Whether the pitcher hits the stone, or the stone hits the pitcher, it is bad for the pitcher. — Sancho Panza in "The Man of La Mancha"
Despite a knee-jerk mistrust of any official story and an often self-destructive inclination to question authority, at first I accepted without question our government’s explanation of the wreck of the Twin Towers. Eventually, however, my trust in physics aligned with my mistrust of politicians to cast doubt on the official story.
The 18th century mathematician, Sir Isaac Newton, explained much about the world. His ideas have been so thoroughly tested that we now call them “Newton’s Laws.” At sizes above the subatomic and at speeds below that of light, those laws offer immutable, easily applied rules for predicting and analyzing the physical world. Since I’m about to dip you lightly into the bubbling vat of high school physics, you’ll be pleased to know there are only three laws of motion. I’ll paraphrase a couple of them for you here.
Law One: Moving stuff keeps moving until some force stops it.
Law Two tells the force depends on the mass of the stuff and how fast we want to stop it.
Law Three: Every force creates an equal and opposite force.
The third is most important to us here. Sancho Panza summarized it nicely in his remark about the pitcher. The collision of a stone and a pitcher produces a force that acts equally but in opposite directions on the two colliding objects. Stones being tougher than pitchers tend to survive larger forces.
The laws are the same for all moving objects. Any high school physics student can calculate the forces that affect colliding stones and pitchers, bugs and windshields, or airliners and skyscrapers. All he needs to know is the weight of both items and their relative speed.
Of course, it’s skyscrapers and airplanes that interest us here. In my customary fashion, I will oversimplify the tragic, historic event for you using figures I found on the excellently researched website of Dr. Morgan Reynolds, www.nomoregames.net.
Dr. Reynolds tells us the Twin Towers weighed something like 500,000 tons and a Boeing 767 weighs around 140 tons. The weight of the plane was .028% of that of the building. There is no great precision necessary in numbers this large. A few hundred tons one way or the other won’t change the ratio much.
Equally important is that the plane was made of soft, light aluminum while the building was made of hard, heavy steel and concrete. The pitcher and the stone. For an example of just how fragile airplanes are, by the way, I recommend some of Dr. Reynolds’ photos of airplane damage caused by collisions with birds.
Skyscrapers and airliners are big objects to try to wrap your mind around. The scale is hard to grasp. To better understand the situation I had to reduce it to more familiar objects while maintaining comparable ratios of mass.
By a lucky coincidence the ratio of the weight of a fully loaded Hummer and a six-pack of cold beer in aluminum cans is not unlike that of our plane and building example. There is also a happy similarity in their construction, aluminum v. steel. A frosty sixer of Bud tallboys is about .069% of the weight of a Hummer. The higher ratio gives us a margin of error. It’s as if the plane were over twice as heavy as it really was and allows us to use the entire six-pack, which I always recommend.
Imagine now, as unlikely as it may seem, that I suspend a perfectly good six-pack above a highway at the grille height of the Hummer. Let’s even imagine that the cans are filled with jet fuel instead of beer. Let’s also put an Arab who has never driven before in the Hummer bearing down on the six-pack at 500 miles an hour. (Do not try this with your Hummer.)
If we believe the official explanation of the collapse of the World Trade Center, the following is what we would have to believe would happen next to our Hummer.
The Hummer hits the six-pack, which, according to Newton’s third law is exactly the same as the six-pack hitting the Hummer. The jet fuel ignites in a spectacular fireball which engulfs the Hummer and burns furiously but not long. The six-pack passes through the grille, the motor, the firewall, and the seats and shoots out through the back door. All traces of the six-pack vanish. No sign of aluminum is found anywhere on the grille or inside the Hummer. Nor are there any pieces of beer can on the road around the point of impact. Even the pull tabs are gone.
The Hummer careens forward in a billowing cloud of smoke for about another half hour then suddenly disintegrates into a pile of nuts, bolts and smoldering dust that you could hide under a beach umbrella. No piece of the wreckage is larger than a door knob.
Officials find the Arab’s undamaged driver’s license on top of the pile.
Do you think Newton would buy this story?
Item by item: A two pound ax can indeed fell a 1000 ton tree, but not with a single blow, and the tree would not disintegrate into toothpicks before it hit the ground.
Eight ounce birds can and often do wreck airplanes. Which only reinforces my point that airplanes are so light, soft and fragile that any collision with a steel and concrete building will not wreck the building; it will wreck the plane.
We are not driving a Hummer into a “jet fuel tanker” but into a six pack of jet fuel, to keep the relative masses of the colliding objects the same. About 5 pounds of fuel in cans to destroy nearly 9,000 pounds of Hummer. Once again referring to physics, kerosene just doesn’t contain that kind of energy. Nor do beer cans.
If indeed mysteriously softened steel (this being the first fire in history in which steel was so softened) caused the floors to pancake down through each other, such a collapse could not have occurred at free fall speed, as each floor would have offered some momentary resistance to collapse.
And we can’t forget that the buildings were pulverized. No chunks of concrete were found in the wreckage. No piece of steel longer than 30 to 40 feet. There was insufficient energy in the falling concrete to pulverize itself. Energy had to have been introduced from some outside source to pulverize the concrete and cut the steel into 35 foot pieces. The laws of physics require it.
Take another look at the video of the collapse. It’s easy to see that the floors are not pancaking down, they are exploding and shattering into dust from the top and cascading down, unimpeded by any resistance from below, with some of the debris flying out hundreds of feet from the sides of the buildings. That’s not what solid floors dropping down one on top of another would look like.
I am willing to accept any explanation of the event that doesn’t require that we ignore both the evidence of our own eyes and the laws of physics.
“Further, if you drive a hummer 500 miles per hour into a jet-fuel tanker, why would you expect, as you say, a “pile of nuts, bolts and smoldering dust that you could hide under a beach umbrella. No piece of the wreckage is larger than a door knob.””
Oops – I meant to say:
Further, if you drive a hummer 500 miles per hour into a jet-fuel tanker, why WOULDN’T you expect, as you say, a “pile of nuts, bolts and smoldering dust that you could hide under a beach umbrella. No piece of the wreckage is larger than a door knob.”
Oh, what a sad day it is.
Here is what you are woefully missing, in your grasp of physics.
Since you like analogies so much (and I do too), here a couple: A 2-pound ax can take down a 1000 ton tree.
And a 8 oz. bird can do the same to a plane. It just depends on the circumstances.
But here is what you are missing: this is not a question of mass and force. What your post is explaining should be why the towers didn’t fall over from being hit by the planes. It is true – the mass and energy of the planes would not have knocked the buildings on their side.
But that is also not the official reason they fell.
The official reason is the massive jet-fuel fire, which softened the steel girders that the buildings were supported by. Once the steel softened, the enourmous weight of the floors above the impacts caused the softened girders to fail. Once that happened (the collapse of the impact/fire floors), the falling weight of the upper building was unstoppable.
Further, if you drive a hummer 500 miles per hour into a jet-fuel tanker, why would you expect, as you say, a “pile of nuts, bolts and smoldering dust that you could hide under a beach umbrella. No piece of the wreckage is larger than a door knob.”
I cannot say it any clearer – what you saw that day is what your got.
And nothing has made me sadder.
Total nonsense comparison.Each airplane partially wrecked one floor of the building and weakened it enough that it could not hold up the ones above it. The floors above it crushed it and each succeeding floor one at a time.
You may argue about whether that is a realistic scenario, but nobody ever tried to suggest that an airliner splattered itself against the side of the tower and disintegrated it. If you want to throw conspiracy boogeymen find better pseudo science.
Total nonsense comparison.Each airplane partially wrecked one floor of the building and weakened it enough that it could not hold up the ones above it. The floors above it crushed it and each succeeding floor one at a time.
You may argue about whether that is a realistic scenario, but nobody ever tried to suggest that an airliner splattered itself against the side of the tower and disintegrated it. If you want to throw conspiracy boogeymen find better pseudo science.