Oh, so this was yet another thread with no real point except for your desperate search to be right about something -- anything -- even if there's no real significance to it? 
Oh, well, there's not much else going here, so let's continue discussing why your search has not yet ended...
> As the upper block nibbles away the lower, the lower nibbles away the upper. There is no debris mat.
Huh? How did you make the debris disappear? Yes, the "lower nibbles away the upper" but what we're discussing is Gourley's mistaken notion that it was "equal and opposite" to "the upper block nibbles away the lower." In the Verinage videos, what we see is that the upper blocks only shorten by one floor while "pile-driving" through several lower floors:
Bazant explains this; Gourley does not.
> Dr. Bazant's theory rears no resemblance to reality. There is no evidence of a pristine top "block" riding a debris mat down to the ground, pulverizing all the floors in the way. No photos. No photo evidence from the debris pile. The notion is refuted by the persistence of the lower core, and by the fact that the upper block on WTC1 was visibly coming apart before the structure under the impact zone failed. Dr. Bazant's theory is thus discredited.
Again, it isn't possible to see through the smoke and dust, so there is no evidence of Gourley's "equal and opposite" claim, either. Before smoke and dust obscures everything, we can see a couple of floors of the upper block destroyed, but Bazant acknowledges that -- those first few floors are where the debris layer comes from. (However, we can see in the videos that your claim that "the upper block on WTC1 was visibly coming apart before the structure under the impact zone failed" is just silly.) But what we can say is that Bazant takes into account the effect of the falling debris, which Gourley's claim clearly does not, so it makes more sense to say that it's Gourley's claim that "bears no resemblance to reality." Since you still haven't addressed it, I will just post this again, as promised:
Contrary to the discusser’s claim which is based on his understanding of Newton’s third law, these forces are not equal, as made clear by Fig. 2 (g and h) of the original paper. Their difference is equal to the weight of the intermediate compacted layer B plus the inertia force attributable to the acceleration of layer B (for additional accuracy, one may also add the energy per unit height needed for the comminution of concrete and the expelling of air, which are secondary phenomena not taken into consideration in the original paper). When the compacted layer attains a sufficient mass, which occurs after the collapse of only a few stories, this difference becomes very large.
I see that you also dodged my point that "crush down/crush up" is an aspect of Bazant's one-dimensional model, but it is not in any way an essential part of his fundamental energy argument, so let's get back to that:
> Dr. Bazant's "limiting case" assumes MAXIMAL transmission of kinetic energy to the structure.
It doesn't matter how many times you say that; it's still bullshit: There is no such assumption in the analysis, and in fact your reasoning is exactly backwards about what difference that would make, anyway. You simply do not (or more likely, disingenuously refuse to) understand what the analysis demonstrates. But I'll give it one more try, explaining it as simply and clearly as possible: The analysis calculates the maximum amount of energy that would be absorbed, even if every columns presented its maximum resistance up to the point of buckling, even though we can be pretty sure that that's not what happened in many cases. In many cases, floors were ripped away from the columns and they were simply pushed aside, absorbing much less energy than would be absorbed by buckling. The analysis then compares that maximum possible energy absorption to the gravitational energy that was present and finds that there was a huge disparity: the structure simply could not absorb that much energy, even under the most optimistic assumptions. The conclusion is therefore undeniable: If the energy of the falling mass could not be absorbed, then the collapse was bound to continue all the way to the ground.
There are only there possible ways to refute Bazant's analyiss: Prove there was less energy available than he calculates; prove that the structure could absorb more energy than he calculates; or prove that the conclusion I italicized about is fallacious. When you don't even attempt to address any one of those, you simply demonstrate that you don't understand why you need to, which means you're just wasting everyone's time with drivel like this:
> It ignores all the energy requirements of pulverizing the floors. breaking connections, twisting and crushing the steel.
Bullshit, if there was 8 times more energy available than would be required to buckle every column, then there was enough energy to explain all the other damage. Furthermore, there was no "requirement" to pulverize the floors in order to bring down the building, and in fact, that pulverization simply demonstrates how much extra energy there was. Again, you are parroting illogical "truther" bullshit about that, and what's really hilarious about claiming that as a reason to doubt a "natural" collapse is that "truthers" don't seem to understand what they are implying: Since thermite can't pulverize concrete, they are implying that the "perps" used many, many extra tons of their magical silent explosives to pulverize concrete, for no apparent reason whatsoever. Pulverizing concrete with explosives is no easy task, either: You would need to put huge amount of it all over the office spaces.
> I never said the collapse has to be halted. That's a straw man argument.
My apologies, then, for assuming that you have an actual argument. For some reason, I thought you were attempting to deny Bazant's conclusion that total collapse was inevitable after it got started, as a way of making controlled demolition sound like the only plausible explanation.
> But I've never seen anyone do an energy budget that accounts for all the energy sinks (pulverizing the floors. breaking connections, twisting and crushing the steel) at all, let alone one that explains the speed of the collapses. Instead, NIST simply dodges the issue.
Where have you looked? I mentioned in a different thread that "truther" Gordon Ross attempted such an analysis, but he made a gross error that led him to the wrong conclusion. That analysis is still online ("truther" bullshit being as hard to kill as Freddy Krueger), and I mentioned what the error was if you want to investigate it.
NIST correctly stated that the progressive collapse after initiation was "readily explained," and FEMA and Bazant aren't the only ones to do so. If you're satisfied with your lame excuses for discounting NIST, FEMA, and Bazant, then get busy on this list: https://sites.google.com/site/911science/
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