If confirmed, the arrest and detention of Bandar would constitute the most significant and high profile figure caught up in the purge – even above that of high profile billionaire investor Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal – given Bandar’s closeness to multiple US administrations and involvement in events ranging from Reagan’s Nicaraguan Contra program (including direct involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal), to making the case for the Iraq War as a trusted friend of Bush and Cheney, to directing US-Saudi covert operations overseeing the arming of jihadists in Syria.

So you now agree that the twin towers collapsed due to aircraft impact and subsequent uncontrolled fire and you wish to talk about the people involved in that? or are you going to disprove science with politics?

No, but see below

Yes, but see below

It couldn’t really have collapsed any other way, that does NOT mean that the collapse was predictable or likely. Just the manner of collapse.

You seem to be mixing up probability of collapse Vs probability of a different manner of collapse. (or maybe I’m mixing up what you’re getting at?)

I doubt anyone would have predicted it would collapse. But if you’d told people to predict the manner of collapse if subjected to excessive structural damage of the type that we now know occurred then “down, roughly into it’s own footprint” is the answer you’d likely have got.

as above then, are you aware of some significant lateral force that we’ve all missed?

Still not huge enough to shift the CoG outside the footprint. In fact I suspect even if you had a succession of airliners crashing into the tower during the 10s it took to collapse that still wouldn’t have been enough to prevent it collapsing straight down.

Before anybody asks, no I haven’t done the maths and I CBA.

No, it really is just the vertical bit you need to worry about in this situation.

The force is gravity, and the mass is mahooosive, any lateral reaction forces from bumping into stuff on the way down are many orders of magnitude smaller, consequently you cna pretty much disregard them, hence…

“Yeah, it will pretty much fall on itself”

ahhh cross post with amedias

This is one of those situations where the numbers are BIG, and humans are generally speaking, terrible at envisioning BIG. We think we can, but we can’t, hence why we need maths to prove stuff to us once it gets outside of the realms of what our brains can deal with.

Logic and experience tells us that if you bump into stuff you get deflection*, but in everyday situations we’re not encountering stuff BIG enough, or realising the BIGness of the difference between things.

Plug the numbers in and it becomes a lot clearer!

*yes some of the rubble gets spat out sideways, but the bulk of the mass goes in the same direction.

It’s not though.

This really is a case of your perception vs reality. There may be lots of stuff in the way for it to bump into in a chaotic fashion, but the horizontal forces are still orders of magnitude smaller than the one going down, so down it goes, and remember its not a rigid structure, even if some part of it gets a punt sideways, it’s not transferred to the mass as a whole.

You really need to get your head around the fact that there are no external lateral* forces during the collapse. Once you get your head round the fact that there is no force acting laterally on the mass then you can see why there’s no reason to expect lateral movement of the mass as a whole.

*The only lateral forces are horizontal components of reaction forces due to the down wards motion, and these are tiny by comparison.

Assuming every level was blown to get it to drop – would this look any different? All the concrete is gonna break up and be sent in all directions but will get normalised into the downward direction.

there is always a gravitational force on the mass, the deflection forces get cancelled/minimised/deflected again or the part gets destroyed/broken again, when they hit something else, the gravity force is still there.
It’s lie leaves blowing int he wind, there is turbulence, collisions and stuff getting ejected sideways, but the majority of the mass is going in the direction of the prevailing wind.

In isolation, many of the theories regarding the towers collapse as a result of plane impact and fire do seem perfectly reasonable, all we’re ever likely to have on that front is informed conjecture from either camp

That said, when looking at cases which bear some similarities, it’s not unreasonable to question not only the mode of collapse, but the factors which led to it.

(disclaimer: no responsibility taken for 3rd party material and external websites)

So you have concrete and steel layers, an external skin, and inner cores columns. The layers (the floors) are tagged onto the inner core columns. If you cut all the columns or de-tag them from the columns its gonna go down right. But there is still most of the existing mass.

In isolation, many of the theories regarding the towers collapse as a result of plane impact and fire do seem perfectly reasonable, all we’re ever likely to have on that front is informed conjecture from either camp

Not really.
I saw the plane impact the building, I saw the fire, I saw the collapse.
They didn’t collapse before the plane impact and fire, did they?

The Windsor building in Madrid is a different construction to that of the WTC. The Windsor building is/was a traditional stanchion and beam construction so each floor has multiple columns supporting it. The WTC were an inner core and outer skin joined by very lightweight lattice beams.

If you don’t understand the difference then you won’t understand why one collapsed and the other didn’t. Of course I don’t remember a passenger jet aircraft striking the Windsor building, do you?

Yes but it wasn’t all from one side so any force resulting from material being ejected from the north side would be largely counteracted by that being ejected from the south. Similarly for east and west.

Had we not established that mechanically at least, the aircraft impact was not relevant?

Except they are not.[/quote]

The horizontal motion from ‘bumping into stuff’ is a small horizontal reaction component of the downwards momentum after collision, there is still the resulting downwards component of momentum + the force from gravity downwards, and that is still acting, the horizontal force stops after collision.

Take a single piece of rubble as an example, even if 100% of the downwards momentum were converted to 100% lateral, there is nothing pushing that bit of rubble sideways after it hit whatever it hit, but gravity is still pulling it downwards, overall path is down…

I’ll say this bit again:

There are no external lateral forces. There is an external vertical force, gravity.

I’ll say this bit again:

There are no external lateral forces. There is an external vertical force, gravity.

No need to say that again I haven’t proposed any external lateral forces

nothing pulling it back either. I can assure you it’s not the lack of understanding of the basic mechanics of this which makes it problematic. It is the complexity of the interactions which make it difficult to unpick

Indeed which is why the cloud of whatever is significantly larger than the perimeter of the tower.

Let’s try some probabilities

1)Probability that it would collapse ‘neatly’ given that it was a controlled explosion:

2)Probability that it was a controlled explosion, given that it collapsed neatly:

some estimates will do just to get started

You’ve just gone down the rabbit hole CM…