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.
It would take about a tenth of a second, no matter what the load. It depends on the speed of sound in the structure. Or show how you would come up with another number. And show what would happen in that interval of time. Go ahead and calculate the moment of inertia of the upper story mass and the off-balance moment that would produce a torque. And then calculate the amount of rotation in that time interval, to decimal fractions of a degree.
What reason would there be to postulate a lateral load? Of what strength? How would it compare to the gravity load on the upper story mass? I'm kind of thinking that it would be a trifle, but you show me otherwise. If there were such a load, powerful enough to prevent a vertical collapse, it would also have prevented a demolition-based vertical collapse. What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Your alternative hypothesis has to assume that the demolition planners would know well in advance, to the exact second, when to fire the charge---such that there would be no lateral load! Not credible. You just told me that they take pains that such a thing would not be there, but you can't plan something like this to exact timing and still make sure about the lateral load.
It would fall DOWN because, within a tenth of a second, the strength of ALL supports would have become essentially zero. No holdouts. They would all fail.
No evidence of explosions. What you have is evidence of pressure expulsion of air, smoke, dust, glass, and miscellaneous material. And explosion would do that, of course---but it would absolutely be the result of air compression and wall-bursting. Probably also rapid motions of distorted structural members flinging things around. You should also consider the likely possibility that if there was any airplane fuel that leaked downward into the building (and there was), the air compression of the successive collapses might have a high enough compression ratio to act like a Diesel engine, igniting the fuel from the compression temperature rise. If there are sufficiently powdery combustible materials, you could also have the equivalent of a grain elevator deflagration. All that would need is a spark.
Okay, I don't want to play the bad guy. I'm not in the best health lately and my patience wears thin easily, depending on the sequence of things I encounter. So, let's consider the lateral load. Was there one? What was it? How large was it? Compared to the gravity load? And if it would compromise the collapse mechanism I have outlined, how would it not compromise a demolition? In fact, how would a demolition even be possible when no one could know in advance if there would be a lateral load or not? And if there was no lateral load, what is wrong with this explanation? (As for explosions, I believe the more you think about the necessary implications of collapse and air compression, you will see that it accounts for the few visible phenomena that might exist.)
I first want to say I appreciate you taking the time and energy to engage in earnest. I will comment on a couple of your statements, but mostly I want to show you what the NIST document is reported to say itself, along with a couple criticisms. It will be relatively brief compared to the total scholarship, but I think it is the only way to progress past your assumptions. It isn’t that I think your assumptions are necessarily incorrect, but that you are missing too many essential elements, both in structural design, and in the NIST explanation itself.
Go ahead and calculate the moment of inertia of the upper story mass and the off-balance moment that would produce a torque. And then calculate the amount of rotation in that time interval, to decimal fractions of a degree.
The amount of movement in the first tenth of a second would be amplified as time went on. You seem to be assuming that all forces go to zero after that first tenth of a second and that the system runs strictly on inertia. That is not supported by any evidence, or any model, or any design of large scale structures. On the contrary, the exact opposite is true. Structures are really just a bunch of boxes. Each box is designed to support all of the boxes above. If any box fails, any load changes to any box adjacent to the failure will be lateral not vertical. Each adjacent box will still be able to support all of the boxes above. It can only crumple if there is sufficient lateral load to cause it to fail laterally. This lateral failure will then cause a vertical failure. That is the sequence of events. That is exactly the pattern seen in any building collapse where only a part of the supports are destroyed. In the particular event of that building, supposedly a sink hole opened up and caused the central section to collapse. There is reason to doubt the stated reasons, but I won’t get into them here. The point is to show the failure mode. After the central section fell, the other parts fell towards the side of the initial collapse due to an asymmetry of lateral forces. This is not an anomaly. This is seen in ALL building collapses except those where the controlled demolition specifically removes sufficient gravity supports symmetrically (and on several floors, not just one) to force an "implosion" and a strictly downward collapse into the footprint.
This exact same "lateral chain" failure mode is shown in the NIST model itself (which I will get to in a second). Indeed, their stated reason for failure was because of a disconnect between a lateral member and a column due to thermal expansion. Their stated estimated temperatures for these beams due to the fire at the point of failure was 300C for the columns, 600C for the beams at the attachment point of failure, and 500C for the girders. The rest of the failure was a chain reaction of lateral loads, not due to weakness in the metal, but lateral loads causing lateral failures in each of the attached boxes, as will be seen in their animation.
For reference, so we are on the same page, according to engineering toolbox, at 300C structural steel is about 20% STRONGER than at ambient temperature. It is about 30% of ambient strength at 600C (beams) and 50% of ambient at 500C (the two girders that are blamed for the failure). The structure didn’t fail due to insufficient vertical load bearing capacity as you assume, on the contrary, according these NIST temperature estimates, the columns were stronger than they would have been the day before. NIST says that the failure occurred due to a thermal expansion of the girders attached to column 79 (in the corner of the building) which caused them to disconnect from the column, which then caused lateral loads on the adjacent boxes.
One of the problems with their temperature model is that the fire on the floor (and surrounding floors) where the failure supposedly occurred had been out for over an hour before the collapse, but I will not be focusing on the criticisms, but rather what the NIST say themselves.
Looking at their model it shows clearly that boxes on one side fail, and that causes lateral loads to cause a chain of box failures. (You only need to watch a couple seconds of that video, because that's all that official NIST video shows of the model.)
This shows a comparison of the two NIST animations with reality.
In the first model comparison it shows a deviation from the vertical (torque around the base as axis) as well as a twist (torque around the vertical center as axis). It also shows the top left face collapse completely. The worst part of this first NIST model is that it stops long before the actual collapse. It looks at the first second or so. If one were to move forward in time past where the NIST model does, it would show an increase of movement from center (more topple, more twist). Why would their model stop where it did? A clearer picture of this deviation from vertical can be found in this video, which adds a vertical line. If you pause that video at 35:04 you can see that the top is clearly moving away from the vertical line. Again, if the NIST animation had moved forward, this deviation would have been amplified with time. Looking at other building collapses this is what a building looks like in the first few seconds when the final result is that it falls over on its side, which is COMPLETELY different than what actually happened.
The second NIST comparison model continues a couple seconds past the first one in time, but it still stops before the end. Regardless, it shows a clear deviation from observation, which would only have been amplified if the animation continued.
In all cases, the NIST models are not compatible with observation. If experiment does not match the model, the model is wrong. It’s really that simple.
It is entirely possible that the NIST team made their models match as best they could with observation. Of course that’s an accusation of sorts, except that that is standard fare for model building in any other context. A tweak to temperature here, a change in fire pattern there, a different length of time for heating on the other side, a slight change in thermal expansion, and viola, a completely different collapse dynamic, well within the parameters of the initial assumptions. This happens ALL THE TIME in model building.
Because they were reconstructing what happened from numerous sources, the NIST report makes assumptions on pretty much every single page of it’s 800 page length. Each assumption is a potential weakness, and a parameter that can be tweaked without in any way being obvious about it. Those assumptions are addressed in numerous critiques.
The biggest strength the NIST model has is that people don’t want to believe that a group of engineers, working for the government, would lie, or even stretch the truth, or do ANYTHING except exactly the most honest approach possible. These are the TOP EXPERTS. The group was literally made to be trusted. From these experts, consensus is then created by corroboration from other entities. OK, maybe, but engineers who work on top secret projects stretch the truth all the time in any public encounter. They HAVE to, that's part of their job. In addition, once you start digging in, you find numerous accounts of manufactured consensus in other domains (see Covid vaccine). Is it possible that the government selected experts stretched the truth here? Tweaked an assumption there? Manufactured consensus? Why not? It happens literally all the time.
Of course none of these are “conclusive proof,” but they are serious questions that remain unaddressed in any reasonable way. Most addresses are done by “expertise,” i.e. credentials, and plausibles, not arguments strictly from the evidence. Regardless, In all cases, the math doesn’t add up. There is no model that I have seen ever presented that shows anything even remotely close to the perfection that is the WTC7 collapse. They all show torques that are not seen in the actual. The ONLY videos that match the actual are other controlled demolitions that do everything they can to reduce lateral loads to zero.
And that’s what has to have happened. The collapse, according to the NIST report, was caused strictly by a chain reaction of lateral loads. In order to create a perfectly symmetrical collapse as seen, all lateral loads would have to add to zero. That can theoretically be created in a model by tweaking as I suggest (though the NIST model failed to do so), but it is highly unlikely to happen without help in the real world. It's not impossible, and I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm saying that all lateral loads adding to zero (or very nearly zero) is HIGHLY unlikely, and has never been seen before or since, except under intention for that exact outcome.
As for the explosions that I insist there is evidence of, go to the 40 second mark in this video. That is not "windows breaking from structural collapse," those are clearly explosions. Do I trust that video? No, it is insufficient, but it is still evidence of explosions and can't be dismissed. That is why I said initially that there was evidence, but not conclusive evidence. If the ownership chain of that video could be somehow verified, that would make this video quite damning, because it clearly shows explosions across the whole structure in exactly the pattern that matches those found in controlled demolitions with the same outcome.
Well, I have to tip my hat to you for a very reasonable and researched reply, far above the normal that I encounter. Here are my thoughts:---
If the NIST model is wrong, then that puts us back at zero. It does not validate any hypothesis for demolition. If NIST got it wrong, somebody got it mostly right, as shown in this video (in the bar adjacent to the page hosting the Tucker Carlson video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAkTbyENZ5s The only variation from the real-life result was the seeming integrity of one of the curtain walls. I'm sure you can agree that such a result is lost in the noise of assumptions. It results in a debris footprint largely within the WTC7 perimeter. This is the result of new software, so maybe all we can blame the NIST for is not having sufficiently competent tools.
There is another angle that seems not to have been considered, namely, the seismic shock of the Twin Towers collapse. The gravitational potential energy realized by the collapse would have been equivalent to 100 tons of TNT (my estimate based on a construction of 200,000 tons of steel and a height of 415 meters, with a ton of TNT equal to ~4 x 10^9 joules). It would have been unreasonable for the NIST to have ignored the effect this might have had on WTC7. I experienced the effects of the 2001 Nisqually earthquake at my place of work. Most 2-story structures survived intact, but one single-story laboratory building had to be demolished, as it was damaged beyond repair. Other buildings had to be retrofitted with external diagonal bracing. For a long time, I considered it possible that the WTC7 collapse was a delayed response to the Twin Towers collapse seismic signature. It certainly could have compromised the integrity of the structure.
Back to Tucker Carlson. All I saw were flashes of light---which could have been caused by brief fires or electrical discharges. The distinctive elements of an explosive detonation (shock wave, sound signature, and residue) were absent. The windows were not blown out, but were loosened by the structural deformations. No evidence of explosions---rather, evidence of the absence of explosions.
I don't know whether to carry this further. It seems to me that (1) there is no evidence of demolition, and (2) any faults in the original NIST simulation are covered by the new simulation. The rational man would stand down from a gratuitous hypothesis that has no substance.
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.
It would take about a tenth of a second, no matter what the load. It depends on the speed of sound in the structure. Or show how you would come up with another number. And show what would happen in that interval of time. Go ahead and calculate the moment of inertia of the upper story mass and the off-balance moment that would produce a torque. And then calculate the amount of rotation in that time interval, to decimal fractions of a degree.
What reason would there be to postulate a lateral load? Of what strength? How would it compare to the gravity load on the upper story mass? I'm kind of thinking that it would be a trifle, but you show me otherwise. If there were such a load, powerful enough to prevent a vertical collapse, it would also have prevented a demolition-based vertical collapse. What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Your alternative hypothesis has to assume that the demolition planners would know well in advance, to the exact second, when to fire the charge---such that there would be no lateral load! Not credible. You just told me that they take pains that such a thing would not be there, but you can't plan something like this to exact timing and still make sure about the lateral load.
It would fall DOWN because, within a tenth of a second, the strength of ALL supports would have become essentially zero. No holdouts. They would all fail.
No evidence of explosions. What you have is evidence of pressure expulsion of air, smoke, dust, glass, and miscellaneous material. And explosion would do that, of course---but it would absolutely be the result of air compression and wall-bursting. Probably also rapid motions of distorted structural members flinging things around. You should also consider the likely possibility that if there was any airplane fuel that leaked downward into the building (and there was), the air compression of the successive collapses might have a high enough compression ratio to act like a Diesel engine, igniting the fuel from the compression temperature rise. If there are sufficiently powdery combustible materials, you could also have the equivalent of a grain elevator deflagration. All that would need is a spark.
Okay, I don't want to play the bad guy. I'm not in the best health lately and my patience wears thin easily, depending on the sequence of things I encounter. So, let's consider the lateral load. Was there one? What was it? How large was it? Compared to the gravity load? And if it would compromise the collapse mechanism I have outlined, how would it not compromise a demolition? In fact, how would a demolition even be possible when no one could know in advance if there would be a lateral load or not? And if there was no lateral load, what is wrong with this explanation? (As for explosions, I believe the more you think about the necessary implications of collapse and air compression, you will see that it accounts for the few visible phenomena that might exist.)
I first want to say I appreciate you taking the time and energy to engage in earnest. I will comment on a couple of your statements, but mostly I want to show you what the NIST document is reported to say itself, along with a couple criticisms. It will be relatively brief compared to the total scholarship, but I think it is the only way to progress past your assumptions. It isn’t that I think your assumptions are necessarily incorrect, but that you are missing too many essential elements, both in structural design, and in the NIST explanation itself.
The amount of movement in the first tenth of a second would be amplified as time went on. You seem to be assuming that all forces go to zero after that first tenth of a second and that the system runs strictly on inertia. That is not supported by any evidence, or any model, or any design of large scale structures. On the contrary, the exact opposite is true. Structures are really just a bunch of boxes. Each box is designed to support all of the boxes above. If any box fails, any load changes to any box adjacent to the failure will be lateral not vertical. Each adjacent box will still be able to support all of the boxes above. It can only crumple if there is sufficient lateral load to cause it to fail laterally. This lateral failure will then cause a vertical failure. That is the sequence of events. That is exactly the pattern seen in any building collapse where only a part of the supports are destroyed. In the particular event of that building, supposedly a sink hole opened up and caused the central section to collapse. There is reason to doubt the stated reasons, but I won’t get into them here. The point is to show the failure mode. After the central section fell, the other parts fell towards the side of the initial collapse due to an asymmetry of lateral forces. This is not an anomaly. This is seen in ALL building collapses except those where the controlled demolition specifically removes sufficient gravity supports symmetrically (and on several floors, not just one) to force an "implosion" and a strictly downward collapse into the footprint.
This exact same "lateral chain" failure mode is shown in the NIST model itself (which I will get to in a second). Indeed, their stated reason for failure was because of a disconnect between a lateral member and a column due to thermal expansion. Their stated estimated temperatures for these beams due to the fire at the point of failure was 300C for the columns, 600C for the beams at the attachment point of failure, and 500C for the girders. The rest of the failure was a chain reaction of lateral loads, not due to weakness in the metal, but lateral loads causing lateral failures in each of the attached boxes, as will be seen in their animation.
For reference, so we are on the same page, according to engineering toolbox, at 300C structural steel is about 20% STRONGER than at ambient temperature. It is about 30% of ambient strength at 600C (beams) and 50% of ambient at 500C (the two girders that are blamed for the failure). The structure didn’t fail due to insufficient vertical load bearing capacity as you assume, on the contrary, according these NIST temperature estimates, the columns were stronger than they would have been the day before. NIST says that the failure occurred due to a thermal expansion of the girders attached to column 79 (in the corner of the building) which caused them to disconnect from the column, which then caused lateral loads on the adjacent boxes.
One of the problems with their temperature model is that the fire on the floor (and surrounding floors) where the failure supposedly occurred had been out for over an hour before the collapse, but I will not be focusing on the criticisms, but rather what the NIST say themselves.
Looking at their model it shows clearly that boxes on one side fail, and that causes lateral loads to cause a chain of box failures. (You only need to watch a couple seconds of that video, because that's all that official NIST video shows of the model.)
This shows a comparison of the two NIST animations with reality.
In the first model comparison it shows a deviation from the vertical (torque around the base as axis) as well as a twist (torque around the vertical center as axis). It also shows the top left face collapse completely. The worst part of this first NIST model is that it stops long before the actual collapse. It looks at the first second or so. If one were to move forward in time past where the NIST model does, it would show an increase of movement from center (more topple, more twist). Why would their model stop where it did? A clearer picture of this deviation from vertical can be found in this video, which adds a vertical line. If you pause that video at 35:04 you can see that the top is clearly moving away from the vertical line. Again, if the NIST animation had moved forward, this deviation would have been amplified with time. Looking at other building collapses this is what a building looks like in the first few seconds when the final result is that it falls over on its side, which is COMPLETELY different than what actually happened.
The second NIST comparison model continues a couple seconds past the first one in time, but it still stops before the end. Regardless, it shows a clear deviation from observation, which would only have been amplified if the animation continued.
In all cases, the NIST models are not compatible with observation. If experiment does not match the model, the model is wrong. It’s really that simple.
It is entirely possible that the NIST team made their models match as best they could with observation. Of course that’s an accusation of sorts, except that that is standard fare for model building in any other context. A tweak to temperature here, a change in fire pattern there, a different length of time for heating on the other side, a slight change in thermal expansion, and viola, a completely different collapse dynamic, well within the parameters of the initial assumptions. This happens ALL THE TIME in model building.
Because they were reconstructing what happened from numerous sources, the NIST report makes assumptions on pretty much every single page of it’s 800 page length. Each assumption is a potential weakness, and a parameter that can be tweaked without in any way being obvious about it. Those assumptions are addressed in numerous critiques.
The biggest strength the NIST model has is that people don’t want to believe that a group of engineers, working for the government, would lie, or even stretch the truth, or do ANYTHING except exactly the most honest approach possible. These are the TOP EXPERTS. The group was literally made to be trusted. From these experts, consensus is then created by corroboration from other entities. OK, maybe, but engineers who work on top secret projects stretch the truth all the time in any public encounter. They HAVE to, that's part of their job. In addition, once you start digging in, you find numerous accounts of manufactured consensus in other domains (see Covid vaccine). Is it possible that the government selected experts stretched the truth here? Tweaked an assumption there? Manufactured consensus? Why not? It happens literally all the time.
Of course none of these are “conclusive proof,” but they are serious questions that remain unaddressed in any reasonable way. Most addresses are done by “expertise,” i.e. credentials, and plausibles, not arguments strictly from the evidence. Regardless, In all cases, the math doesn’t add up. There is no model that I have seen ever presented that shows anything even remotely close to the perfection that is the WTC7 collapse. They all show torques that are not seen in the actual. The ONLY videos that match the actual are other controlled demolitions that do everything they can to reduce lateral loads to zero.
And that’s what has to have happened. The collapse, according to the NIST report, was caused strictly by a chain reaction of lateral loads. In order to create a perfectly symmetrical collapse as seen, all lateral loads would have to add to zero. That can theoretically be created in a model by tweaking as I suggest (though the NIST model failed to do so), but it is highly unlikely to happen without help in the real world. It's not impossible, and I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm saying that all lateral loads adding to zero (or very nearly zero) is HIGHLY unlikely, and has never been seen before or since, except under intention for that exact outcome.
As for the explosions that I insist there is evidence of, go to the 40 second mark in this video. That is not "windows breaking from structural collapse," those are clearly explosions. Do I trust that video? No, it is insufficient, but it is still evidence of explosions and can't be dismissed. That is why I said initially that there was evidence, but not conclusive evidence. If the ownership chain of that video could be somehow verified, that would make this video quite damning, because it clearly shows explosions across the whole structure in exactly the pattern that matches those found in controlled demolitions with the same outcome.
Well, I have to tip my hat to you for a very reasonable and researched reply, far above the normal that I encounter. Here are my thoughts:---
If the NIST model is wrong, then that puts us back at zero. It does not validate any hypothesis for demolition. If NIST got it wrong, somebody got it mostly right, as shown in this video (in the bar adjacent to the page hosting the Tucker Carlson video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAkTbyENZ5s The only variation from the real-life result was the seeming integrity of one of the curtain walls. I'm sure you can agree that such a result is lost in the noise of assumptions. It results in a debris footprint largely within the WTC7 perimeter. This is the result of new software, so maybe all we can blame the NIST for is not having sufficiently competent tools.
There is another angle that seems not to have been considered, namely, the seismic shock of the Twin Towers collapse. The gravitational potential energy realized by the collapse would have been equivalent to 100 tons of TNT (my estimate based on a construction of 200,000 tons of steel and a height of 415 meters, with a ton of TNT equal to ~4 x 10^9 joules). It would have been unreasonable for the NIST to have ignored the effect this might have had on WTC7. I experienced the effects of the 2001 Nisqually earthquake at my place of work. Most 2-story structures survived intact, but one single-story laboratory building had to be demolished, as it was damaged beyond repair. Other buildings had to be retrofitted with external diagonal bracing. For a long time, I considered it possible that the WTC7 collapse was a delayed response to the Twin Towers collapse seismic signature. It certainly could have compromised the integrity of the structure.
Back to Tucker Carlson. All I saw were flashes of light---which could have been caused by brief fires or electrical discharges. The distinctive elements of an explosive detonation (shock wave, sound signature, and residue) were absent. The windows were not blown out, but were loosened by the structural deformations. No evidence of explosions---rather, evidence of the absence of explosions.
I don't know whether to carry this further. It seems to me that (1) there is no evidence of demolition, and (2) any faults in the original NIST simulation are covered by the new simulation. The rational man would stand down from a gratuitous hypothesis that has no substance.