Why there were NO BOMBS planted at the WTC.

benburch

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Thu Feb-23-06 12:08 AM
Original message

Why there were NO BOMBS planted at the WTC.

Edited on Thu Feb-23-06 12:47 AM by benburch

I believe that WTC towers 1, 2 and 7 fell because towers 1 and 2 were hit by airliners on 9/11,
and that there were no explosives planted in any of those buildings.

I know this is a radical statement, and is going to take some explaining, so please bear with me.

The first thing you need to understand is Gravitational Potential Energy.

As you raise a mass against gravity, you expend energy. This energy is not lost as heat, but
gets stored in the item raised in the form of gravitational potential energy. If you allow the
mass to fall, you get back this energy first in the form of velocity and then, at the point of
impact with the ground, as mechanical energy that will attempt to deform and heat the body and
deform and heat the ground it strikes. The exception is a fully elastic collision, when both the
body and the ground are strong enough to resist this deformation, and the body bounces.

The Mass of the structure of each #1 and #2 WTC is given at approximately 500000 tons.

This is one Billion Pounds of mass.

The weight of the contents is usually given as equal in weight to the structure itself, for
a total weight as occupied on 9/11 as two Billion Pounds, roughly 900 million kilograms.

The Height of each tower is 411 meters.

Now, only a small amount of mass is at the top, and mass can be assumed to roughly be distributed
equally throughout, so for calculating the gravitational potential energy, we will use half of this
height, 200 meters.

The formula is;

PE-subG in joules = weight * G (9.8 m/s/s) * height.

For 900 million kilograms, and 200 meters, this is 1,764,000,000,000 Joules.

Big number! One Point Eight Trillion Joules.

Now a one kiloton atom bomb yields 4,000,000,000,000 Joules of energy.

So the mass of one tower of the WTC falling was the equivalent of a half-kiloton atom bomb.

And two of them fell.

Two half-kiloton atom bombs went off in Manhattan on 9/11!

This is sufficient to explain why, once they started to fall, they kept falling, and why they also
destroyed Building 7 and why the debris in the pit were so very hot initially.

No bombs are required whatsoever.

Building 7 was hit by high velocity ejecta from the two collapse events, and also by two pulses of
superheated air laden with debris; In effect two synthetic pyroclastic pulses, by analogy with the
remarkably similar effect that occurs in some volcanic eruptions. This is sufficient to have
damaged building #7 so badly that it later fell.

Now, what started the collapse of each tower?

When the aircraft hit each building, they did considerable damage to the load-bearing walls on the
exterior of the building, and their fuel burned along with the contents of the structure (a
considerable source of fuel) and eventually weakened the entire structure enough to partially fail,
and to sag just a bit. Didn't have to be much... An inch or two. But that movement was of the
entire top-weight of the building above the fire floors. And once that mass started moving, it
had considerable inertia due to giving back its gravitational potential energy. Being the highest
part of the building, it of course has the highest proportion of this energy which we dealt with
in an averaged manner, above.

Now, had the floors this sagging mass fell onto been at their full strength, they might have been able
to "catch" it, but they were weakened by the fire, and so they continued to deform, as the solid
top mass continued to fall and continued to trade gravitational potential energy for velocity and
work done deforming the structure below. And as this work of deformation was completed, the
now-liberated mass of each floor joined the top-weight in its destructive fall.

Now, people have wondered why it fell straight down like it did, or nearly so; The simple answer
is that it could fall no other way. The force vector for gravity is straight down, and I have
shown that there is sufficient energy here to overwhelm and twisting moment that the materials
of the building could have exerted, at least after the first few floors were consumed.

Also note that the air within the tower was compressed, and like air compressed in a bicycle pump,
heated up. In fact it was a rush of superheated air that roared out of the bottom of each tower,
and powered the synthetic pyroclastic pulse I spoke of. This air was hot enough to set materials
alight, and possibly enough to melt glass and some steels.

Now, at the bottom of this plunge was the basements of the WTC. In that pit all of the remaining
energy of the fall, plus the remaining fuel of the airliners (mostly spent) plus the fuel from the
building's auxiliary generators, plus gasoline from the parking decks, all of that energy and fuel
went into deforming the materials that fell into the pit, heating many of them to the melting point,
and providing a slow-burning, or coked, fire that was insulated by tons of powdered material and by
the earth itself such that there were pools of molten and nearly molten metal weeks later.

I first worked out this concept of what a building collapse would mean when considering what the
failure of Chicago's Sears Tower would mean in event of a major earthquake on the New Madrid fault,
but it applies equally to this calamity.

EDIT: Fixed a missing bit... And some typos.