Indeed, i recall experts being brought on teh air as the towers were burning stating they were designed to take this and more. my understanding the engineers who designed and built the suckers were shocked when they fell.
On 2/20/07, Stephen A. Lawrence <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Jed Rothwell wrote: > I wrote: > >> PROBLEM: How do you know what airplane is going to hit? That is >> impossible to predict! > > Some other problems, equally severe, equally obvious: > > How do you make the thermite work when there are thousands of gallons of > flaming kerosene around it, collapsing walls, no remaining telephone > connections, and so on? NIST supposes it would be "remotely ignited and > somehow held in direct contact." Imagine trying to do this on the floor > of a building that has been struck by airplane. Suppose it is not done > remotely, but by extra suicide volunteers standing by ready to ignite > the stuff and hold it next to the pillars. They would be killed > instantly, before they could operate the equipment. > > As I said, installing thermite in the lower floors would contribute > nothing to the destruction, and serve no purpose. But let us pretend > that the conspirators were extremely stupid and they /thought/ you need > to cut more than one floor. (We are talking about someone in the Bush > administration, which includes some fairly stupid people, and for that > matter bin Laden himself did not think the building would fall down even > though he is an engineer.) Jed, you have said more than once that (nearly) all the expert engineers /knew/ it would collapse. That's absolutely not what I read in the mainstream press reports: The buildings were capable of taking a hit from a good sized jet with a certain amount of jet fuel on board. Whether what actually happened was a big enough wallop to bring them down was _not_ _obvious_, to _anyone_. Opinions as to whether they would fall or not were little more than guesses, as far as I can tell. The planes they were socked with were somewhat larger than what had been imagined by the designers, _and_ they had full tanks, which put them at the upper end of lethality. But that puts it into the region where we might reasonably think there was a possibility the buildings would collapse -- it certainly doesn't make it appear inevitable, save possibly in hindsight! Again, I seriously doubt your repeated assertions that "all the experts" were convinced the buildings _WOULD_ collapse after the planes hit. That's tantamount to saying the people running the show on the ground really screwed up bigtime by not evacuating, and I don't think it's called for -- with hindsight, yeah, they were hit hard enough to bring them down. With foresight I don't think you would have found anything like a consensus among experts to the effect that they _WOULD_ fall, nor even a consensus as to what the probability of collapse would be. In fact, from what I read in the press shortly after the collapse, Bin Laden's view was shared by many of the engineers who were competent to form an opinion: It was surprising that they collapsed -- it was _NOT_ surprising they stood as long as they did. If you disagree please cite something beyond generalities and one or two examples of experts who "guessed right" about the collapse to support it. > Okay, so even though it is hard to imagine an > engineer who thinks the building could survive one floor dropping onto a > lower floor, Sure, sure, obviously if one floor falls, only God could hold up the floor underneath, but not all engineers, by a long stretch, thought /any/ of the floors would fall as a result of the impact. > let's say they put several thousand pounds of thermite on a > lower floor. How do they coordinate the thermite cutting with the > collapse? Two problems: > > 1. No one could predict the exact moment when the building would start > to fall. You cannot coordinate. If you cut too soon your section of the > building starts to fall first -- and everyone see that; if you cut too > late you are crushed by the falling building and you contribute nothing. > > 2. It takes a long time to cut a steel beam with thermite. Hours, > actually, but let's pretend it is 20 minutes. Suppose they magically > know exactly when the building is going to fall; they still have to > start cutting 20 minutes earlier. People would notice a new raging fire > in progress on a lower floor as thousands of pounds of thermite went > off. You could not hide that, especially with hundreds of television > cameras pointed to the building, and hundreds of police and firemen > swarming through the place. > > I could probably think of several other equally compelling common-sense > reasons to reject this hypothesis, but the whole notion is so outlandish > it is a waste of time to consider it. I am sure the people at NIST felt > that way, and they were right. It is, as I said, like spending your time > looking for a chemical reaction to explain cold fusion. You should > dismiss that hypothesis from the get-go. > > - Jed
-- That which yields isn't always weak.
