Originally posted by budaruskie
I must say, that for all of the talk of biased webpages and all, your proposed justification for this thread is somewhat perplexing.

I, for one, am not interested in proving that NIST's theory is plausible or as you say in fact probable. Furthermore, if you really want to prove its probability, you should start by convincing actual engineers and architects that it is in fact, plausible.

Seconded. I have seen enough of NIST shooting spray-on fireproofing with shotguns and the like to have all respect for them years ago. I have never seen NIST claim to have proven anything, and only the contrary, that they have opinions and "best guesses" based on their a priori conclusions, but nothing beyond that.

Even the OP admits "probable" is his goal, since he must already realize NIST actually proved nothing.

What else is there to say? If it's really that damned "probable," I'm all ears, but of course it's not nearly that simple. The sheer amount of information that NIST flat-out ignored is staggering in itself.

Yeah sure, OP, let me waste my time reading and analyzing 10,000 pages of agenda driven NeoCon garbage to disprove your delusional fantasies about how the Towers collapsed. Good luck with that!

Originally posted by SphinxMontreal
Yeah sure, OP, let me waste my time reading and analyzing 10,000 pages of agenda driven NeoCon garbage to disprove your delusional fantasies about how the Towers collapsed. Good luck with that!

I see, and presumably that means you have a theory of equal detail about how they collapsed that has some evidence to support it?

Would you care to post it somewhere? There are a lot of people waiting to see one.

Originally posted by bsbray11
What else is there to say? If it's really that damned "probable," I'm all ears, but of course it's not nearly that simple. The sheer amount of information that NIST flat-out ignored is staggering in itself.

This is a thread for discussion, not preaching. I want to go through each section of the report and find exactly what people have issue with.

Once there's a consensus on what information we can trust, then we can look at the alternative options for the information we disagree on.

I'm not demanding NIST is correct, but I have yet to see many serious challenges for their investigation. Even the best I have come across tend to be quite trivial, nobody has come together to actually set out experimental criteria that I know of.

These were the points we have yet to discuss, there's no point discussing whether or not the collapse was possible, if we don't even agree about the temperature of the fires:

• WTC workstations would readily burn and produce temperatures significant enough to damage steel
  
• These temperatures were maintained for a long enough period to affect the steel
  
• Steel with damaged insulation would heat up very quickly
  
• Insulation damage was very likely

Originally posted by exponent
To that end, here are the first topics, quoted from the 'engineer cuts steel' thread:

• WTC workstations would readily burn and produce temperatures significant enough to damage steel
  
• These temperatures were maintained for a long enough period to affect the steel
  
• Steel with damaged insulation would heat up very quickly
  
• Insulation damage was very likely

Please detail any and all complaints with these points, and we can discuss then in a calm and civilised manner. Cheers!

Thing is none of your 'topics' gets to the heart of the matter.

You could prove NIST was correct in all those points, but it doesn't prove that the towers could globally collapse.

So what IF trusses did sag? They can not put a pulling force on the columns they're attached to. IF the trusses sagged it was because heat causes expansion. IF the trusses were able to create a pulling force on columns they would first have created a pushing force when they expanded. They couldn't do either so they did the only thing they could do they SAGGED down.

So what IF the fires burned long enough to effect steel? Most of the buildings steel was not effected and would maintain their ability to hold up the building. (hypothetical) Lets say the trusses collapsed on floor 81 and dropped on floor 80, why would that cause the whole top section of floors to drop? The floors were independently attached to the columns with many trusses, that would all have to fail equally for the whole floor to drop. If one floor dropped it doesn't mean all the floors above would also drop.

A lot of debunkers want you to think the whole top section would drop from failure of one or two floor trusses. For the whole top section to drop as one the central core and outer mesh would all have to fail also, at the same time to create an instant collapse. This is just not logical.

Uninsulated steel would heat up faster than insulated steel, but it still doesn't automatically mean the building would completely collapse. Same with damaged insulation.

The problem isn't whether fire can make steel weaken and fail over time, it can. The problem is the amount of steel, and the length the fires burned for.

The fact that you seem to think that once a few trusses failed then the complete collapse of the building was inevitable shows a lack of understanding of reality. You may be an expert on what NIST claims, but it doesn't mean NIST was telling you the truth, or is even physically possible.

NIST didn't even cover the actually collapse, why? Because they couldn't without revealing the truth, better to pretend it doesn't matter and hope no one questions to much. This is why they rejected the pancake/progressive collapse, because they know people would see through it instantly. Progressive collapse would require there to be more mass in the footprints than there was. If the mass is ejected out of the footprint then there is no mass to do any crushing. Newtons laws of motion tell us that a smaller mass can not destroy a larger mass. We know the floors must have been destroyed as the building collapsed (no floors left post collapse and well we saw all the dust and ejected mass during the collapse), so it was either floors destroying floors which would mean the top would run out of floors before the bottom was destroyed (equal opposite reactions, and momentum conservation), or another energy was involved.

You all fail when it comes to disusing physics in the real world, to the point some of debunkers claiming a new phenomena is needed to explain the collapses. A collapse is a simple resistance and momentum problem, easily explained by Newtons laws of motion.

And I know most debunkers do not understand the laws of motion. I, and others, have proved this with easy questions that go unanswered, either because you don't know or you realise it contradicts your claims.

Originally posted by ANOK
Thing is none of your 'topics' gets to the heart of the matter.

You could prove NIST was correct in all those points, but it doesn't prove that the towers could globally collapse.

That's true. I don't want to cut out the rest of your post without good reason, but the point is that we go through things that we agree with, then get to the bits where we disagree.

For example, you disagree about the trusses, and we can definitely have a good discussion on whether they can or cannot exert an inward force. However, it is worthless to discuss that, if you think they deflected by 2" and I think they deflected by 20". The difference in the deflection means that we're arguing from different positions on the inward force.

And I know most debunkers do not understand the laws of motion. I, and others, have proved this with easy questions that go unanswered, either because you don't know or you realise it contradicts your claims.

I promise you that if you engage with me and discuss the topics in order so we can debate what we agree or disagree on, that I will answer any question you pose about the laws of motion, or any other such physical equation I am capable of handling. You can PM me if I am absent, pretty sure that e-mails me.

I appreciate you spent a lot of time on the response, and I don't want to appear as if I am simply dismissing it. I am aware that we have our differences, and I do want to talk about them. If I replied point by point though, we'd end up with a huge spidery thread just like every other one.

I want this thread to be useful

Originally posted by exponent

Originally posted by bsbray11
What else is there to say? If it's really that damned "probable," I'm all ears, but of course it's not nearly that simple. The sheer amount of information that NIST flat-out ignored is staggering in itself.

This is a thread for discussion, not preaching. I want to go through each section of the report and find exactly what people have issue with.

You can discuss it all you want, but the critical facts that will remain even at the end of your discussion, and I can promise you this, will be that

1) They still didn't actually prove what happened, and
2) They completely ignore tons of evidence, not least of which scores of witness testimonies to explosions, which are never even so much as mentioned in passing.

Once there's a consensus on what information we can trust, then we can look at the alternative options for the information we disagree on.

I already trust that they believe their guesses are "probable," or at least most people at NIST probably believe that.

Look at what we already agree on. That's significant enough already. They didn't actually prove anything.

And what they blatantly ignored was even more significant.

Originally posted by exponent

Originally posted by psikeyhackr
My point was if they could give a total for the steel and other people have totals for concrete why doesn't the NCSTAR1 report have it? Why should we need to do all of that calculating. They had 3 years and $20,000,000 and they couldn't tell us the TONS of STEEL and TONS of CONCRETE that were on every level. Doesn't every level of every skyscraper in the world have to be strong enough to support all of the weight above?

Certainly, but here's the reason why, and I really want to make sure you don't take this the wrong way:

It's none of your business.

Now that's not me saying that, i'm not trying to insult you, but the fact of the matter is that these are private buildings owned by private companies, the design and construction of their buildings is private to them. They have no obligation to release it to the public, as they will have paid an awful lot of money from an architect for that.

Now, I am sure NIST could have totalled it up if they had wanted to, but that's neither here nor there. If they listed every single fact they gathered in detail the report would be 40,000 pages long and you still probably wouldn't read it.

They can tell us the tons of luggage that was on each plane but they can't tell us the tons of steel that was on each level that had to be strong enough to support the buildings for THIRTY YEARS.

There is one funny thing about doing searches in the NCSTAR1 report. You start to notice that the same sentence and the same paragraph is used again and again and again. I gave up trying to to keep track of how many times I noticed this. The tons of steel and tons of concrete on every level would amount to 232 numbers for each building. That would hardly amount to much in 10,000 pages. So give us more good reasons why people really should not pay attention to the NIST report while at the same time saying it should be read and contains worthwhile information.

The nation that put men on the Moon can't tell the entire world the distributions of steel and concrete in buildings designed before 1969 but expects people to believe an airliner could obliterate a building TWO THOUSAND TIMES its mass in less than ONE HOUR.

psik

Originally posted by psikeyhackr
Doesn't every level of every skyscraper in the world have to be strong enough to support all of the weight above?

Only the columns hold the weight of the building above. The weight of the floors are distributed to the columns and as such are seperate.

Originally posted by exponent
I know it's not an ideal situation to have to do the calculations by hand, but enough information appears to be there, certainly to get to the level of accuracy that a non professional group will be able to simulate.

Not all the information is there to perform an actual finite element analysis. What about the professional groups who want to study a building that is not even in existence anymore? Nope, natonal security.

That's my problem with this whole "investigation". The secrets.