Unnecessary Freefall Revisit #2038046179007145309

Thanks to 'Charlie Gate', many truthers, particularly in the UK, have been brushing up on their 9/11 knowledge, and there has been fierce debate on YouTube about things like the freefall of WTC7.

The apologists for NIST have been claiming that WTC7's 2.25 seconds of free fall can be explained by the lack of core support and exterior column buckling between floors seven and fourteen (depicted above) that NIST's model alleges occured. Basically they're saying it wasn't perfect freefall, but something indistinguishable - like 98% of freefall or something - which can be explained by the fact that the resistance offered by the eight crippled floors was so low that it could only slow the acceleration by a tiny amount. Let's do some simple physics to assess this claim.

As anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of physics knows, the downward force (or weight) of an object being acted on by gravity is equal to the mass of the object multiplied by gravity, or:

F = M g

When there is a resisting force acting in the opposite direction (f), the force available to accelerate the object downward is:

F = Mg - f

Since force = mass × acceleration, the acceleration of an object being resisted can be calculated by dividing both sides of the above equation by M...

a = g - f/M

Since force = mass × gravity, you can substitute mg in place of the little f, where m is the maximum mass that whatever is doing the resisting can support, giving you...

a = g - mg/M

or

a = g (1 - m/M)

In the case of NIST's WTC7 theory, the acceleration of the collapse would therefore be determined by the ratio of the mass of the upper section (M) and the mass that those eight buckled floors can support (m). Because the building is collapsing, M is obviously going to be greater than m, but how much greater?

If m is just one tenth of M - say if the mass of the upper section was 50,000 tonnes and the mass that the eight buckled floors could support was 5,000 tonnes - then the acceleration would be 8.8ms^-2, which is noticeably less than freefall. If m is just one twentieth of M - say if the mass of the upper section was 50,000 tonnes and the mass that the eight buckled floors could support was only 2,500 tonnes - then the acceleration would be 9.3ms^-2, which is still noticeably less than freefall. So unless the eight buckled floors couldn't even support say a fiftieth of the mass of the upper section, then the rate of WTC7's collapse, for those eight stories, would be noticeably less than freefall.

Remember, skyscrapers are overdesigned, so it's hard to imagine, even with the loss of the core structure and a buckled exterior structure, that those eight floors would lose so much strength that they couldn't even support one fiftieth of the mass above.

Another thing to consider is how sudden the transition to freefall was. Before the period of freefall, the outer structure barely moved at all, then all of a sudden it just dropped. If the free fall drop was the result of a loss of support in floors seven to fourteen, then that loss of support in those eight floors would have had to have been instantaneous. Otherwise the upper section would start crushing those floors at a rate much lower than freefall the moment they could only just no longer support the mass above - much like how the partial collapses of the TU Delft building and the Windsor tower initiated slowly...



Notice how both collapses begin quite tentatively. This is because the scales have only just tipped. The resistance is less than the weight, but only just. This is what we would expect to see in WTC7. The alleged domino collapse of the core structure and buckling of the outer structure would not have been instantaneous. So even if this could explain the freefall, it can't explain how the onset of freefall was so sudden.

Essentially, the apologists for NIST expect us to believe that eight floors lost at least a fiftieth of their resistance to the weight above in an instant.



But of course, all this is giving NIST's computer model too much credit, since the model fails to match observed reality in many ways. For one thing, the massive bulging of the east side, as seen in the south view of their global collapse simulation, was not observed.



My point is, even if NIST's computer model was an accurate depiction of the state of the lower floors, it's still unlikely that the resistance offered by those floors would be negligible enough for virtual freefall to be plausible.

Chris Mohr's "respectful rebuttal" smells like debunking

Chris Mohr is uploading 'respectful rebuttal' videos of Gage's presentations. I've just quickly looked at this one ... I may watch the others later. Some thoughts...

One minute in Mohr states that Gage does not acknowledge the differences in construction between the twin towers and the other skyscrapers he cites as examples of towers which burned more severely without collapse. Humorously, he then does what so many debunkers do and contradict his own criticism by citing the collapse of a building even less like the twin towers ... the TU Delft building.

I rebutted this stupid debunking argument in the first video I ever made, when I used the TU Delft collapse to support the demolition argument. Mohr characterized the TU Delft collapse as "very fast, almost symmetrical, and into its own footprint". Really? It was about 1/4 of the height of WTC7, and1/8 the height of the twin towers, and collapsed no where near a free fall rate, and it was only one wing of the building ... how exactly is this proof that a massive skyscraper can undergo a progressive, global collapse at basically free fall?

Afer droning on about the TU Delft collapse for a full four minutes, he then cites other examples commonly cited by debunkers like the Kadel toy factory and the interstate 580 overpass - again contradicting his earlier criticism of comparisons to skyscrapers Gage cites. The doublethink here is astounding. If a university building, a toy factory and an overpass are relevent then so are the skyscrapers Gage cites.



After talking a bit about how fire causes floors to sag, and how this phenomena is vital to NIST's 'inward bowing' theory for the towers (while neglecting to mention it's a major problem for NIST's 'rigid thermal linear expansion' theory for WTC7), he finishes this part of his rebuttal by comparing 9/11 truth to what I guess is called "titanic denalism", and saying lots of scientists don't like people like Gage for various reasons. One reason, he says, is they don't like being accused of being part of a conspiracy - an accusation Gage has never made - and another reason is we are apparently "unschooled in the scientific method" - even though Gage's presentations follow the scientific method.

Chris Mohr says this is a "respectful rebuttal" and not debunking. Sorry Mr Mohr, but if it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck ...

The only difference is Chris Mohr's rebuttals are relatively ad-hominem-lite. Aside from that, the tactics and arguments are basically the same.

Related Info:

Edited version of Gage and Mohr's debate with added comments and videos to address the sound issue and other points raised by Mohr.

9/11 Controversy Strikes Again at UC Boulder Face-Off

2/25/11 Answers from NIST to Questions by Chris Mohr, Journalist

Charlie Veitch Parroting Outdated Official Claims Regarding WTC7

In recent interviews justifying his sudden U-Turn on 9/11, Charlie Veitch has made some incorrect claims about WTC7.

He says he spoke to an expert who told him that 25% of WTC7 was scooped out. This is an old claim that even NIST have abandoned. The claim was made in Appendix L to their 2004 progress report. This is one diagram from that report.



In the 2005 Popular Mechanics article, Shyam Sundar of NIST claimed that "On about a third of the face to the center and to the bottom — approximately 10 stories — about 25 percent of the depth of the building was scooped out".

But there was no evidence for this assertion. Davin Coburn of Popular Mechanics claimed to have seen NYPD photos that they were not allowed to release which showed clearly that WTC7 had indeed been 'scooped out'. These photos have now been made public via the IC911Studies FOIA (slideshow below) and none of them show what David Coburn claimed them to show. This was a blatant lie by Popular Mechanics.



In their 2008 final report, NIST changed their story. Below is a graphic representation of the south face damage from their final report (NCSTAR 1-9).



Most of the damage was superficial, apart from a gauge on the west side between floors 5 and 18. According to NIST's final theory, the collapse initiated on the east side on floors 12 & 13. Since that area recieved only superficial damage, damage from the north tower's collapse could not have played a role in that failure, so the only role the damage from WTC1 played was to ignite the fires. The damage played no role in the collapse itself. As NIST's Q&A states:

The debris caused structural damage to the southwest region of the building - severing seven exterior columns - but this structural damage did not initiate the collapse. The fires initiated by the debris, rather than the structural damage that resulted from the impacts, initiated the building's collapse after the fires grew and spread to the northeast region after several hours.

It seems the expert Charlie spoke to has not even read the final NIST report. He is parroting an old version of the official story. NIST's final theory - the "thermal expansion" theory - claims that heat from the fires expanded floor beams on floors 12 & 13. These floor beams then pushed against a critical girder, which buckled, causing several floors to fail, resulting in a critical column being unsupported horizontally over a nine story length, and when that buckled it initiated a chain reaction which led to global collapse.



When I saw Richard Gage live in Bristol on the 21st of June he said something like "There are so many things wrong with this, but for the sake of time, I will list only twelve!". He then went on a rapid fire tirade simply on why the idea of heated floor beams remaining rigid and pushing against a girder and causing it to fail is ludicrous. What would of happened in reality, and not in the fantsy world of NIST's computer simulations, is the thermal expansion would have been relieved through downward sagging. The expanded beams would not have remained rigid.

As Kevin Ryan wrote in his review of NIST's final report:

These extremely high steel temperatures would most certainly have resulted in the weakening of the beams, once the shear studs had been lost, allowing the thermal expansion to be relieved through downward sagging. This fact is supported by the experimental data produced by the Cardington tests, described in NCSTAR 1-9 (section 8.4.3), where much shorter floor beam spans experienced significant sagging. Therefore, this rigid beam linear expansion hypothesis is not realistic.

Not only does NIST's theory have no historical precedent, but they didn't even conduct experiments to test the validity of it. But of course, this is not the main problem with NIST's theory, or any fire/damage theory. The main problem is of course the freefall rate, which brings me to Charlie's next point.

Charlie has been repeating the old debunker chestnut that the total time WTC7 took to collapse, including the east penthouse collapse, was 18 seconds, not 6.5. This is true. The problem is, the TIME is irrelevant. It's the ACCELERATION at each instant that matters. To give you an idea of how the time doesn't really matter, consider the following... (Warning: Math ahead!)

When accelerating constantly from rest, the distance-acceleration-time formula is distance = ½ × acceleration × time² (S = ½ a t²). WTC7 was 180 metres tall. So for WTC7 falling at constant freefall acceleration (9.8ms^-2), the values would be:

180 = ½ × 9.8 × t²

Which gives you a value for t of about 6 seconds. Now let's imagine WTC7 fell at only half the rate of gravity (4.9 ms^-2). The values in this case would be:

180 = ½ × 4.9 × t²

Which would give you a value for t of about 8.5 seconds. The rate of fall has been halved, but the time has only increased by a couple of seconds. This is because everytime you halve a, you double t². Which means you multiply t by √2 (1.4). So halving the acceleration will yield only a 40% increase in time.

Now if WTC7 had taken 8.5 seconds to collapse, a truther might say "this is only a couple of seconds longer than freefall, this is proof of demolition", and a debunker might respond by saying "8.5 seconds corresponds to an acceleration of half that of freefall, no demolition needed", and the debunker would be correct. But this is assuming the acceleration is constant throughout. In reality the acceleration was not constant.

This was the mistake NIST made in their draft report. They correctly pointed out that the time between the moment the main structure (excluding the east penthouse) began to collapse and the moment the building disappeared from view in the most well known video of its collapse, was 5.4 seconds. Freefall time would have been 3.9 seconds. But the time is irrelevant, what matters is the acceleration. When physicist David Chandler called them out on this, they did a revised analysis for their final report. Below is NIST's velocity-time graph of WTC7's collapse...



"In Stage 2, the north face descended at gravitational acceleration ... This free fall drop continued for approximately 8 stories or 32.0 m (105 ft), the distance traveled between times t = 1.75 s and t = 4.0 s." ~ NIST NCSTAR 1-A

So NIST admitted that for 2.25 seconds, the building fell at an acceleration of 9.8ms^-2 - gravitational acceleration - as if eight stories worth of building were just teleported away.

This is what we've been saying all along is impossible. Because when an object is falling at freefall acceleration, all of its gravitational potential energy is being converted into energy of motion, which means there is no energy left over to actually collapse the building! It's that simple. It doesn't matter if the period of freefall is only a small fraction of the overall collapse time, freefall acceleration at any moment is impossible.



NIST have not explained the 2.25 seconds of freefall, they've simply asserted that it is consistent with their computer model. Their computer model has not been independently reviewed and they haven't even released an animation of the entire collapse. All we have from them therefore is their word. Even if several floors of the outer structure were buckled as depicted above, there would still be plenty of structure to prevent the building from accelerating at free fall. Because in order to crush that buckled structure, it would have to use some of its gravitational potential energy, this would mean that not all the gravitational energy is being converted to kinetic enegy, and therefore freefall would not occur. The only known way to get a building to accelerate downwards at a free fall rate is controlled demolition.

In fact, controlled demolitions don't fall in a free fall TIME either - as debunker alienentity demonstrated. However, alienentity's analysis was oversimplified. Again, he just TIMED the demolition. I expect if you were to do a velocity-time graph of the demolition it would have the same characteristic S-shape as WTC7's velocity-time graph above. This S-shape, you could say, is a fingerprint of controlled demolition.

As I said before, I'm not disagreeing with Charlie Veitch's assessment of conspiracy theorist psychology. Certainly the average 9/11 truther suffers from a cult-like psychology due to being so emotionally invested in their views. However, I strongly disagree with Charlie's new stance on the controlled demolition stuff and the 'inside job' theory in general. On the plus side though, Charlie's dissention may encourage the conspiracy theorists to research more into the science. This post is for both their benefit and Charlie's. I'll send this article to him, hopefully he'll at least see he's been misled by some old defunct claims which we've addressed ad-nauseum on this very blog.

Another Balzac Vitry Verinage

DEF Tower, Balzac, Vitry-sur-Seine
June 23, 2010



This is another verinage demolition of an apartment building in the same area as the other one.

And here's an After Effects speed-time plot...



Can't get much clearer than that really!

See Also:

Debunker Verinage Fantasies are Bunk!

Reflecting on the Verinage demolition method

Charlie Veitch, WTF???

The latest person to be branded a shill by fundamentalist truthers is Charlie Veitch of The Love Police who recently announced to all his followers that he no longer believes 9/11 was an inside job. This is especially weird because no less than two weeks ago he said the scientific evidence presented by Richard Gage had fully convinced him that the towers were demolished. In the above clip he explains why he's changed his mind.

I'm assuming Charlie didn't know this was being recorded because he revealed something I'm guessing he wasn't supposed to. Apparently the BBC are making a program called "9/11 Conspiracy Roadtrip" about five 'truthers', including Charlie, touring the states investigating 9/11.

Update:

Conspiracy Road Trip Reactions

Now I wanna know who these other four 'truthers' are, because Charlie is not a prominent person in the 9/11 truth movement. He's just a general activist who has only mentioned 9/11 every now and then. I expect it will be the same with the other four. No doubt one of them will also be a crazy no-planer or something. If so, it's not really a program about truthers. He also mentioned visiting family members. Again, I expect these were carefully selected family members who disagree with us. But what about the family members behind the BuildingWhat campaign?

Edit: More info on the BBC piece from WideShutUK

The game the BBC are playing here is obvious. Their intention is to get these five so-called 'truthers' to recant their conspiracy views so the viewer thinks this is all BS. And it seems with Charlie they have succeeded.

Alot of what he says in the above clip I actually agree with. I agree that there is a sort of cult-like mentality with regards to things like Pentagon no-plane theories and fake phone call stuff. But this is not the real 9/11 truth movement. Most real truthers have abandoned these theories. It's only the conspiracy theorists who ascribe to them. Veitch seems to have lumped the 9/11 conspiracy theorists and the 9/11 truthers together. They are not the same.

And his comment about the psychology is right on. 'Awakened' people can be just as guilty of becoming emotionally attached to an idea as the so-called sheeple. And the furor of comments he has recieved the last few days proves that.

I respect differing opinions, but he seems to be parroting alot of typical debunker denialism here. He states flatly that he 'saw no evidence of controlled demolition', as if he's forgotten about all the science he saw from Richard Gage's presentation in Cambridge. And he parrots the 'impossibility' canard. As if he's forgotten everything people like David Icke (he's seen David Icke live) say about compartmentalization.

He also said he spoke to a demolition expert, who I assume was probably someone like Brent Blanchard, and I'm guessing they told him it would be impossible to demolish those buildings. While there are many demolition experts who disagree with us, the problem with their counter arguments is that we are not saying these buildings were destroyed using the conventional methods that most demolition experts are familiar with. In fact, we are saying the exact opposite. These were very unconventional demolitions. It doesn't matter how impossible you believe such a thing to be, the science is there. To say "I can't imagine how these buildings could be covertly demolished, therefore I'm going to deny all the hard science that proves they were covertly demolished" is an argument from incredulity, a logical fallacy.

At 5:15 in the above video he says he was given a demonstration of the ineffectiveness of 'nanothermite'. But John Cole has demonstrated that crude thermate-based devices can be quite effective at cutting steel. It all depends on how it's used.



But even if he's right, and nanothermite is ineffective at cutting steel, it was still found in the dust. And it still shouldn't be there! Regardless of how it was used, it's very existence in the dust proves fowl play.

I don't like calling people shills, and I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt, but still ... it's very strange how someone could completely change their opinion so suddenly. I think it may be that he was shown evidence that a plane hit the pentagon and evidence which refuted alot of the other fringe stuff, realised those ideas were all crazy, and then applied this assessment of 'crazy' to all the 9/11 truth arguments. And the tidal wave of rabid comments he has recieved from so-called 'truthers' have reinforced that assessment.

I'll assume this is just him mistaking fringe 9/11 conspiracy theorists for 9/11 truthers and thinking in black and white and not due him being 'got to'.