Mainline European Physics journal publishes paper critical of NIST 9/11 report

[William Seger]

7. Why "constant acceleration" proves that Richard Gage is an idiot

It's completely impossible for the WTC towers to fall at "constant acceleration" even if they were controlled demolitions. Regardless of what started the collapses, they would consist of thousands of individual failure events involving falling mass impacting intact structure and being briefly decelerated while it stressed that structural element into failure. A 12-foot steel column can only be compressed a fraction of an inch before it begins to buckle and rapidly lose strength, which means it's no longer able to provide a constant resistance force, so the falling mass would begin accelerating again. But from the rubble pile, we know that the predominant failure mode, by far, was not columns buckling; it was floors ripped from their support beams. That kind of failure literally took microseconds, after which the entire mass plus the new debris would be in free fall again, hitting the next collision with even more force.

This "constant acceleration" bullshit is the bastard brainchild of an incompetent high school physics teacher named David Chandler who apparently doesn't realize that when he measures the fall of the top of the building, he is seeing the net result of thousands of individual failure events, so he can only see the average acceleration of a completely chaotic system. (His confirmation bias also causes him to ignore the fact that even his own data doesn't really show constant acceleration -- he just plots his points and draws a best-fit straight line through them, which is a classic example of a logical fallacy called "affirming the consequent" or "begging the question.&quot But the real kicker is that this high school physics teacher doesn't realize that if the top of the building and debris are in motion, then by definition it's a dynamic system, so his static analysis of the force of gravity versus structural resistance is too incomplete to have any meaning. In a dynamic system, you also have to account for inertial forces, and if you think that might only be a small difference, consider the difference between balancing a brick on your head and having a brick fall from 12 feet. Chandler claims that if the top of the building was falling at a "constant" acceleration of two-thirds gravity, then that means the bottom structure was only providing resistance equal to one-third the weight of the top. That's bullshit. If the thousands of individual failure events resulted in an average acceleration of two-thirds gravity, that means the structure provided resistance equal to one-third the weight plus the inertial forces of that weight in motion -- a much larger force which Chandler completely ignores.

Gage invites his gullible followers to fall for various "appeal to authority" logical fallacies, starting with his pretense that his own AIA membership qualifies him as an expert in anything. For this "constant acceleration" nonsense, we're supposed to believe that someone who has taught high school physics for 40 years must know what he's talking about. But the incompetence of Chandler's analysis implies that Chandler has probably been sharing some faulty notions about physics with his students for 40 years, but nobody contradicted him.

So then Chandler teams up with Tony Szamboti, a mechanical engineer infamous for his "missing jolt" hypothesis. This is the idea that Chandler's data should show a large "jolt" -- a sudden change in acceleration -- when the top of the building impacts the columns in the structure below, all at once, and pushes those columns into plastic buckling. Szamboti claims that the only explanation for the absence of a large jolt is a controlled demolition. (But like Chandler, he never actually explains how a controlled demolition could produce the observed result, either; he just assumes it.) For years now, Szamboti has abjectly refused to recognize that the problem with his hypothesis is that it's totally irrelevant because that scenario simply didn't happen; the top of the building did not fall cleanly onto the columns below and push them all into buckling, all at once. The tops of both buildings tilted before the first impacts, so even where columns buckled, those failures were spread out over time, not all at once. But the bigger problem is that, as noted above, most of the failures were floors simply ripped from their supports, which happened precisely because that required less energy than crushing the columns they were attached to. After countless internet debates, Szamboti knows all this but he just can't bring himself to acknowledging the implication. The "missing jolt" is the best he can do to protect his controlled demolition delusions, so he's sticking with it.

This is the state of the "truther structural mechanics" that Gage will mail to engineers. Next year, he'll solicit more money from his gullible followers to do it again, with no explanation for why qualified people are ignoring him. Happy anniversary.