"Inside Job": Hidden energy in reports by Prof. Bazant, Dr. Greening and D. Thomas

Originally posted by -PLB-
reply to post by Akareyon

 

I see you ignore my questions.

I don't, but I see you're bringing them up to avoid confrontation with the logic implications I laid out much earlier, so I hesitated to answer them to avoid the pitfall of engaging in a salami-tactics discussion. I must admit I had my answer to your question written, but I thought it would lead nowhere. Let me explain why I decided to not get deeper into this.

So we're stuffing 12 floors into containers, put them onto the floor slab of the 98th floor and see what happens. Will connections break? I don't know, it could be. If they do, they can't take the perimeter and the core with them as they are going down. If they don't, they will have to take the perimeter and the core with them and have less momentum to go through the next slab.

So there is a huge "I dunno" speculation around this sort of argumentation. Want to throw me through the ice palace again? Okay, but this time we're bringing the sucker down. I tie a rope around my waist and the the other end around the topmost flag pole. Then I jump and we'll see what happens.

It all depends on the way the ice palace was built. I don't know what it was built like, but I know my weight, the weight of the palace and its volume. Let's see how brittle it is, shall we?

It's just a different approach within the boundaries of the laws of physics, not a revolution of math or an attempt at going over your arguments as if they were not valid. They are. But even though our analysis is based on simple math, thought experiments and approximations, we are still talking about the collapse of two of the tallest buildings ever built by men that were made of steel - not because it looks so funky but because it's a great material to build something solid with - and that were reduced to dust and rubble within seconds, allegedly under their own weight and with no means to do something about it, because (macroscopically) they behaved like a fluid after a few minutes' fire in one relatively small section: they were sinking like Titanics.

I am here because it says "deny ignorance" under the logo of each page I click on. If you decide that you know enough, that the slipshod design and similar explanations suffice, I won't force you to see what I see. I see a machine being pulled by a string into itself. If you see bad construction and natural behaviour, I must not agree, but can accept that because that doesn't make you any dumber in my eyes. You probably just have made different experiences than me, so we're looking through different eyes and speaking different languages, so we must both be patient one with another, and translate, and try to understand. I don't know what happened. I could conceive a lot of apparatuses to mimic the behaviour, think of a thousand ways to bring a model down, but each would require either a lot of planning or a lot of force. And that makes me an uneducated layman? I'm not just playing at what was written here, but also at the way this incident is treated by our governments, our experts, our media, and our neighbours.

I said I'm not trying to sell you anything. That is true. I can only show you the door. You and Irish are better at Euler, Mathlab, Ruby and whatnot than me, it would take me weeks to do what you can do in a few minutes. But what I as a layman can do, I have done: offer a different perspective from an uneducated fool who has been stacking, glueing, sticking, inventing, screwing, shearing, repairing, building, tearing, breaking and destroying things all his life for a living. Of course the towers were big, but not big enough for rocket science and relativistic phenomena.

reply to post by Akareyon


It seems to me that the answers to the questions I asked are fundamental for creating a model. You need to identify the weakest link in the towers. Just out of the blue introducing pressure per unit area is useless when the load is concentrated on specific structural members. It is not for nothing that I asked what exactly you want to analyze, why, and what you expect as result. What you are doing here is diving into specific details while completely losing sight of the complete picture.


Besides all that, I just reviewed the calculations you did 2 pages back, and they make no sense to me whatsoever.

E we know (2,1*110 = 231 GJ), V we know (1,638,400m³) . It's the average of everything inside the Tower, no matter how solid, fluid, brittle, weak or strong it is. Pressure is force per area. We also know the (average) area, 4095m². So we have pinned down the (average) force that was necessary to overcome F_c:

p=E/V=141,327 N/m².

p=F/A, so

F=p*A=141,327 N/m² * 4095m²=578,733,673 N. Strange, that almost looks like 58,994,258 kg to me, just 100 tonnes more than the mass of Block C... on each meter of height? That's the stress on the structure now that Block C is sinking through it!

First you calculate the total potential energy in the building, then you calculate the average potential energy per cubic meter. For what purpose? Floor 100 has 100 times more potential energy stored than floor 1. Then you use this value to calculate a force? I have no idea what force you think you calculated. It all makes absolutely no sense to me what you are doing.

Originally posted by Akareyon

What are we arguing about?

You misunderstand the discussion. There is NO argument here. Merely an attempt by some to educate you so that you understand a little better so that you may dispel your "inside job" notions.

So, once it's moving, it's moving and nothing in the world could stop it (except the bathtub)?

This is the purpose of the discussion, right? To determine that....

You will see, if you're honest enough, intelligent enough, and willing enough to swallow your pride about your "inside job" notions, that Bazant was correct that collapse was inevitable.

reply to post by Akareyon


You seem to be assuming that the weight from above will be distributed as per your ice analogy. You weigh less on the ice when you are spread out because you are distributing your weight among more area. With the towers, simply from the initial leaning we can be certain that it never started out as a distributed flat-on-flat collapse. This means more weight was concentrated with other areas. Plus, the simple fact that the top section did fall applies force on the core columns. The exterior wall panels simply cannot take the force of the debris.

You act as if this was something it wasn't. Please, use your brain, and just think about this without so much bias.

reply to post by -PLB-

Just out of the blue introducing pressure per unit area is useless when the load is concentrated on specific structural members. It is not for nothing that I asked what exactly you want to analyze, why, and what you expect as result. What you are doing here is diving into specific details while completely losing sight of the complete picture. [...] It all makes absolutely no sense to me what you are doing.

Then you know now what if feels like for me.

I have found no explanation whatsoever for the "optimistic" assumption that the very structure that held itself up against several fires, one plane impact, one huge kerosene explosion, one bomb in the basement and several storms should suddenly be "doomed" out of the blue under its own weight, why suddenly all floors resisted with no more than 0.5GJ to make sure the complete thing can come crumbling down. I asked you. Did you answer? You didn't, and that's okay because we're debating Bazant here and Bazant said so, so I tried a different approach to explain, and you try to evade again, try to make me look like an idiot who can't count 2+2.

Whatever your thought experiment was, I picked it up to explain in your own words. Whatever your calculations were, I picked them up and used your own math. In the meantime, my experiments were worthless because paper loops are more stable than steel (!) and my Jenga Towers are less wobbly than the skyscrapers that professional engineers erect in New York (!!), my math is useless because I picked basic physical principles out of the blue (!!!). Maybe we should let laymen build our houses from now on?

My numbers were too big, so I unified floor heights and floor areas, now suddenly it doesn't make any sense anymore even if I point my finger at a blatant correspondence between the energy "missing" and the energy I claimed was "hidden" to prove it's not there.

What kind of circular logic is that? The potential energy didn't go up there for free, but it stayed up there for free, no tensile strength or resistive force needed, thank you, it's just in the weakest links. Now, what a surprise, where was it before? Hooked in the skies? Lifted by prayers and goodwill?

And naaw, we cannot derive an average for the tension in the towers (although it is obvious that it must be at least as much as the potential energy), but if Bazant and Greening say each floor's resistance was negligible, it's hewn in stone and not debatable because he's the expert. Wait, that's the point, where has it gone? But okay, let's calculate with that, where's the rest of the energy? Oh, it became kinetic. What is it? Did it become kinetic because it was tension before or is it losing tension because it became kinetic?

Okay, I see, we got the collapse time right by m*g*h. What is that in p*V? What, p*V? Why would you need that? Why would we want to calculate torque, brittleness, surplus pressure, tension diminished, second moment of area, young's modulus, even if just as an approximation, why would it be of any friggin' use to understand and analyse what was going on with another method than the one the experts used, even if all we find out this way is how to simulate the collapse and distribute those values over the shear resistance of four bolts per floor, the amount of spaghetti that we would need to replace the steel columns or even just the displacement of two Jenga blocks relative to another?

And what could someone mean by "2.1GJ triggering 981 GJ, ain't that ratio a little suspicious?" - damn, no, it's the proof for free energy! What's so strange about that? I'm running across this effectiveness every day, don't you?

I promised on page 2:

I won't feel hurt if logic, physics and math prove me wrong

I have feelings and I feel hurt not because of logic, physics and math proving me wrong, but because of baseless insultations, sophistry and dogmatism of a self-proclaimed elite and their willingness to throw two millenia of science and research out of the window and their arrogance towards "uneducated laymen".

But all drama aside, I'm scared as hell and close to tears to see where this is heading.

“How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.”

“Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.”

--George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

Originally posted by Varemia
reply to post by Akareyon

 

You seem to be assuming that the weight from above will be distributed as per your ice analogy. You weigh less on the ice when you are spread out because you are distributing your weight among more area. With the towers, simply from the initial leaning we can be certain that it never started out as a distributed flat-on-flat collapse. This means more weight was concentrated with other areas.

For the moment, of course. If it sinks in with an edge or a corner, little area, big pressure. The deeper it sinks, the larger the area, the smaller the pressure. Now what? What makes two steel columns cut through each other?

Originally posted by Akareyon
Then you know now what if feels like for me.

I have found no explanation whatsoever for the "optimistic" assumption that the very structure that held itself up against several fires, one plane impact, one huge kerosene explosion, one bomb in the basement and several storms should suddenly be "doomed" out of the blue under its own weight, why suddenly all floors resisted with no more than 0.5GJ to make sure the complete thing can come crumbling down. I asked you. Did you answer? You didn't, and that's okay because we're debating Bazant here and Bazant said so, so I tried a different approach to explain, and you try to evade again, try to make me look like an idiot who can't count 2+2.

I did explain it, using the ice plate analogy. That is the mechanism. I also explained how it relates to the WTC. It was not doomed out of the blue, it was doomed because a huge mass (that of the top section) that has been stationary for 25 year started to move as result of failing supports as result of the plane impact and fires.

Whatever your thought experiment was, I picked it up to explain in your own words. Whatever your calculations were, I picked them up and used your own math. In the meantime, my experiments were worthless because paper loops are more stable than steel (!) and my Jenga Towers are less wobbly than the skyscrapers that professional engineers erect in New York (!!), my math is useless because I picked basic physical principles out of the blue (!!!). Maybe we should let laymen build our houses from now on?

You used my math? Where? Are you an alter ego of psikeyhackr? He is the only one I know of who experimented with paper loops. Your calculations make no sense. Start with making clear what energy you are calculating, and what force you are calculating.

My numbers were too big, so I unified floor heights and floor areas, now suddenly it doesn't make any sense anymore even if I point my finger at a blatant correspondence between the energy "missing" and the energy I claimed was "hidden" to prove it's not there.

What kind of circular logic is that? The potential energy didn't go up there for free, but it stayed up there for free, no tensile strength or resistive force needed, thank you, it's just in the weakest links. Now, what a surprise, where was it before? Hooked in the skies? Lifted by prayers and goodwill?

And naaw, we cannot derive an average for the tension in the towers (although it is obvious that it must be at least as much as the potential energy), but if Bazant and Greening say each floor's resistance was negligible, it's hewn in stone and not debatable because he's the expert. Wait, that's the point, where has it gone? But okay, let's calculate with that, where's the rest of the energy? Oh, it became kinetic. What is it? Did it become kinetic because it was tension before or is it losing tension because it became kinetic?

Tension? What tension? Define what you are talking about. Do you mean compression? Again, this all does not make any sense.

Okay, I see, we got the collapse time right by m*g*h. What is that in p*V? What, p*V? Why would you need that? Why would we want to calculate torque, brittleness, surplus pressure, tension diminished, second moment of momentum....

And what could someone mean by "2.1GJ triggering 981 GJ, ain't that ratio a little suspicious?" - damn, no, it's the proof for free energy! What's so strange about that? I'm running across this effectiveness every day, don't you?

Free energy? What on earth are your rambling about.

I promised on page 2:

I won't feel hurt if logic, physics and math prove me wrong

I have feelings and I feel hurt not because of logic, physics and math proving me wrong, but because of baseless insultations, sophistry and dogmatism of a self-proclaimed elite and their willingness to throw two millenia of science and research out of the window and their arrogance towards "uneducated laymen".

But all drama aside, I'm scared as hell and close to tears to see where this is heading.

“How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.”

“Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.”

--George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

Sorry, you completely lost me. Your math doesn't make sense, what you write doesn't make sense. I see absolutely no correlation between what you write and the WTC collapse.

Originally posted by Akareyon

Originally posted by Varemia
reply to post by Akareyon

 

You seem to be assuming that the weight from above will be distributed as per your ice analogy. You weigh less on the ice when you are spread out because you are distributing your weight among more area. With the towers, simply from the initial leaning we can be certain that it never started out as a distributed flat-on-flat collapse. This means more weight was concentrated with other areas.

For the moment, of course. If it sinks in with an edge or a corner, little area, big pressure. The deeper it sinks, the larger the area, the smaller the pressure. Now what? What makes two steel columns cut through each other?

The weight pushing down from above, of course. Do you imagine that all the parts are acting only on each other and are applying no conglomerate weight or force on anything else?

Yeah, tension, what tension... the one I've tried to explain in at least a dozen different ways now? I bet it's such an unknown concept that there's not even a Wikipedia article about it - wait, I even posted the link and called Mr. Pascal to the witness stand! But tension? What tension? If I could just define what I'm talking about...

Your calculations make no sense. [...] this all does not make any sense. [...] What on earth are your rambling about. [...] you completely lost me. Your math doesn't make sense, what you write doesn't make sense.

I'm sorry, you're right. I just redid the math, read Bazants paper and noticed that I'm a complete idiot. I now see how a skyscraper just turning to dust will make more sense when I'm sane again.

Again, I'm really sorry. Thank you for your patience in explaining where I was wrong. It should have been clear to me from the beginning that nothing could have stopped the top from falling, not even nine tops stacked on top of each other.

I'll move out of my flat and live in a tent from now on and never ask stupid questions again and just trust for the experts to know what they're doing.

Nice to meet you, PLB.

And no, I'm not psikeyhackr. My name is Akareyon.

Originally posted by Akareyon

And what could someone mean by "2.1GJ triggering 981 GJ, ain't that ratio a little suspicious?" - damn, no, it's the proof for free energy! What's so strange about that? I'm running across this effectiveness every day, don't you?

2.1 GJ didn't trigger 981 GJ (the rest of the building).

2.1 GJ triggered one floors worth of PE, with some of that KE "consumed" during the collsion. Then that impacted floor added to the KE... iterative process continues, floor by floor in Bazant's paper.

reply to post by Joey Canoli

Thanks for clarifying, Joey. As you can see from my previous posts, I didn't get that concept. Now I understand.

Originally posted by Akareyon
reply to post by Joey Canoli

 

Thanks for clarifying, Joey. As you can see from my previous posts, I didn't get that concept. Now I understand.

So then where's the misunderstanding on your part?

Why are you in tears?

This is the result of building steel structures as we do. There is nothing to fear, nor cry about.

I dare say that in any properly designed steel building, that if the steel columns fail across an entire level, then progressive collapse will be a result. Dogma driven truthers will point out the Windsor building and say, " but look! The building didn't entirely collapse!" True, but not all of the steel columns across a single story failed, because of the robust concrete encasement of those core columns. It's notable that the steel outside the core area DID fail as expected, and that the progressive collapse was halted only by the exteremely robust "technical floor", which is equivalent to a mechanical floor in the towers.

COULD buildings be designed to resist progressive collapse? I don't know the answer to that.

But let's just take a look at it from the perspective of the Bazant paper. Surely it is undeniable that there can be an impact on any column that could cause it to go immediately into plastic buckling. It would of course depend on the amount of load on it prior to buckling in the first place due to fires and impact damage.

So how robust should the building be? Would it need a FOS of 10 to be able to take that impact? 15? 20? And at that point, how expensive would the building be to construct? Would it be useful to build it?????

A more practical approach is to design to normal circumstances: use SFRM and drywall as fire insulation to allow time for firefighters to go put the wet stuff on the hot stuff. Have a sprinkler system also to aid in the above and stop fire spread.

I think that this is a better approach....

reply to post by Akareyon


If you just give up I guess we are done. I don't think anyone here will be able to explain what exactly you have been calculating. I can be wrong, and if so, I am curious to hear it.

reply to post by -PLB-

Yes, I give up, we're done. You're not wrong, I was.

Joey: thank you. Yes, I think it's a good start to have a sprinkler system in a building. Maybe, if I were an engineer, I would also provide for a maxwell line well above m*g, but that's a different story. I'm no engineer, why break my noodle over that. It's okay, life goes on. Thank you all for your patience.

Originally posted by Akareyon

Maybe, if I were an engineer, I would also provide for a maxwell line well above m*g, but that's a different story.

Yes, it's indeed a different story, cuz in reality (and not in Bazant's conditions set forth in his paper) it is ludicrous to expect the column ends to meet in such a fashion as to allow them to halt progressive collapse.

You'd need to design to expected results - that columns are gonna miss, and design the FLOORING to resist being punched through, AND stop the KE of the descending part, AND have connections ablt to withstand that KE.

I hope you're getting it now.....

Originally posted by Joey Canoli
I hope you're getting it now.....

Yes, I think I got it now, I've got it right before my eyes how all those columns jump out of their shoes just in time to give way for the mass of falling debris from above. Thanks.

Originally posted by Akareyon

Originally posted by Joey Canoli
I hope you're getting it now.....

Yes, I think I got it now, I've got it right before my eyes how all those columns jump out of their shoes just in time to give way for the mass of falling debris from above. Thanks.

IOW, you're not gonna believe it until you do the computer program/study that you and IWW have proposed.

Fine.

Then get to it and report back your results please.

Originally posted by Varemia
With the towers, simply from the initial leaning we can be certain that it never started out as a distributed flat-on-flat collapse. This means more weight was concentrated with other areas.

It's good that you realise that all you need to do now is use logic, and realise that unless the force was equally spread across the floor the connections are not going to fail at the same time. Which means there would have been resistance causing the collapse to not be symmetrical, as it would tend to want to fall to the path of least resistance.

This a common problem in mechanics, when objects are not struck 'true' you have deflection, or resistance. For example if you hit a nail with a hammer, anything but straight down, the nail will bend, the hammer deflected. Or if you try to put a piston in a cylinder at an angle, it will jam and resist being forced down the cylinder.

The floors would have done anything but smoothly collapsed straight down with no sign of resistance. Especially as the tops, WTC2, were already tilting and thus not providing an equal pressure across the floor.

Originally posted by ANOK

Originally posted by Varemia
With the towers, simply from the initial leaning we can be certain that it never started out as a distributed flat-on-flat collapse. This means more weight was concentrated with other areas.

It's good that you realise that all you need to do now is use logic, and realise that unless the force was equally spread across the floor the connections are not going to fail at the same time. Which means there would have been resistance causing the collapse to not be symmetrical, as it would tend to want to fall to the path of least resistance.

This a common problem in mechanics, when objects are not struck 'true' you have deflection, or resistance. For example if you hit a nail with a hammer, anything but straight down, the nail will bend, the hammer deflected. Or if you try to put a piston in a cylinder at an angle, it will jam and resist being forced down the cylinder.

The floors would have done anything but smoothly collapsed straight down with no sign of resistance. Especially as the tops, WTC2, were already tilting and thus not providing an equal pressure across the floor.

When did they ever fail at the same time? And since when does an impact avoid what it's impacting to move into the air? You seem to have a basic misunderstanding of your world. Yes, objects will try to find a less resisting place to move, but if they begin impacting already, then the energy is transferring, and it will not move outside until it is able.

I just don't understand your thought process, man. It's like we think on completely different wavelengths.

Originally posted by Joey Canoli
IOW, you're not gonna believe it until you do the computer program/study that you and IWW have proposed.

Fine.

Then get to it and report back your results please.

Fine? We can't even agree what an average is and that E=p*V and now you try to tell me that you'd throw the "inevitability theory" overboard if I'd just post some fancy diagram proving the change in tension per floor that ultimately MUST go along with the crush-down.

No, really, sorry, I don't believe this discussion is going anywhere soon. I suggest we all stay friends and keep up our respect for each other, even if I won't change my mind about the laws of nature and you don't have to change your mind about the inevitability of gravitational progressive collapses. Is that okay for you?