RE: "Remember, the rule for gravity is 32 feet per second per second. In the first second, the material feel 32 feet."
Actually, it's a differential equation. The distance it travels in the first second would be somewhat less than 32 feet, as the falling object doesn't start at 32 fps, but at zero. Without actually doing the math (which would require my blowing the dust off a 30 year old college text book and spending several hours trying to remember most of what I've forgotten over 3 decades), a ballpark number would be close to 20 feet.
"At the end of the second second of the collapse, the top of the building, were it in free fall, would have traveled 192 feet."
The rate of acceleration is constant (32 feet faster every second). At the end of 2 seconds, the object is traveling at 64 fps. It traveled about 20 feet in the first second, had the full 32 fps at the beginning of the second second, and picked up the same 20 feet in the course of acceleration. The distance traveled would be 72 feet, plus or minus the amount of error in my ballpark estimate. Checking my math on the back of a napkin, I come up with:
1st second - 20 feet at 32 fps
2nd second - 72 feet at 64 fps
3rd second - 156 feet at 96 fps
4th second - 272 feet at 128 fps
5th second - 420 feet at 160 fps
6th second - 600 feet at 192 fps
7th second - 812 feet at 224 fps
8th second - 1056 feet at 256 fps
9th second - 1332 feet at 288 fps
I can't be too far off as the numbers check against what we know to be the height of the buildings.
"F=MA. And after 2 seconds, the mass that we are discussing is not the 500,000 ton weight of the entire tower, but the mass of the upper stories alone. In the case of the South Tower, which collapsed first, this would have been a substantial mass..."
Okay, so let's round it off to approximately 250 million pounds for the top 30 stories. If you'll pardon my stubbornness, I still think that's enough to munch up a piece of sheetrock pretty good. All of the weight would have been focused on the exterior columns and the central core, at least at the beginning of the collapse.
"But that still does not explain the initial instability in the structure."
Indeed. The central core should have been virtually untouched at the angle the second plane hit. For the entire weight of the building to be suddenly shifted to the exterior columns, to a degree that the walls and everything attached to them almost instantly turned to powder, the core was just plain gone.
Go over this one again:
howstuffworks.com
I think it fits.
Load up the core columns at the top with thermite. Hit the building with a plane as a diversion, then ignite the incendiaries. Give the thermite about an hour to eat its way to the basement, where it leaves pools of molten metal that are still burning weeks later. Wrap the core columns in the basement with 200-300 pounds of RDX and set that off first, sending a nice shock wave straight into the bedrock. Wait about 10 seconds to let the weight shift to the exterior of the building, then, as a courtesy to those neighbors without the foresight to take out a few billion in terrorism insurance the month before, blow the core to pieces above the point of plane impact with a few hundred more pounds of RDX. Now that the top is off, and won't tip over on those without insurance, 100-200 pounds of RDX wrapped around the core columns every 10 stories or so should do the trick. While there are a few telltale squibs going off on the way down as the core is being disintegrated, most of that is hidden in dust caused by the gravity collapse of perimeter columns, unable to bear the weight of a one billion pound building all by themselves.
What's wrong with that? It covers all the facts. Conforms to conventional implosion theory. And there's no need to reinvent the wheel, or to account for the clandestine introduction of devices the size of a dump truck. |
