When I talk to people about the building collapses on 9/11/2001, most people have never even heard about the destruction of World Trade Center Building No. 7, the 47 story steel office tower that fell into its own footprint at 5:20 on the evening of 9/11. But even people who know about building 7 will indicate that they don’t feel competent to have an opinion about the plausibility of the official explanation for the twin towers collapse. They will say things like “I’m not a structural engineer.” or “I’m no architect.”
I contend that you don’t have to be a structural engineer or architect to see that the official story, to the extent that there is one, is strictly impossible. Even knowledge of basic High School physics is enough to prove that the official explanation can not be squared with the rapidity of collapse or the plumes of concrete dust observed on 9/11.
9/11 Commission Report Fails High School Physics Test
Newton’s law of gravity tells us exactly what to expect from falling bodies. A falling object experiences a constant acceleration of 32ft/sec^2. We can calculate that the time it would take for an object to fall from the top of one of the 1350ft WTC towers is 9.2 seconds without accounting for air resistance. When air resistance is included, for example, for a brick falling from that height, we would expect it to take about 12 sec. This is very close to the approximately 10 seconds it took for the towers to fall as reported in the official Kean-Hammilton-Zelikow report or the 10 to 13 seconds as independently measured from observation of various videos of the collapses. The bottom line is that the towers fell at essentially free fall speed.
Another fundamental law of physics is the conservation of energy and it applies to falling bodies as well. An object, as it falls, converts its gravitational potential energy (due to height above ground) into kinetic energy (speed). If that object has to use some of its energy for something else, like pushing air out of the way, then there will be less energy available as kinetic energy so it will take a bit longer to reach the ground. As we’ve seen in the example of a brick falling from the top of the tower, even just the energy required to move air out of the way is enough to slow the free fall time from 9.2 seconds to 12 seconds.
In the “official” explanation of the collapse, the so-called “pancake theory”, the floor above gives way and crashes into the floor below it, which gives way and together they fall on the next floor below, and so on. The falling floor must use a considerable amount of its energy to break loose the floor below. In addition, to account for the observed dust plumes, the crashing together of the floors has to crush the concrete floor slabs into a fine powder and that takes a very substantial amount of energy as well. Additional energy is then required to eject those tons of crushed concrete at high speed in all directions because that’s what was observed on 9/11. All of this energy must be subtracted from the original potential energy of the falling floor, which means there is much less energy available as kinetic energy(speed) so the floors must be falling much slower than they would otherwise.
How much slower? You don’t have to be an engineer to realize that the energy required to crush the concrete into fine powder and blow it out of the buildings at high speed is many times more energy than what is required just to move air out of the way. If the energy required to move air out of the way of a falling brick could increase the fall time from 9.2 sec. to 12 sec, the requirement to not only move air, but also crush concrete, and eject tons of crushed concrete dust laterally at high speed, should have increased the fall time considerably.
The fact that the buildings were observed to fall at essentially free fall speed, means that all of the gravitational potential energy of the building was in fact converted to the kinetic energy of falling. The fall speed accounts for all of the gravitational potential energy available. There is no gravitational energy available to break steel, crush concrete, eject dust or do anything else but just fall.
The Conservation of Energy Law forces us to conclude that there had to be some additional source of energy. Some source of energy to pulverize the concrete and send it in all directions at high speed as a fine powder. Some additional energy to knock out the heavy steel beams that had supported the building for 40 years so that the top of the building could free fall unimpeded to the ground in just over 10 seconds.
What was the source of the additional energy? Since the 9/11 commission neglected to investigate the mater, that has been left to your imagination, but large quantities of high grade explosives fit the bill.