Cap'n Refsmmat

To revolutionize physics, physicists must know about a discovery, and posting it on a forum won't really do that well enough. That's what peer-reviewed journals are for: publishing discoveries and "revolutionary" ideas.

Right. Try the Newest SFN Style and tell me what you think. I don't like it myself, but if you really want the avatar over there... (Note: I can force the post text to not wrap around the avatar, but then it has to stay a fixed distance away from the left of the box, meaning that if the avatar is small, it looks bad.)

The SFN User Awards polls are closed and Klaynos would like to announce the results.

Weird. Try deleting your SFN cookies and logging in again. Dak: that will screw up text longer than a paragraph, but I can try it if you really want it.

Those weren't peer-reviewed papers, one was a blog post. And the argument against Dr. Griscom is essentially this: The collapse was not initiated by all of the girders collapsing at once. NIST believes it to have been the failure of the core columns collapsing, which, as they collapsed, pulled (through the floor beams) the outside columns inward. The existence of the outer columns was negated by the fact that they were pulled in by the collapse. Also, any estimate of the time to collapse is guaranteed to be inaccurate, simply because the base of the tower was obscured by dust near the end of the collapse. NIST acknowledges this, and says that the 11-second time was for the first columns to hit the ground. Not the complete collapse. Anyway, this thread has run its course. The conspiracy theorists have repeated the same arguments over and over, tried their ad-hominem attacks and appeals to authority, but I will not tolerate it any more.

Once I have the time, I'll gladly do that. Just wait a bit. http://wtc.nist.gov/pubs/factsheets/faqs_8_2006.htm NIST says: Note the bolded stuff. It's important.

Not physicists and engineers, students of neuroscience and experts in nuclear fusion. Not structural engineers. And most of the articles are unrelated to our current topic, the collapse of the buildings. The diagram is misleading simply because it portrays the buildings as solid blocks, and they're small, too. Let's try a thought experiment instead: Design a 93-story tall building out of steel and concrete. It must be able to catch another 14-story building, of identical structure, falling from a height of 20 feet directly above it, without sustaining significant structural damage. Hard, isn't it? Remember that each floor of the WTC buildings was covered with concrete, too. Now pause for thought. Sure, the top floors might have had a hard time collapsing, but they weren't moving very fast. The longer the building had to fall, the more momentum it had - from mass (it collected more floors as it went) and acceleration (from gravity). If there was a 1/4 of a second delay on the top floor, there was perhaps a 1/64 second delay on the bottom. Also, claiming that the collapse was exactly 11 seconds is rather misleading. By the time the collapse has progressed to the bottom of the towers, there is so much dust and debris flying everywhere that it is impossible to determine just when the collapse stops, even in video. So it may have taken 15 seconds, or 18, or anything. Unless you had a guy with a stopwatch standing on the observation deck, you can't really claim it was "near free-fall speeds."

If you put something on a person's face as they sleep, they try to wipe it off (while still asleep), but that doesn't mean they consciously felt anything.

I just love how you ignore my reasoning and then tell me I have no reasoning. Tell you what, how about you read my post again and get back to me? And if you give a private board the ability to do things a court only has the authority to do, there are legal issues that arise. That still doesn't explain how it kept burning for so long.

So, now that you've all had a while to see the new style, are you used to it yet? Still want the avatar somewhere else? I'm totally used to it by now, I think.

You could probably use a larger (but still small) hydraulic pump external to the hand and pistons mounted on each finger.

Heck, I could explain everything, but you probably wouldn't like the explanations.

I think you have a reading comprehension problem.

Presumably, after realizing it was all untrue, they told the truth in the report. I mean, you don't usually say "it's all wrong, but here's a report based on it." Now stop the stupid sarcastic comments.

Right. So you want us to trust a journal created with the intent of proving a point. Hardly unbiased. Five democrats, five republics. Hardly "most." That would be nice, but it would be worrisome to have an independent group going around subpoena-ing things.

Iron (the main component of steel) is almost always found with sulfur, which must be removed. If it isn't...

Apparently eutectic reactions did, although a chemist will have to explain those. Also note the mention of sulfidation. http://httd.njuct.edu.cn/matweb/gas/ka_ht/ht_sulfd.htm If the steel had above-normal sulfur content, or contamination, etc., well there you go. Suddenly girders lose significant amounts of strength, and not necessarily at their melting point.

Err, yes, so they said "melt," but they didn't really mean it. Right. Regardless, my point is that explosives were not needed to bring down the towers - if steel can be significantly weakened or melted by gasoline, it can be melted by jet fuel, if perhaps by a different amount. The molten bits of metal found in the rubble could have been any metal with a low melting point.

We still have a lot to learn before we can even begin to answer that question.

Just as a note, there is a general science section. I've also removed your other thread, as it's easier to keep replies all in one place.

So now you have to explain how thermite would keep burning in the rubble days after the collapse. That has no relevance to this thread.

Oh yes, and I thought I'd bring this up again. I find it rather irritating when people ignore certain arguments against them. News article: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/04/29/BAGVOPHQU46.DTL

Aluminum melts at 660 C. There are a vast number of different metals inside large buildings that can melt - you can't assume it's all steel. The Pentagon, being a shorter building, had actual firefighters actually able to try to contain the fire. That's harder eighty floors up. You forget the mass momentum thousands of tons of steel and building materials get when they begin to accelerate downward. Assuming I could send electric shocks through the Internet, I'd... oh, wait, I can't. Assumptions don't help. Err, gee, that's what's called a strawman argument. I did not suggest that the lower half of the building was significantly weakened. I suggested that by the time the collapse reached the stronger part of the building, it was moving quickly enough to easily destroy any support structures in place. Just think: how would you try to catch several stories of a tall building, with contents and all, with some steel beams? It's not an easy problem. The more floors that start moving, the more mass is involved, and the more force the collapse imparts to lower floors. Also, gravity has a nice way of accelerating things downward. Okay. I'm a skeptic. That means I wait for the evidence before I believe something. So when these doctors and professors come up with the evidence, I'll believe them. But right now, you're full of baloney. Appeal to authority. You do realize ad hominem attacks are against our rules, don't you? And I see no reason to believe that you are doing anything but that. It's not like they were trying to keep the passengers comfortable or anything. They didn't need to worry about, say, exceeding the design limits of the aircraft, or anything like that... anything that breaks would be of little importance. That's the problem: you're attacking the straw man you yourself constructed, not the arguments the rest of us are putting forward. The penthouse is, err, on top, isn't it? Appeal to authority. Reference? There's plenty of other flammable stuff in the building. You will note that insane_alien points out the possibility of plastics or glass providing the effect. You'll need to prove it's "pure nonsense" first. Please also note that I will begin to hand out warning points to people using ad-hominem arguments (and other fallacies) in their posts. You've been warned.

That's probably hypothetical, as the nearest black hole is light-years away. The concept is correct, however. Atomic clocks on fast-moving airplanes record slight differences in time depending on their movement.

There are two: the general theory of relativity and the special theory of relativity. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_theory_of_relativity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_relativity