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NIST Releases Report On WTC 7 Collapse
photonic writes "After three years of study, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) finally released its report on the collapse of World Trade Center building 7. The main conclusion is that the building came down due to fire, not due to debris damage or some conspiracy demolition team. The fire started pretty small after the collapse of WTC 1, but was left to burn several floors out completely. The important finding is that the collapse was triggered by thermal expansion of beams, which could detach asymmetrically loaded girders from the main columns. Some limited pancaking of floors then caused a lack of lateral support and buckling of a single column. This triggered the failure of the entire core of the building, which finally fell down as a single piece. Crackpot theories can be discussed elsewhere; please limit the discussion to the science here. All documents can be found at NIST's WTC page, which read like a porn magazine for finite element junkies. Simulation movies are also available. And yes, they used Beowulf clusters to do the simulations, some of which lasted for several months."
And your point is? It's a common misconception that random events don't or can't look very neat and tidy. One of the common mistakes people make when faking random data is to make it look too random. Meaning they don't have enough places in the data which appear to be non-random.
The way that a skyscraper is designed and built favors it falling more or less straight down rather to one side or the other. The reason being that if it were to topple, as remote a possibility as that is, the building shouldn't be allowed to hit other buildings. Nobody wants a set of dominoes that large.
Let's just get this out of the way first. BULLSHIT!
The rest of the world knows something suspicious went on, but America has their head in the sand. Not long after this shit, there was a building in Europe, where the fire was so intense, it burned everything off. The steel structure was still standing but oxidizing flame was enough to melt or buckle steel in the trade center? The sheer ignorance of the American populace astounds me.
How about if we get this out of the way:
A statement that one building somewhere at sometime didn't collapse under certain conditions is no grounds (in fact it's a logical fallacy) for saying a building couldn't collapse under the same conditions... and worse, it's also no grounds to subsequently stereotype an entire group of people and flame them.
Thank you and have a nice day.
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
Why are there so many similarities to the way the buildings fell to a controlled demolition? Because there are only so many ways a building basic physics allows a building collapse, controlled or not?
Both are afected by gravity, which exerts a downward force.
Another big reason large buildings tend to fall straight down is that is the direction gravity is pulling them. Anything much bigger than three or four stories is going to come apart very soon after leaving vertical, and the pieces come straight down.
Anarchists never rule
Crackpot theories can be discussed elsewhere; please limit the discussion to the science here.
What site is this, and what has it done with Slashdot
Well, for sure Digg is one of the places where this is happening, some idiots over there get +100 for the most ridiculous comments. What this has done to Slashdot? I hope they drew away some of the trolls from here...
karma police: arrest this man, he talks in maths; he buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radio. [radiohead]
How many skyscrapers have people seen collapse which are NOT controlled demolitions?
In other words, how many data points do you have on "What does a skyscraper collapsing on its own look like"?
In other other words, how do you know that "falling straight down" is an artifact of controlled demolition, and not an artifact of being a skyscraper?
It needn't be as subtle as seeing patterns where there are none, although we know that happens all the time.
In simple terms, things tend to fall down. Surely, if it were easier to get a building to topple over sideways, a team of terrorists isn't going to go through the trouble of averting what would surely be a larger and more spectacular catastrophe.
People whose experience with construction is limited to building models tend to imagine buildings are much lighter relative to the strength of materials in them then they are.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Yeah, building engineers don't ACTUALLY know how fire safety works.
Slashdot has always been about freedom albeit in the open source world, this has always included debates on what people read and think. How can anyone on this web site stand there and demand to limit to science as if the fact that the only steel buildings in existence to ever fall from fire all did so on 9/11 (which includes WTC Building 7). This is a fact that goes against the science given which has always fueled conspiry theorists and with good reason. We live in a society that is given the freedom to discuss and this forum has until today always given it's user's the right to says anything that is on their minds. Is slashdot changing it's stance?
History was not written only once, it was written and rewritten countless times over long periods of time and came to exist as we know it because discussions continue over time and corrections and rewrites and new information that was ignored or suppressed comes out.
But this only happens because people don't just stand there and accept blindly what is told to them especially when it goes against commen sense.
I hope the person who wrote this has the curtosy to remove the comment or correct it.
The claims about it being controlled demolition misses some points that are important. No controlled demolition has ever been done for a building even the size of WTC7, let alone the main towers. The tallest ever was done by CDI in 1998, when the 439-foot-tall JL Hudson Department Store was brought down. The original WTC7 was 610 feet tall, and of course the main towers were more than twice that. Trying to map that out without being fairly obvious would be difficult at best.
It seems to me, in a bit of a thought experiment, that it makes sense that a skyscraper should come straight down, more or less. They are built around structures that are designed to withstand significant loads due to wind, bending slightly but not that much overall. If structural member breaks, even if it breaks outward, there will likely still be some connectivity to the core, preventing it from moving outward. The additional stress added to local joints would cause them to fail, but in a less outward direction, as some of that energy has already been redirected downward. This continues around the building as the collapse continues. Some of the materials in other parts of the building will tend towards their own outward motion, but be pulled back in by the remaining connection to the core, canceling out some of the momentum in the other direction. Ultimately, everything comes straight down.
I think that makes some sense.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Another big reason large buildings tend to fall straight down is that is the direction gravity is pulling them. Anything much bigger than three or four stories is going to come apart very soon after leaving vertical, and the pieces come straight down.
Yeah, you really have to keep in mind just how big these structures are. With the two main towers, there were dozens of floors above the impact point. It's already a phenomenal engineering feat to hold up that amount of weight. Then consider once the frame becomes weakened. Once any point in the structure starts to give, all those floors above start to move, the weak point is going to buckle. Just think about the amount of kinetic energy all that building gains after accelerating only a few feet. There's no way the structure underneath can survive that even if was completely undamaged. Thus why it seemed as though the towers went into free-fall, the amount of downward force being exerted simply tore through everything like it was cray paper, which then itself fell adding to the mass.
The enemies of Democracy are
That's why firefighters had no fear whatsoever of going in there.
Citation needed.
I don't need any research to tell me that if you fly a large passenger airplane into a building then something really bad going to happen to it.
As far as WTC7, I've seen a whole neighborhood burned down in less than an hour because of one house catching on fire, I'm strangely led to believe that something on a much larger scale could have similar effects.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
The difference being that that building was reinforced concrete stack, which is essentially monolithic.
The discussion is about steel skeleton buildings, which have riveted/welded joints that create natural pivots and fulcrums when stresses become off-centered.
Women are like electronics: you don't know how damaged they are until you try to turn them on.
As I write on my blog, there's a big group of - for lack of a better name - crackpots who go around claiming the Bush (Jr.) Administration had something to do with the 9/11 events or in the destruction of the two towers. Which is ridiculous for the simple reason I point out: "the (current) Bush Administration doesn't have people smart enough to pull a stunt like that. The current administration's staffing policies have been directed toward political cronyism and connections, even at the expense of even bare competence. From what I've seen, anyone working there that has any self respect or common sense has quit." It's pointless to argue that they have the kind of people smart enough to pull off this sort of thing and keep it secret. If they were that good, they'd have been able to cover up the whole fake "weapons of mass destruction" issue in order to make it look like they really were present in Iraq.
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
Actually, "gravity" is ~9.8 m/s^2. That's an acceleration, not a flat rate, meaning that air resistance notwithstanding, the average rate at which something will accelerate when falling is 9.8 meters a second per second. It absolutely should have taken fewer than 23 seconds to fall.
You may wish to learn a little bit more about gravity here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_gravity .
Don't bother. If you agree, he's obviously right. If you disagree, you're obviously brainwashed and/or sent by the government.
Welcome to the wonderful world of self-confirming delusions, wherein you need never admit you're wrong.
Yes, you're right, holocaust deniers, intelligent design proponents, and 9/11 conspiracy theorists all feel like they've been denied the right to debate their theories.
The thing is, they're lying to themselves. They have lots of debates. I've heard 9/11 conspiracy theories deconstructed and made out to be bullshit lots and lots of times. Holocaust deniers do have conventions (like the one in Iran last year). Intelligent design, which should be laughed out of any adult conversation, has managed to actually be taught in schools and considered in courts of law. All of these people already get way, way, way, way, way more attention than their theories deserve.
These people say the opposite of the truth, not only when spouting their absurd theories, but when explaining why other people won't listen to them. "Oh, they're just sheep, led astray by a huge conspiracy." No, actually, you're a petty fool with a reality deficit. We don't ignore you because we are dummies, we ignore you because we have better judgment than you do and can see thru what you say.
First, I need to say a few things to inoculate myself from being labeled one way or the other:
1. The concept of a "conspiracy theory" is flawed, and is simply a cop out. There is no such thing as a conspiracy theory. There are just good and bad theories. Labeling an idea a "conspiracy theory" is just a form of jingoism and does nothing to increase the flow of ideas. Labeling something a conspiracy theory is a brilliant tactic to bury an idea as it takes advantage of herd mentality. Judge an idea by its merit and not by its label. Here on Slashdot extremely brilliant and extremely stupid ideas are posited all the time, so why now are we disallowed to discus a certain set of ideas? I thought there was a strong freedom/libertarian mindset here...
2. If you examine history, conspiracies are actually the norm and not an aberration. Look at Rome, or the times of Shakespeare, or Nazi Germany, or the French revolution, etc etc. Look at the behavior of the current administration of the United States and say there haven't been conspiratory behaviors with a straight face. All a conspiracy means is that more than one person plans together to do something secretly. That happens ALL THE TIME, whether criminally or not.
3. As Slashdot readers many of you consider yourselves to be scientifically minded and aware of logical fallacies. Why does this mindset breakdown when it comes to politically charged events? You are labeling people nut cases and tinfoil hat wearers and conspiracy theorists the same way people were labeled communists during the McCarthy era. The ad hominem attacks are relentless.
4. In light of the awareness that several agencies in the US with billions of dollars in funding and specific programs for controlling the flow of information DO exist, wouldn't you think that Slashdot, a hub of meme flow on the internet, would be a specific target of operations? Opinions are manipulated on the net regularly. You only have to look at China with their "wangyou" (internet friends) that are paid 50 cents chinese for each message they post that supports a certain agenda. The manipulation in the US is much more subtle. Teams of PhDs and psychologists know what buttons to press to get a certain response out of a self-admittedly obsessive compulsive crowd of nerds.
5. Building 7 was never hit by an airplane. The owner of the building admitted to it being demolished, then reneged his statement. There are videos of reporters describing building 7's fall while it is still standing in the background. It took SEVEN years for investigators to come up with a reason for the building to fall the way it did. Is it possible that the SEVEN years were spent honing a story plausible enough to convince even the most skeptical people of it's truth?
6. Unless you've visited the site of the building and done your own scientific measurements, everything you know comes from suspect media sources. This relates to point 3 above. I freely admit I don't know the truth of what happened due to this single fact.
In summary: Don't buy into either side of the story. There are plausible explanations for it being due to fire, but there are equally plausible explanations to it being due to malicious intent. Don't follow the herd - a certain subset of humans are purely pragmatic and will do whatever it takes to gain money or power.
PLEASE PLEASE refer to the last 5000 years of history and don't make the mistake of thinking that somehow right now things are different and innocent.
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
Name another steel skyscraper fire that went completely uncontrolled for 7 hours.
Cynical Idealist
It looks as though that building fell down because it either became detached from its foundation, or because the foundation wasn't firmly planted in the ground. The above-ground construction of the building doesn't seem to have been the primary cause of the collapse, as the whole thing seemed to remain largely intact before hitting the ground.
I'm not going to say that it's "Apples and Oranges," but that video seems to depict a pretty different scenario.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
This is WTC 7 that we are talking about, not towers 1 or 2. It wasn't struck by a plane and didn't have hundreds of gallons of aviation fuel in it. As colfer pointed out, it had some diesel fuel tanks in the basement, but these were found to have not contributed largely to the fire (which was on the upper stories).
The conclusion of the board is that a normal building/office fire starting by falling debris from WTC 1 is what brought the building down. If we are going to be building dense cities with skyscrapers then it is important that a normal fire merely gut the building, not compromise it's structural support. The building techniques used in WTC 7 were not sufficient, and shouldn't be used in the future.
Because he accidentally used terminology that happens to also be used in the demolition business to refer to something else. And the BBC just fucked up.
Cynical Idealist
It could also be that anyone who has ever watched a Discovery Channel documentary on professional demolition of large buildings has been led to believe that safely and completely collapsing such a building requires weeks of planning and absolutely precise placement and detonation of lots of explosives.
Or you could just thow some kerosene on it.
I never understood this weak attempt at a sarcastic rebuttal from you "truthers". It's like you just can't wrap your minds around the fact that one of the goals of a controlled demolition is to not cause billions of dollars in damage to surrounding buildings...
People will pass up steak once a week, for crap every day.
Ok so you you got a smaller mass ( the higher collapsing flours) falling over a bigger mass (the lower floors - which were also supported by the ground under them). So now my common sense is suppose to accepts that that smaller mass is able to cause the bigger mass the be pulverized without any resistance?
It didn't pulverize the ENTIRE REMAINING BUILDING simultaneously, genius. The falling, growing, and accelerating mass destroyed the remaining building one floor at a time.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Well, if NIST says so, it MUST be true.
Well, in the first place your chronology is off. The first Enron trial began in 2004. As of 9/11/2001, Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling were still in charge, and in fact the first public questioning by analysts of Enron's valuation were only a few months old at that time. The SEC investigation didn't begin until October 2001, so if it all were an attempt to cover up Enron evidence, it would quite literally be prescient.
In any case, there are easier ways to get rid of evidence if you have this kind of power. It is hardly necessary to destroy seven buildings when a fire starting near a single room would do. Even a simple burglary is both easier and more likely to succeed. Add this the fact that the destruction of so many buildings and lives means there would be commission afterwards to investigate. This commission could, of course, be controlled, but if the power to do this certainly it could much more readily have squelched the original investigation.
This kind of "evidence" is typical of conspiracy theories, which have three hallmarks:
(1) Require remarkably smooth coordination between conspirators with no demonstrable ties and considerable reason to distrust each other.
(2) Require the conspirators to choose convoluted, uncertain, and risky means where more direct, more reliable and safer means would presumably be at their disposal.
(3) Concoction and defense of dramatic "facts" that are either can't substantiated or are even (as here) demonstrably impossible.
Now what work, exactly, could be (a) passed of as routine, (b) be so non-invasive that witnesses would fail to recall it later and (c) reliably bring the building down?
Remember, the whole reason or this theory is that the building could not have imploded without considerable preparation. If a few plastic explosive charges here or there could due the trick, why couldn't extensive structural damage followed by a raging fire?
Armchair it may be, but whereever it proceeds from it is well supported in evidence that conspiracy theories such as this do not explain the facts very well. It follows that since the "explanations" involved are not very convincing in terms of how they reconcile facts, they must be convincing for other reasons. The exact nature of those reasons are, admittedly, a topic of speculation. Who can know for certain? However, I think my explanation is both plausible, and more charitable than the more common assumption that conspiracy theorists are just bat-shit crazy.
Now, I want to go on record that I do think Enron's senior executives were evil, and that I believe the Bush administration is both evil and wildly incompetent at pursuing its nefarious aims. However, I don't think it is within their scope of competence (or incompetence) to execute this putative conspiracy, nor is there any evidence requiring explanations of this sort.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Simulations are not as effective: given three years and a beowulf cluster one can model improbable events, and an improbable event verified three out of three times in the case of the WTC buildings won't satisfy conspiracy theorists.
Nothing satisfies conspiracy theorists...
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." -- Eric Hoffer
Demolition companies are just as concerned with preventing debris from ejecting sideways from the building as it collapses as they are with preventing the building as a whole from falling sideways.
However, to my knowledge, no building as large as the WTC towers have ever been demolished under controlled conditions, and few (if any) buildings with the same internal design (the steel tube core). The steel core of the WTC towers may have very well lent itself to a vertical collapse under any conditions.
Again, not saying anything conclusive, but merely because three buildings happened to fall more or less straight down when they collapsed is no proof that something secret went on. It could also be argued that since WTC 1 and 2 were more or less identical in structure, they should have been expected to collapse the same way given the similar conditions (of being impacted by jet planes), therefore it's only "two" perfect collapses. (Other problem: define "perfect collapse", the WTC 1/2 debris impacted other buildings, that's hardly perfect.)
It could *also* be argued that if you're going to demolish giant skyscrapers and kill thousands of people, you're also not going to care about collateral damage, so why not make them topple sideways so that it looks more accidental? Basically, it's bogus to assume that a straight-down collapse implies shenanigans in the first place.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Actually, it isn't that it's a conspiracy theory that's the problem.
In fact, that al-Qaida, an international network of terrorists that want to launch jihad against the western world, is responsible for the 9-11 attacks is a conspiracy theory.
The difference is that with the above they don't have to accuse people of being brainwashed in order to get people to accept the theory.