Video from National Geographic?

I saw this, and it was probably discussed before, but what DO people have to say about this?


www.youtube.com...

To my understanding, if the same piece was under a crap load of building, the fire would not need to be that strong to do this.

On the episode, there were some people who claimed that a confined piece is not a good example. Why? If anything, I've seen that that would make it more likely to fail.

I mean, if I make a toothpick wtc and crack one piece, it doesn't fall, but crack a whole floor? Tumble.

I think using a smaller girder disqualifies the entire test. They certainly could have used an actual sized beam and that would have been cooler, but they chose not too.
As for not using fire proofing they can only guess that the fireproofing fell off. There was no on there who lived to tell us and the building crumbled into dust leaving no evidence.

I would like to comment on your toothpick analogy.

I think you are correct, if you crack the entire floor it would fall off. But how much damage would it do to the remaining structure beneath it?
Would it crush it some, or cause it to crumble into dust as it falls to the ground atop itself?

I personally do not accept this video as evidence of anything but thanks for the post. It should provide some good conversation in the thread.

I didn't know National Geographic did a piece on this topic. Thanks for the post.

I continued on since the clip you posted, and noticed there wasn't much additional information that isn't already available to the average ATS member. However, I did enjoy the ending.

This video is a great example of how not to conduct an investigation. After watching this episode it is clear Nat Geo supports the official story. All this episode showed was that Nat Geo devised an experiment to support their OS theory.

It would be nice to see a truly objective experiment, perhaps a scaled down model of one of the WTC towers, maybe 10 stories. I know it will never happen but I don't see this debate ever coming to an end unless something like this is done.

reply to post by taccj9903


Good response from all of you. But what I wanted to point out is the time itself. WTC burned for a lot more and that could do a lot more damage. Toothpicks? Weight increases drastically to scale. More mass, more gravity action pulling down.

And as to fire defenses. I mean, I know they cleaned off the asbestos from there and replaced it. So you really have to end up asking if they did a good job. I can't honestly say I have that much faith in NYC government to do that job right.

I don't think they ever took off the asbestos and put it back on like you say....by regulations standards it actually needed to come off...which I think estimated to be 1 billion dollars or so and as such never happened. Not to mention the asbestos is actually applied by spraying it on in a liquid form so to say it was applied poorly is hard to believe because it does not require much labor to actually do it.

I think that by having the MUCH smaller beam in the experiment they throw everything away. Not to mention that in the structure the beams were made in a pattern that allowed them to all support each other. Even if some had sagged they would have been supported by others.

Also the government story stated that the floors themselves collapsed...not the beams and as such the central column should have still been standing AT LEAST so some degree because the central columns did not hold the floors directly.

Finally they fell in about 15 seconds....it SHOULD have taken about 45 seconds based on physics calculations. Finally as was shown in this poor experiment the beam twisted and rolled. If the beam sags and twists how is it possible for the building to have fallen straight down with no variance in any direction...not once....but twice (3 times if you include WTC bldg. 7)?

[edit on 2-6-2010 by Dennislp3]

reply to post by Dennislp3


In architecture we value scale. And we use materials ans scaled items all the time. if scaling it throws away everything as you say, then every single structure built off of scale is at risk of failing.

Also they took the asbestos off. They replaced, not put it back on.


And physics wise, it works. Items accelerate extremely fast due to gravity. Due to impulse, a small force over a long time is the same as a large force briefly. imagine a large force over a large time. The fact is that scale works. If it does not, than we should not use it in stress test models.

I am an architect major. And one of the first things we learned was scale. Scale is used so one can cheaply create a simulation of the model.

There are two kinds of models. Simulation and representation. This video was simulation. And as far as I can see, it works plenty well.

Originally posted by taccj9903
This video is a great example of how not to conduct an investigation. After watching this episode it is clear Nat Geo supports the official story. All this episode showed was that Nat Geo devised an experiment to support their OS theory.

I watched that same video. I personally believe that judging from the science, expert testimony, and evidence that it's possible for airplanes and fire to have brought down the WTC towers and judging from the science, expert testimony, and evidence that it's also possible that some method of demolition was used to bring down the WTC towers.

I would conduct a similar experiment if I wanted to test the OS theory that fire weakened the steel of the WTC towers. How else (other than putting steel in fire) would you test the theory that fire weakened steel?

You said:
"they devised an experiment to support their OS theory"


What about saying:

"they have devised an experiment to test the OS theory."

reply to post by Gorman91


Wow! Great video.

Gage and Griffin are so lost in their delusion world views, it can only lead one to feel a little sorry for them, now....(only a little, though...because they are still vile examples of profiteering on someone else's misery...)

Speaking of vile examples...I noticed...was that? Dylan Avery, also invited as a representative 'truther' to see the NatGeo rough cut footage??

Too bad they didn't include any of his comments...(if he made any at all, after chewing off his fingernails)...would have been greatly entertaining.

Originally posted by iamcpc
You said:
"they devised an experiment to support their OS theory"


What about saying:

"they have devised an experiment to test the OS theory."

Or, more to the point, what about devising an experiment that supports the conspiracy theory? Get a steel column of the exact same size/thickness as the ones that were in the WTC, plant it vertically, and see what it takes to destroy it.

If it'll take a whole day of cutting with blowtorches and a whole wall of sandbags full of thermite to destroy the columns, that ought to show how unrealistic the conspiracy theory is, right there.

Great video. Thanks for sharing.
They scaled the beam down, but not the heat. Of course a smaller/thinner piece of metal will degrade much faster/easier. Will this same thing happen to a much larger beam?

reply to post by iamcpc


Heating one steal beam, a smaller one than what was used at the WTC, is not my idea of a good experiment. If they wanted to test the OS theory they should have used actual size and number of beams connected together in the same fashion as WTC and spread the fire out over those beams. I don't doubt that an intense fire on an exposed steal beam would weaken that beam, however, I don't believe Nat Geo represented actual circumstances that took place with the steel beams in those buildings. They exposed a smaller steal beam with one hell of an intense fire focused at the mid (weakest) point of the beam and also placed a load at that point, of course it will weaken and sag.



[edit on 2-6-2010 by taccj9903]

[edit on 2-6-2010 by taccj9903]

Originally posted by HrdCorHillbilly
Great video. Thanks for sharing.
They scaled the beam down, but not the heat. Of course a smaller/thinner piece of metal will degrade much faster/easier. Will this same thing happen to a much larger beam?

You tell us.

You recognize that a smaller beam heats up faster than a large beam. Therefore using your own logic displayed, it will, but just take longer.

This is what you were intuitively saying, correct?

Originally posted by taccj9903

If they wanted to test the OS theory they should have used actual size and number of beams connected together in the same fashion as WTC and spread the fire out over those beams.

Why?

High temp steel, hot enough to seriously degrade its load carrying capacity, isn't part of the NIST hypothesis. Moderate temp creep IS, however.

This test was simply to show just how abysmally wrong and gullible truthers are when they say that fires can't weaken steel.

It also happens to be an in-your-face when they used jet fuel to do it, when so many gullible truthers make unimformed statements like black smoke = a cool fire.

Originally posted by Joey Canoli

Originally posted by taccj9903

If they wanted to test the OS theory they should have used actual size and number of beams connected together in the same fashion as WTC and spread the fire out over those beams.

Why?

High temp steel, hot enough to seriously degrade its load carrying capacity, isn't part of the NIST hypothesis. Moderate temp creep IS, however.

This test was simply to show just how abysmally wrong and gullible truthers are when they say that fires can't weaken steel.

It also happens to be an in-your-face when they used jet fuel to do it, when so many gullible truthers make unimformed statements like black smoke = a cool fire.

Mr Canoli,

I believe you are mistaken if you think all truthers don't believe fire can weaken steel. I think what you are so sadly missing here is the point that different size I-beams have different strengths. For example, and W8x24x25' I-beam would have less strength than a W16x50x25' I-beam so if I wanted to show how fire can weaken steal I would obviously use a smaller size I-beam. www.efunda.com...

If you like the taste of NIST's kool-aid that is your business. I'm not buying it.

reply to post by taccj9903


Like he said. It would just take longer. It did...

Originally posted by taccj9903
reply to post by iamcpc

 

I don't believe Nat Geo represented actual circumstances that took place with the steel beams in those buildings. They exposed a smaller steal beam with one hell of an intense fire focused at the mid (weakest) point of the beam and also placed a load at that point, of course it will weaken and sag.

I agree. They did show that fire can weaken steel. Something that people on this very forum don't believe. Something that people in the truther movement don't believe. (how did we ever do mideval iron and steel blacksmithing)

Well here is the thing. Without going into the building after impact and before collapse it's impossible to know how much damage the airplanes did. I've read a lot of reports. The one with the most detail was the one done by the team of experts at MIT.

SOURCE: web.mit.edu...
"number of destroyed core columns in South Tower will vary between minimum of 7 and maximum of 20."

"the predicted number of damaged core columns in the North Tower will vary between 4 and 12."

"Yet, we do believe that the primary damage suffered by the South Tower via the initial impact alone was severe enough to bring it down with very little outside help"

(I assume they mean outside help from things like fire, thermite, explosives)


Without knowing EXACTLY how many core support beams were destroyed by the airplane it's impossible to know the loads the other support beams were carrying.

There is a TON of science, physics, and engineering that has to be poured into the collapse investigation. And after pouring science physics and engineering all over what happened that day we only have theories.


(just simple numbers to make the math easier)
44 support beams are supporting 440 tons. 10 tons each you take out 7 of them with a 110-150 ton 500 mile per hour airplane. You also take out a decent percent of some perimiter columns. Now each core support beam is supporting 12 tons each. Or maybe certian beams are supporting 13 tons and certian beams are supporting 11 tons. Now you heat 20 (of the remaining 37 beams) supporting 12 tons to 1000 degrees and now they are only able to support 7 tons. Those extra 100 tons have to now be spread out among the 17 remaining beams who are already holding up 12 tons. Now you have beams who were originally supporting 10 tons holding up almost 18 tons. If one of the 17 remaining beams started to heat or even crack then you could have beams that were originally supporting 10 tons now supporting 20 tons or even more. I'm not even thinking about the tons of airplane debri sitting on the floor.



When I think about it like that it seems that it is possible that the airplane fire theory could have happened.

i still think that the planes were actually just holograms of some sort

911blogger.com...

By Dwain Deets and Gregg Roberts

AE911Truth plans to release a longer response than this one as soon as resources permit. In the meantime, readers are encouraged to examine these other recently published pieces:

Jim Hoffman, National Geographic Does 9/11: Another Icon Debased in Service of the Big Lie

Kevin Ryan, Finally, an Apology From the National Geographic Channel (with comments at Kevin Ryan's Blog)

Richard Gage, AIA, Gregg Roberts, and David Chandler, Evidence for the Explosive Demolition of World Trade Center, Building 7 on 9/11

National Geographic Channel (NGC) first broadcast its two-hour special misleadingly entitled "9/11: Science and Conspiracy," on August 31, 2009. NGC, with 67% ownership by Rupert Murdoch, posed as a neutral party explaining both sides in an ongoing dispute. In reality, it manipulated the presentation, doing many subtle and not so subtle things to support the side of the official story.

In actuality, this so-called documentary was a de facto hit piece, an assault on truth, and obviously skewed in support of the government's explanation of 9/11 and against "9/11 truth." Whatever their intentions, the producers failed completely in any supposed attempt at balanced reporting and a fair presentation of both sides of the story.

The Manipulation Channel

The first big manipulation was the use of a highly misleading title, suggesting that those supporting the official story represent the scientific viewpoint, while those questioning the official story are merely "conspiracy theorists" who have no science or scientists on their side. The truth is that those supporting the official story were manipulating and those questioning the official story were much more objective in their reasoning.

Most troubling, NGC used a devious tactic at program's end against those questioning the official story. These four leaders of the objective side (Dylan Avery, Richard Gage, David Ray Griffin, and Steven Jones) had pointed out shortcomings in the several "experiments" (better called pseudo-scientific demonstrations) sponsored by NGC. According to NGC, these experiments would answer the key questions in the dispute between the two sides, but the 9/11 skeptics were critical of each of the demonstrations, saying that each of them were irrelevant. NGC twisted this criticism of the experiments as evidence that 9/11 skeptics would refuse to accept any experimental results that work against their conclusions – and would do so for that reason alone.

NGC actually used the term "truthers" to refer to the objectivists, a silly-sounding label used as shorthand within the community of 9/11 skeptics, but not one that they use when speaking to critics. The use of that insider label was one of the many appeals to emotion rather than reason used in the show. To help understand this, compare the use of the "N" word by African-Americans themselves, as opposed to its use by people who are not members of that group and instead are hostile toward its members. The repeated use of the word "beliefs," more appropriate to emotional and religious contexts, rather than the word "conclusions," which carries a connotation of rationality, is another example of this kind of manipulation.

In each case of critiquing the demonstrations, Gage said, "the experiment design doesn't even take into account the evidence for explosive controlled demolition." His critique was glossed over by NGC as if he hadn't even said it. What did he mean by this? It turns out, Gage had provided NGC a full briefing on this evidence, and what he meant by explosive controlled demolition. Gage furthermore was assuming as he was making these critiques that his terminology would convey the meaning developed during his full briefing. It turns out that, in what survived the producers' cuts, NGC chose to exclude all of this evidence presented by Gage.

Had Gage known that NGC would censor his list of evidence, he might have given a more spe

[edit on 10-6-2010 by truthseeker911]

Continued

Had Gage known that NGC would censor his list of evidence, he might have given a more specific reason for criticizing the various demonstrations. For example, in the aviation fuel fire test, where NGC showed that a single steel beam under load would sag when it reached over 2,000 degrees F. In reality, 2,000 F wasn't an important temperature at all in the larger context, or even the fact that aviation fuel could burn that hot. Part of the evidence for explosive controlled demolition was that temperatures in the structures reached more than twice that temperature – far above what burning aviation fuel could produce. NGC's experiment was moot. Not a single leading 9/11 skeptic would deny that steel that is sufficiently overloaded and heated will twist out of shape and eventually fail entirely. Indeed, Gage said this on the show.

Other key parts of the evidence for explosive controlled demolition was the more than two seconds of free-fall acceleration of Building 7, the molten metal at Ground Zero that remained extremely hot for many weeks (unexplainable for jet fuel and office fires), the evidence of unignited nanothermite in the dust, the massive girders thrown 600 feet horizontally, and the symmetrical destruction of all three buildings, accelerating into what should have been the paths of greatest resistance. Although the nanothermite was discussed by Jones, it was dismissed by the NGC narrator as merely something some 9/11 skeptics believe in. NGC reinforced this dismissal of the importance of nanothermite by not at all being bothered that their thermite demonstration did not address nanothermite, which was found in the dust from the destruction, but rather its tamer cousin thermite, which NGC was willing and able to obtain.

The NGC narrator was cast as a voice of authority. The tone and inflection conveyed the idea that this show was presenting the "final word," bringing truth out of the controversy. During the lead-up to the building demolition demonstration, the narrator commented that it would take so many people and so much time to wire the explosives, she didn't even know if it would be possible to wire ''both'' buildings. The use of the term "both" was part of an effort throughout the program to ignore Building 7. It falsely implied that only two buildings "collapsed" that day. Building 7 is widely regarded among 9/11 skeptics as a more obvious problem for the official story than the Twin Towers, since its destruction precisely resembled a controlled demolition. (It takes some people longer to see that the destruction of the Twin Towers also had to be a controlled demolition, albeit one that used an "overkill" amount of explosives and started at the impact zones.)

NGC attempted to make its case using personalities in the public's eye, casting them as authorities on this matter. One was Matt Taibbi, editor of Rolling Stone magazine. At one point, Taibbi said, "We ask people who really know the answers. I've asked dozens of structural engineers and scientists about what happened on 9/11, and the answer I uniformly get from credible sources is always the same—overall, this story tends to be supported by the evidence." Such a statement completely dismisses the expertise of Gage and Jones, the more than 800 architects and engineers at Gage's website, in favor of unnamed alleged dozens of structural engineers and scientists somewhere out there. No opportunity was given to counter this outrageous put-down and dismissal. With regard to structural engineers, see our a recent article "29 Structural & Civil Engineers Cite Evidence for Controlled Demolition in Collapses of All 3 WTC High-Rises on 9/11" by Gregg Roberts and AE911Truth staff. The article presents hard evidence that Taibbi's unnamed dozens would find hard to refute.