reasons its hard to discuss
WTC 7 or the Pentagon with the same certainty is because no comparable
reports exist for these sites. The WTC 7 NIST report is still in
preparation and no comparable study is planned for the Pentagon.

1)In particular, I think the report would answer many of the questions that
David asks below. For example, the fires did not go out but kept burning.
Using visual evidence, the report is able to reconstruct temperature
contours in parts of the building.
also, one of the more impressive parts of the report is the very detailed
computer simulation they did. It seems to reproduce, with some fairly
impressive accuracy, much of the observed data. This can also be used to
reconstruct temperature contours.

The simulation and visual data also help track the progress of the
weakening of structures. In the simulation, collapse was initiated after
-- I think 102 minutes -- which is within the actual collapse time to
within a few minutes. Once collapse was initiated, by the top 15 floors
falling down, the rest of the building collapsed immediately.
The report does not deal with the collapse, but the point is that it would
be unreasonable to think that collapse occured in a 'pancake' fashion. The
onset of collapse at the top could have caused the steel to buckle
along the length of the building.

2)
About WTC 7, the only report so far is the FEMA report that is not nearly
as good as the NIST report. It may be found at:
www.fema.gov/pdf/library/fema403_ch5.pdf

However, they do make the point that waste from WTC 7, found 11,000
gallons of diesel fuel. WTC 7 stored tens of thousands of gallons of fuel
within the building to supply emergency generators for the New York
Emergency Management Service, Silverstein and Associates and the US secret
service. This is what is said to have caused the collapse. The FEMA
report, though, does have several photographs of WTC 7 that show it to be
highly damaged after a fire that burnt for many hours.

Also, NIST did make some preliminary statements to the effect that debris
from the collapsing towers had affected WTC 7 to a greater extent than
previously supposed. Again, speculation on this must await release of the
final report by NIST.

3)About the cover-up, it is correct that much of waste was carted away but
as I mentioned in my earlier email to Lex, NIST was able to examine
several samples of steel from the two towers. So, it is not true that all
evidence was disposed of. It is true that the government was VERY careless
with preserving evidence.

4)About 'molten steel', again see the report on the initial analysis of
steel from WTC 7.
http://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/JOM/0112/Biederman/Biederman-0112.html
It points out, that the heating of the steel lead to the oxidation of
steel. The presence of sulphur led to the formation of an 'eutectic
mixture' of iron-oxide and iron-sulphide. This melts at temperature far
lower than steel.
This is the molten metal that observers seem to have referred to.

5)In all this, it seems that two points cannot be covered .. one has to do
with why the collapse wasnt 'messier'. As I mentioned, there is a limit to
how messy it could have been even under very general considerations but
you are correct that this does not exclude messiness. This, it seems to
me, is a minor criticism and should be put to a structural engineer who
should be able to clear it up.
The second has to do with the squibs and the claim that this was caused by
falling debris. Again, I think it would be incorrect to take the pancake
theory at face-value. Minor collapse, of some kind, was probably initiated
simultaenously across the length of the building. This was then completed
by 'pancaking'. This would explain the lack of resistance to the visible
free-fall collapse of the top of the building as well as the squibs
appearing low-down in the collapse.
I admit this is not a rock-solid theory, but again this criticism is not
devastating.

----------------
I apologise for the excess of equations in the previous few emails. Not
much more remains to be said in that direction. I also think, that it is
important for the opponents of the conventional theory to propose at least
some alternative and defend it. It is certain that with a day or so
of research, I will be unable to answer many questions regarding the
details of the collapse[such as the squibs], but this in itself does not
prove much. As of now, it seems the conventional theory seems to have
much more ammunition than alternatives.

in solidarity,

Suvrat







On Sat, 10 Dec 2005, David Mericle wrote:

Hi all,
I'm glad we are having this debate, especially with several physicists in
our group.  I second the request by Gretavo that we not move on too quickly.
I'm glad we're discussing this piece-by-piece, as there are many questions
and pieces of evidence that need to be carefully examined.  I read the NOVA
interview and the paper by the BYU physicist and a few other things sent
out, and found them all interesting.  Below is my response to what has been
said so far about the collapse; sorry if I repeat Gretavo in places.


General criticisms:

1.  The argument that the building had to fall down, rather than to the
side, seems to me to present a false dilemma characteristic of Eager's
general perspective.  That is, it takes for granted that the official story
is basically correct, that the planes somehow caused the building to fall.
It then seeks the most probable explanation given these assumptions.

To conclude that it is incomparably more likely that the building would fall
down rather than to the side is not the same as saying that it is at all
likely that the building should, under these circumstances, have fallen in
the first place.  In general, I feel that, as the BYU physicist suggests,
Eager and others have been contrasting the likelihood of explanations that
assume the official story, without ever commenting on how likely their
favored explanation actually is.

2.  The cover-up seems to me to be one of the strongest pieces of evidence
that the official story is false.  In the particular case of the WTC
collapse, there seems to have been a major cover-up involving immediately
removing the steel and evidence at the base in very strange ways.

3.  The point Lex makes is important: If you can't explain WTC7, then you
have to be more open to unnatural causes of the collapse of WTC 1 and 2.  In
other words, you might think that the probability of unnatural collapse of
WTC 1 and 2 is low, but that the probability of unnatural collapse of WTC 1
and 2 given a controlled demolition of WTC 7 is considerably higher.


Specific criticisms of the collapse account:

4.  I still have trouble with the fact that the twin towers fell straight
down.  It seems to me that that the point is not that the entire tower
should have fallen to the side, but rather that the fall should have been
much messier than it was.  For example, if one side of a floor broke faster
than the other side, wouldn't the above floors slide off to the side?
Wouldn't we expect this to happen quite a bit in the course of the fall?  I
don't have a sense of how messy the collapse was, but it seems a little too
clean and perfect.

5.  Why the long delay before the towers collapsed?  It seems implausible
that the time when the heat caused the building to collapse would be so long
after the initial crash.  Fuel would burn up quickly, and the black smoke
seems to indicate the fire had nearly died.

6.  As far-fetched as it sounds to talk about controlled demolitions, when I
watch the videos, especially of WTC 7 collapsing, I just cannot get the idea
out of my head.  WTC7 didn't even look damaged, and yet it just collapses
straight down.

7.  The speed of collapse still bothers me in two ways.  First, it doesn't
make sense that the buildings would stand for over an hour and a half, and
then collapse uniformly and instantaneously.  I can't believe that the
critical amount of heat needed would be reached everywhere suddenly and
simultaneously.

8.  Second, it doesn't make sense that the buildings collapsed to the ground
so fast.  On this second point, Suvrat's argument about the pressure waves
passing through is interesting, but I still think that cannot explain the
total lack of resistance from each floor and the consequent speed of the
fall.  Also, I'm certainly not a physicist, but I don't understand how we
get from pressure waves to the steel totally giving way or breaking or
whatever they claim happened.  In fact, it seems to me that with regard to
explaining the collapse, this is a weaker argument than the claim that the
steel was weakened by heat from jet fuel (not that I believe the jet fuel
was there; what I mean is that I understand how the steel being weakened
contributes to the collapse, but not how the pressure waves contribute).

9.  I don't buy the explanation of the squibs.  In the BYU professor's photo
at
http://www.physics.byu.edu/research/energy/9-11%20Picture7%20(squib1).jpg,
the squibs occur too far down from the part of the building that has been
destroyed.  There are too many intact floors between the part destroyed and
the squibs.  That said, in the videos of WTC7, I can't really see the
squibs, and in the picture, the squibs don't seem particularly systematic,
so I'm not sure how well they fit a controlled demolition story.

10.  Could the temperature really have been as hot as Eager says for a
prolonged period of time?  Are claims about this high temperature consistent
with other visual evidence from that day?

11.  Furthermore, his heat/temperature distinction seems to me to work
against, rather than for, the official story.  The claim that the
temperature got up to 1300F, itself open to doubt, is not enough; we need
the stronger claim that it remained at or above this temperature long enough
to raise the temperature of steel to a very high level.

12.  How do Eager and others explain the molten steel at the base?

If we eventually decide that there are serious unanswered questions that
remain outstanding, perhaps we could invite Thomas Eager to come talk to us?

David