Let's take a look at your proposed model. It's plausible, but how likely is it? What conditions would have to be met?
Assumption
The building was designed such that any energy wave from any point would flow perfectly to all other supports, without any barriers in the design that would redirect the energy, or otherwise slow it down.
OK, maybe. I've never designed a high rise, but I have designed quite a few one and two story buildings. Except for the simplest structure, a single story square box with four walls and four supports, one at each corner, this assumption does not hold true. There are always energy redirects. In addition, such a box would not fall straight down if it failed, it would fall towards the side of failure.
Assumption:
The building was built exactly weak enough at every single member to fall if any one particular member failed.
If any member was stronger than "exactly weak enough to fail" instantaneously then this assumption is incorrect. I say this because it fell at the speed of gravity. Every single member must have suffered catastrophic failure instantaneously (or if you prefer, at the speed of sound in steel). This would be especially true across the "first floor" to fail. That is why when they demolish buildings they simultaneously destroy members across whole floors. If they do not, it won't fall straight down, and it won't fall at the speed of gravity. They don't need to destroy every member on every floor, because they will collapse as you suggest if there is sufficient force, but any one particular floor that is destroyed must do so across every key supporting member simultaneously. Also, it can't just happen on a single floor, not and fall at the speed of gravity. That is why they destroy several key floors in controlled demolition.
Coincidentally, this explosion pattern across several floors is exactly what is seen in the windows of the buildings in the eye witness videos that show that.
Assumption:
The exact right member failed in order for the building to fall straight down.
If we assume that the building was built (intentionally or unintentionally) for the exterior supports to fail on the outside if key inside members failed, if ANY OTHER member failed first, anywhere except somewhere dead center, it would not produce the fall pattern that was observed. Looking at the simple design from the first assumption, lets take the four posts at the corners and add one to the middle. Then we have to make all of them sufficiently weak that if the middle post fails and only the middle post fails, all of the other posts will instantaneously suffer catastrophic failure. Again, if any other post fails it will not fall perfectly straight down as Building 7 did.
There's also the problem that, according to the official story, the fire did not start in the middle of the building but on the side "where the airplane part hit the building." How exactly that fire spread to the middle, and caused the middle supports to fail first, before the outer supports where the "fire started" is not something that has ever been addressed, but it would have to have happened that way. I guess we can call that another assumption.
WTC 7 may be evidence that this failure process is inherent in buildings suffering structural strength loss from extensive fires
OK, maybe, but you have a lot of assumptions that have yet to be shown in any reasonable way. Even if you do show them in a reasonable way (FEM analysis e.g.), there are thousands of buildings that have been built similarly, and they are either all still standing, or collapsed in the same manner as Building 7, except uncontroversally under controlled demolition.
Could I design something that fits the above assumptions? Probably, but I would have to try with the intention of making it fail. No structural engineer worth his salt could look at such a building design without knowing that any member failure would result in a catastrophic failure for the whole system. Such calculations are part of the design schematic.
Even back in the day, people weren't that stupid. There had been plenty of failures in smaller buildings (earthquakes e.g.) before they built the bigger ones. They always made members stronger than they had to be because of potential high wind loads, and potential earthquakes, etc. But your proposal suggests that the design was exactly weak enough to fail if any one member failed. OK, that;s plausible, but no one could build a building like that without knowing that they were.
In other words, it would have been known that a fire in a trash can on a single floor would have caused a collapse before the first shovel hit dirt.
You assume you see it only in demolitions.
Me seeing it only in demolitions is not an assumption, that is a statement of fact. I have never seen any other building fall in this manner except in controlled demolitions. Show me any other building collapse in this manner, or even anything close to this manner that was not a controlled demolition.
The fact may be that this is a new "natural" failure mechanism.
OK, maybe, but other than this one event, for which there is substantial evidence for a different cause of failure, and tremendous incentive to make it happen, there is zero evidence to support this assertion. NONE. Because there is no evidence, you believing it is based on faith. Again, I respect your faith, but it does not make a sound argument.
At the Pentagon they found airplane components, such as engine parts.
The amount of airplane parts they found could quite literally be put into one single pickup truck (and probably was). Your belief of what is possible in an airplane crash stretches credulity beyond even the plausible. Take a moment and really think about the forces involved in an airplane crash, their lower limit and their upper limit, and what it would take to disintegrate an airplane into unrecognizable parts rather than make it break apart and/or crumple. Take a look at the building, and the site around it. Take a look at the parts they found, then try to make the condition of those parts fit with every single other piece of a 757 being disintegrated. Why would that handful of pieces, again, that can fit into a SINGLE PICKUP TRUCK survive intact, with that crumple pattern, yet the entire rest was disintegrated to the point where nothing recognizable as "airplane" survived.
The airplane was obliterated and mixed with building wreckage and debris.
REALLY LOOK at the building wreckage and debris. REALLY LOOK. There is no evidence of a fire within several of the exposed rooms within the surrounding building. Those rooms should have been in the path of the wings, yet they weren't even singed. Look at the wreckage and find anything that might belong to a massive airplane. Hell, just look at the volume of wreckage and explain to me how an airplane and a building fit within it.
Look, I’m not saying I know the truth of what happened, but your explanation does not fit all of the available evidence. The best you are able to do is give a “maybe,” and “it’s plausible that.” That is not an argument from investigation and evidence that is an argument based on faith.
There is no credible alternative explanation.
You assume that you know everything there is to know about every single weapon owned by the military. Their flight capabilities, their explosion patterns, their yield, etc. I don’t care if you are a “death ray designer”, the hubris is incredible. Your arguments of “there couldn’t have been a missile because I know everything there is to know about missiles, and I have tested them in every capacity” are not believable, and are otherwise insufficient.
Well, your first assumption is wrong. It doesn't depend on direct paths, only on possible paths. The load is being redistributed at the speed of sound in steel, which is about 4,000 feet per second. The supported mass is "inertially confined" for that length of time. In a falling house, the situation is not operating at such speeds. (That by the way was YOUR assumption, since I never made such an assumption.)
The second assumption is also wrong. The building was not built to be weak, it was built to be strong. Given the room temperature strength of steel. It doesn't take much temperature increase (in the midst of fire) for that strength to plunge to 10% of its original value. Under those conditions, the floor will reach a point where the total load bearing strength of the columns reaches zero margin. At that point, it is certain that at least one column would fail. Which means that the whole supported load would be redistributed to FEWER columns, and the column loading would go up---failing at least one other (maybe more) columns. Etc. The chain reaction would take maybe a tenth of a second (or less), leaving the upper mass plenty of time to "free fall" under no support. Your eyewitnesses are seeing only the explosion of windows due to the expulsion of air compressed by the falling floor.
This would go on and on, and I have no time to write an inordinately long post. Sad to say, but at some point my life must prevail over my honor. Just be happy that you struck out twice at the beginning.
OK, mostly. I'll grant that the load transfer only requires an available path rather than a similar length direct path, but the actual path followed by a transfer of load is not easily determined, where as the pattern seen in the fall of the building was in the straight down direction exclusively. That was the main theme of all of my assumptions, and the theme that you ignored. There is no reason that the load would follow THAT path initially, and yet it did. There is no reason it wouldn't either, except of all the available directions it could follow, it chose the only one that would lead to the destruction of just that building, and no others, exactly as if it were planned.
The second assumption is also wrong.
I mean, that's not really true. The environment the fire was in was non-trivial. The building had a huge hole in the side of it (supposedly) and many windows were broken. The heat was escaping and/or being fed by oxygen preferentially to one side, which would create an uneven distribution of heat throughout the whole floor, and through multiple floors, whereas both multiple floor and complete floor simultaneous failing are required for the fall pattern that was observed. Thus in order for the building to fall how it did, assuming an uneven heating pattern (variable strength in the members) it would have to have been designed to fail across the entire floor(s) if the other supporting members failed, in order to see the building fall straight down, which is what I said.
Which means that the whole supported load would be redistributed to FEWER columns, and the column loading would go up---failing at least one other (maybe more) columns.
You are assuming a linear crumple dynamic for each column despite a very likely lateral load due to uneven heating. Again, unless the initial support was the center support, which is highly unlikely given the environment, this "plausible explanation" doesn't even reach "plausible," much less "the most likely explanation.".
Your eyewitnesses are seeing only the explosion of windows due to the expulsion of air compressed by the falling floor.
OK, maybe, but that's not what it looked like to me. At best you have no idea, so saying "this is what it is" is straight up gaslighting.
Maybe you could try addressing my other points, since you succeeded at best with a point in the first, failed to address the second properly, and attempted to gaslight on a third (side) point.
You miss the point that in the collapse process, there would only be a hesitation of perhaps a tenth of a second before the upper mass could move, after which the entire floor would pose no resistance. Not enough time to tilt. The upper mass is too massive to respond in a tenth of a second.
When the critical stress has been surpassed, the whole floor will go, regardless of holes or other non-regularities. They will only make that point come sooner.
I don't know what you are suggesting by a "linear crumple dynamic." I am not assuming anything. I am taking for granted that a column failure is a column failure and that it results from a load exceeding a critical level---which has been greatly reduced from the design level by the loss of strength in the heated steel. The loads will be redistributed so fast, it does not matter which column failed first. The overarching fact is that the first failure comes when the total load on the columns is critical. Failures beyond that point come when the total load is over-critical. Every column will fail. They will fail at the rate of, what?, a thousand per second? You have to grasp how fast this is happening. Insofar as the columns are concerned in the process of failure, the rest of the building is not moving.
"It's not what it looked like to me." Yeah, that's because you are substituting cartoon imagination for thought and experience. What do you think is going to happen to that air? Once it is compressed like an elephant stomping on a hot water bottle? No place to go but to burst the windows. (I worked in hazardous environments where we were dealing with devices that contained high pressures. We had blowout panels in the walls in order to relieve the loads if things went blooey on us.) It may not have occurred to you initially, but do you not see now that it is obvious?
there would only be a hesitation of perhaps a tenth of a second before the upper mass could move
It depends on the amount of the load. It depends on the initial direction of the load. it's in an unstable equilibrium. There is NO REASON that it would fall directly down given the different strengths of the supports. I agree that AT SOME POINT soon (very soon) after the initial fail the OTHER supports that did not initially fail would fail according to the direction of the critical load they experience, and that that direction would be mostly downward. You are saying "the initial load would have to be straight down." I am saying "There is no reason to suspect that, and I've given you numerous reasons to suspect otherwise that you refuse to address."
I am not assuming anything.
You are assuming there is no initial lateral load.
You have to grasp how fast this is happening.
That is not the issue I am having. The issue you are having is that you assume that is the issue I am having. There are almost certainly lateral loads INITIALLY. If there is any lateral load WHATSOEVER, the building will not fall into its footprint. That is why controlled demolitions do everything they can with their explosions to ensure there is no lateral load. ANY FAILURE causes a non direct collapse, as can be seen in numerous videos.
You keep ignoring what I'm saying. I'm not sure why but it's not really helping anyone.
that's because you are substituting cartoon imagination for thought and experience.
That's quite presumptive. The videos look like explosions because of the light. They look exactly like explosions in other building demolitions. Could that light be a reflection off the broken glass of the windows? Maybe, but it's not in the sun, and doesn't look like that at all. It looks exactly like light coming from inside.
I mean, you could do this all day with insults and plausibles, but it doesn't look that way to mebased on my own experiences. It isn't that I want it to be a certain way. Why would I? I care only about the truth. You assume you know it. I assume I don't. But I won't concede based on insults and plausibles that go directly against what I see with my own eyes and compare directly to other events of the exact same type.
You really are a gifted gaslighter. It would help if you at least proposed a different explanation instead of using insults and plausibles as if they were "obvious truth." Either you don't understand what gaslighting is, or you understand exactly what it is and are doing it intentionally. If it is the latter, it suggests you are a glowie. I don't want to accuse anyone of that that is willing to engage honestly, but not addressing my actual points and gaslighting are not looking well for you.
Let's take a look at your proposed model. It's plausible, but how likely is it? What conditions would have to be met?
Assumption
The building was designed such that any energy wave from any point would flow perfectly to all other supports, without any barriers in the design that would redirect the energy, or otherwise slow it down.
OK, maybe. I've never designed a high rise, but I have designed quite a few one and two story buildings. Except for the simplest structure, a single story square box with four walls and four supports, one at each corner, this assumption does not hold true. There are always energy redirects. In addition, such a box would not fall straight down if it failed, it would fall towards the side of failure.
Assumption:
The building was built exactly weak enough at every single member to fall if any one particular member failed.
If any member was stronger than "exactly weak enough to fail" instantaneously then this assumption is incorrect. I say this because it fell at the speed of gravity. Every single member must have suffered catastrophic failure instantaneously (or if you prefer, at the speed of sound in steel). This would be especially true across the "first floor" to fail. That is why when they demolish buildings they simultaneously destroy members across whole floors. If they do not, it won't fall straight down, and it won't fall at the speed of gravity. They don't need to destroy every member on every floor, because they will collapse as you suggest if there is sufficient force, but any one particular floor that is destroyed must do so across every key supporting member simultaneously. Also, it can't just happen on a single floor, not and fall at the speed of gravity. That is why they destroy several key floors in controlled demolition.
Coincidentally, this explosion pattern across several floors is exactly what is seen in the windows of the buildings in the eye witness videos that show that.
Assumption:
The exact right member failed in order for the building to fall straight down.
If we assume that the building was built (intentionally or unintentionally) for the exterior supports to fail on the outside if key inside members failed, if ANY OTHER member failed first, anywhere except somewhere dead center, it would not produce the fall pattern that was observed. Looking at the simple design from the first assumption, lets take the four posts at the corners and add one to the middle. Then we have to make all of them sufficiently weak that if the middle post fails and only the middle post fails, all of the other posts will instantaneously suffer catastrophic failure. Again, if any other post fails it will not fall perfectly straight down as Building 7 did.
There's also the problem that, according to the official story, the fire did not start in the middle of the building but on the side "where the airplane part hit the building." How exactly that fire spread to the middle, and caused the middle supports to fail first, before the outer supports where the "fire started" is not something that has ever been addressed, but it would have to have happened that way. I guess we can call that another assumption.
OK, maybe, but you have a lot of assumptions that have yet to be shown in any reasonable way. Even if you do show them in a reasonable way (FEM analysis e.g.), there are thousands of buildings that have been built similarly, and they are either all still standing, or collapsed in the same manner as Building 7, except uncontroversally under controlled demolition.
Could I design something that fits the above assumptions? Probably, but I would have to try with the intention of making it fail. No structural engineer worth his salt could look at such a building design without knowing that any member failure would result in a catastrophic failure for the whole system. Such calculations are part of the design schematic.
Even back in the day, people weren't that stupid. There had been plenty of failures in smaller buildings (earthquakes e.g.) before they built the bigger ones. They always made members stronger than they had to be because of potential high wind loads, and potential earthquakes, etc. But your proposal suggests that the design was exactly weak enough to fail if any one member failed. OK, that;s plausible, but no one could build a building like that without knowing that they were.
In other words, it would have been known that a fire in a trash can on a single floor would have caused a collapse before the first shovel hit dirt.
Me seeing it only in demolitions is not an assumption, that is a statement of fact. I have never seen any other building fall in this manner except in controlled demolitions. Show me any other building collapse in this manner, or even anything close to this manner that was not a controlled demolition.
OK, maybe, but other than this one event, for which there is substantial evidence for a different cause of failure, and tremendous incentive to make it happen, there is zero evidence to support this assertion. NONE. Because there is no evidence, you believing it is based on faith. Again, I respect your faith, but it does not make a sound argument.
The amount of airplane parts they found could quite literally be put into one single pickup truck (and probably was). Your belief of what is possible in an airplane crash stretches credulity beyond even the plausible. Take a moment and really think about the forces involved in an airplane crash, their lower limit and their upper limit, and what it would take to disintegrate an airplane into unrecognizable parts rather than make it break apart and/or crumple. Take a look at the building, and the site around it. Take a look at the parts they found, then try to make the condition of those parts fit with every single other piece of a 757 being disintegrated. Why would that handful of pieces, again, that can fit into a SINGLE PICKUP TRUCK survive intact, with that crumple pattern, yet the entire rest was disintegrated to the point where nothing recognizable as "airplane" survived.
REALLY LOOK at the building wreckage and debris. REALLY LOOK. There is no evidence of a fire within several of the exposed rooms within the surrounding building. Those rooms should have been in the path of the wings, yet they weren't even singed. Look at the wreckage and find anything that might belong to a massive airplane. Hell, just look at the volume of wreckage and explain to me how an airplane and a building fit within it.
Look, I’m not saying I know the truth of what happened, but your explanation does not fit all of the available evidence. The best you are able to do is give a “maybe,” and “it’s plausible that.” That is not an argument from investigation and evidence that is an argument based on faith.
You assume that you know everything there is to know about every single weapon owned by the military. Their flight capabilities, their explosion patterns, their yield, etc. I don’t care if you are a “death ray designer”, the hubris is incredible. Your arguments of “there couldn’t have been a missile because I know everything there is to know about missiles, and I have tested them in every capacity” are not believable, and are otherwise insufficient.
Well, your first assumption is wrong. It doesn't depend on direct paths, only on possible paths. The load is being redistributed at the speed of sound in steel, which is about 4,000 feet per second. The supported mass is "inertially confined" for that length of time. In a falling house, the situation is not operating at such speeds. (That by the way was YOUR assumption, since I never made such an assumption.)
The second assumption is also wrong. The building was not built to be weak, it was built to be strong. Given the room temperature strength of steel. It doesn't take much temperature increase (in the midst of fire) for that strength to plunge to 10% of its original value. Under those conditions, the floor will reach a point where the total load bearing strength of the columns reaches zero margin. At that point, it is certain that at least one column would fail. Which means that the whole supported load would be redistributed to FEWER columns, and the column loading would go up---failing at least one other (maybe more) columns. Etc. The chain reaction would take maybe a tenth of a second (or less), leaving the upper mass plenty of time to "free fall" under no support. Your eyewitnesses are seeing only the explosion of windows due to the expulsion of air compressed by the falling floor.
This would go on and on, and I have no time to write an inordinately long post. Sad to say, but at some point my life must prevail over my honor. Just be happy that you struck out twice at the beginning.
OK, mostly. I'll grant that the load transfer only requires an available path rather than a similar length direct path, but the actual path followed by a transfer of load is not easily determined, where as the pattern seen in the fall of the building was in the straight down direction exclusively. That was the main theme of all of my assumptions, and the theme that you ignored. There is no reason that the load would follow THAT path initially, and yet it did. There is no reason it wouldn't either, except of all the available directions it could follow, it chose the only one that would lead to the destruction of just that building, and no others, exactly as if it were planned.
I mean, that's not really true. The environment the fire was in was non-trivial. The building had a huge hole in the side of it (supposedly) and many windows were broken. The heat was escaping and/or being fed by oxygen preferentially to one side, which would create an uneven distribution of heat throughout the whole floor, and through multiple floors, whereas both multiple floor and complete floor simultaneous failing are required for the fall pattern that was observed. Thus in order for the building to fall how it did, assuming an uneven heating pattern (variable strength in the members) it would have to have been designed to fail across the entire floor(s) if the other supporting members failed, in order to see the building fall straight down, which is what I said.
You are assuming a linear crumple dynamic for each column despite a very likely lateral load due to uneven heating. Again, unless the initial support was the center support, which is highly unlikely given the environment, this "plausible explanation" doesn't even reach "plausible," much less "the most likely explanation.".
OK, maybe, but that's not what it looked like to me. At best you have no idea, so saying "this is what it is" is straight up gaslighting.
Maybe you could try addressing my other points, since you succeeded at best with a point in the first, failed to address the second properly, and attempted to gaslight on a third (side) point.
You miss the point that in the collapse process, there would only be a hesitation of perhaps a tenth of a second before the upper mass could move, after which the entire floor would pose no resistance. Not enough time to tilt. The upper mass is too massive to respond in a tenth of a second.
When the critical stress has been surpassed, the whole floor will go, regardless of holes or other non-regularities. They will only make that point come sooner.
I don't know what you are suggesting by a "linear crumple dynamic." I am not assuming anything. I am taking for granted that a column failure is a column failure and that it results from a load exceeding a critical level---which has been greatly reduced from the design level by the loss of strength in the heated steel. The loads will be redistributed so fast, it does not matter which column failed first. The overarching fact is that the first failure comes when the total load on the columns is critical. Failures beyond that point come when the total load is over-critical. Every column will fail. They will fail at the rate of, what?, a thousand per second? You have to grasp how fast this is happening. Insofar as the columns are concerned in the process of failure, the rest of the building is not moving.
"It's not what it looked like to me." Yeah, that's because you are substituting cartoon imagination for thought and experience. What do you think is going to happen to that air? Once it is compressed like an elephant stomping on a hot water bottle? No place to go but to burst the windows. (I worked in hazardous environments where we were dealing with devices that contained high pressures. We had blowout panels in the walls in order to relieve the loads if things went blooey on us.) It may not have occurred to you initially, but do you not see now that it is obvious?
It depends on the amount of the load. It depends on the initial direction of the load. it's in an unstable equilibrium. There is NO REASON that it would fall directly down given the different strengths of the supports. I agree that AT SOME POINT soon (very soon) after the initial fail the OTHER supports that did not initially fail would fail according to the direction of the critical load they experience, and that that direction would be mostly downward. You are saying "the initial load would have to be straight down." I am saying "There is no reason to suspect that, and I've given you numerous reasons to suspect otherwise that you refuse to address."
You are assuming there is no initial lateral load.
That is not the issue I am having. The issue you are having is that you assume that is the issue I am having. There are almost certainly lateral loads INITIALLY. If there is any lateral load WHATSOEVER, the building will not fall into its footprint. That is why controlled demolitions do everything they can with their explosions to ensure there is no lateral load. ANY FAILURE causes a non direct collapse, as can be seen in numerous videos.
You keep ignoring what I'm saying. I'm not sure why but it's not really helping anyone.
That's quite presumptive. The videos look like explosions because of the light. They look exactly like explosions in other building demolitions. Could that light be a reflection off the broken glass of the windows? Maybe, but it's not in the sun, and doesn't look like that at all. It looks exactly like light coming from inside.
I mean, you could do this all day with insults and plausibles, but it doesn't look that way to me based on my own experiences. It isn't that I want it to be a certain way. Why would I? I care only about the truth. You assume you know it. I assume I don't. But I won't concede based on insults and plausibles that go directly against what I see with my own eyes and compare directly to other events of the exact same type.
You really are a gifted gaslighter. It would help if you at least proposed a different explanation instead of using insults and plausibles as if they were "obvious truth." Either you don't understand what gaslighting is, or you understand exactly what it is and are doing it intentionally. If it is the latter, it suggests you are a glowie. I don't want to accuse anyone of that that is willing to engage honestly, but not addressing my actual points and gaslighting are not looking well for you.