I believe the official story about 9/11. That a group of mostly Saudi hijackers flew planes into the two towers of New York’s World Trade Center. I believe that undeniable evidence of a conspiracy would have come out by now if 9/11 was an “inside job.”
But some people do believe that 9/11 was an inside job. They cite various engineering factors or state that the buildings shouldn’t have collapsed the way they did.
Recently the National Institute for Standards and Technology put out a Frequently Asked Questions in fairly plain English dealing with most of the theories I’ve heard of. Here is the list of questions. If you want the answers, check out the website:
1. Was there enough gravitational energy present in the World Trade Center Towers to cause the collapse of the intact floors below the impact floors? Why was the collapse of WTC 1 and 2 not arrested by the intact structure below the floors where columns first began to buckle?
2. Were the basic principles of conservation of momentum and energy satisfied in NIST’s analysis of the structural response of the towers to the aircraft impact and the fires?
3. How does NIST explain the absence of a timeline for the WTC Towers?
4. Why was physical evidence not collected immediately following the collapse of the WTC Towers?
5. How did NIST derive the temperatures in the WTC Towers and how valid are they?
6. At least one private sector source has asked (1) Whether the Commerce Department’s legal structure impeded NIST’s ability to obtain information and therefore prevented NIST from finding the facts; and (2) Why NIST did not use its subpoena authority?
7. Why did NIST not conduct large-scale/small-scale tests to evaluate the response of the WTC Towers structures to the aircraft impact and the fires in the buildings?
8. Why did NIST conduct ASTM E119 testing of floor systems that were not representative of the condition of the fireproofing on September 11, 2001? Why did NIST ignore the results of these tests, which showed that the floor system did not collapse, in its analysis of the thermal-structural response of the towers?
9. NIST conducted a single workstation burn and a multiple workstation burn as a part of its investigation. Why did NIST only provide temperature data for one of these tests? Was the ventilation used in these tests representative of the ventilation that was present in the WTC Towers on September 11, 2001?
10. Why didn’t NIST fully model the collapse initiation and propagation of WTC Towers?
11. Why didn’t NIST consider the “base” and “less severe” cases throughout its analysis of the WTC Towers? What was the technical basis for selecting only the “more severe” case for its analyses?
12. What was the source of the material properties that were used in NIST’s thermal/structural analyses of the WTC Towers? Were these properties obtained from physical testing of steel recovered from the WTC Towers?
13. NIST states that the fires in WTC 1 were generally ventilation limited. If this was the case, wouldn’t the fires have burned out in about 2 minutes? Why do NIST’s models show the fires burning longer?
14. The collapse sequence for WTC 1 proposed by NIST includes, aircraft impact, core weakening, floor sagging and disconnection, inward bowing of the south wall, and collapse initiation. If the floors are disconnecting from the south wall, how were the floors able to exert forces on the exterior walls to cause the inward bowing?
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Thanks to the NIST for trying to explain this. Between torture, surveillance abuses and manipulated evidence for war, this Administration has committed many real crimes worth our outrage. Let’s not divert our energy into imaginary ones.
So obviously you can’t cope with Newtonian physics and believe what AUTHORITY tells you.
Skyscrapers must hold themselves up. The people who designe skyscrapers know this. The designers must figure out how much steel and concrete to put on every level of every skyscraper.
Try finding a table specifying the TONS of STEEL and TONS of CONCRETE on every level of the WTC towers. How can the potential energy calculations and the conservation of momentum calculations be done without that information?
So how can AUTHORITY assure you of anything meaningful without the most basic data about the problem?
Reading is fundamental. Thinking is MANDATORY!!!
psik
Starting a post with an insult is not a step on the path to convincing me or anyone else. Read through my posts on the Iraq Occupation and torture and see how likely I am to accept “AUTHORITY’S” word on anything.
Second, the FAQs appear to lay out the math and physics in many cases, providing numbers you could show why they are wrong. Here is one example:
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1. Was there enough gravitational energy present in the World Trade Center Towers to cause the collapse of the intact floors below the impact floors? Why was the collapse of WTC 1 and 2 not arrested by the intact structure below the floors where columns first began to buckle?
Yes, there was more than enough gravitational load to cause the collapse of the floors below the level of collapse initiation in both WTC Towers. The vertical capacity of the connections supporting an intact floor below the level of collapse was adequate to carry the load of 11 additional floors if the load was applied gradually and 6 additional floors if the load was applied suddenly (as was the case). Since the number of floors above the approximate floor of collapse initiation exceeded six in each WTC Tower (12 and 29 floors, respectively), the floors below the level of collapse initiation were unable to resist the suddenly applied gravitational load from the upper floors of the buildings. Details of this finding are provided below:
Consider a typical floor immediately below the level of collapse initiation and conservatively assume that the floor is still supported on all columns (i.e., the columns below the intact floor did not buckle or peel-off due to the failure of the columns above). Consider further the truss seat connections between the primary floor trusses and the exterior wall columns or core columns. The individual connection capacities ranged from 94,000 lb to 395,000 lb, with a total vertical load capacity for the connections on a typical floor of 29,000,000 lb (See Section 5.2.4 of NIST NCSTAR 1-6C). The total floor area outside the core was approximately 31,000 ft2, and the average load on a floor under service conditions on September 11, 2001 was 80 lb/ft2. Thus, the total vertical load on a floor outside the core can be estimated by multiplying the floor area (31,000 ft2) by the gravitational load (80 lb/ft2), which yields 2,500,000 lb (this is a conservative load estimate since it ignores the weight contribution of the heavier mechanical floors at the top of each WTC Tower). By dividing the total vertical connection capacity (29,000,000 lb) of a floor by the total vertical load applied to the connections (2,500,000 lb), the number of floors that can be supported by an intact floor is calculated to be a total of 12 floors or 11 additional floors.
This simplified and conservative analysis indicates that the floor connections could have carried only a maximum of about 11 additional floors if the load from these floors were applied statically. Even this number is (conservatively) high, since the load from above the collapsing floor is being applied suddenly. Since the dynamic amplification factor for a suddenly applied load is 2, an intact floor below the level of collapse initiation could not have supported more than six floors. Since the number of floors above the level where the collapse initiated, exceeded 6 for both towers (12 for WTC 1 and 29 for WTC 2), neither tower could have arrested the progression of collapse once collapse initiated. In reality, the highest intact floor was about three (WTC 2) to six (WTC 1) floors below the level of collapse initiation. Thus, more than the 12 to 29 floors reported above actually loaded the intact floor suddenly.
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What numbers or formulas do you disagree with and why?
Also, when you say:
“Try finding a table specifying the TONS of STEEL and TONS of CONCRETE on every level of the WTC towers. How can the potential energy calculations and the conservation of momentum calculations be done without that information?”
Does this not imply that you do not have the data to support your view?
Finally, the whole idea that 9/11 was an inside job requires a level of successful secret keeping by potentially hundreds of people that our government has never successfully carried out before.
We found out that Bush fit facts to policy to invade Iraq. We found out he tortured barely a year after it was done. We found out about the off-the-book detainees and the massive surveillance programs aimed at Americans.
All of these secrets pale in importance before the possibility that 9/11 was an inside job. I honestly believe that if it had been, the truth would have come out long before now for the same reasons the things above were exposed.
I know I’ll never convince you. But I hope that people who read this exchange might consider the publicly available evidence for themselves and draw their own conclusions.