15-09-2012, 12:26 AM
Magda,
Thank you. I am still learning about what happened and have my ideas about in a constant state of flux. I have had a leg up in the technical area but I am by no means a physicist or structural engineer. It's that I have been exposed to this and work with structure for 40 years.
Undoubtly the destruction was a very complex process as differentiated from a nuke which would simply destroy the place in a New York moment. All three towers tool measurable intervals of times to disintegrate and various mechanisms and processes and forces were in play over those intervals. This may not be intuitive to our notion of destruction or collapse... which we associate with a single cause. And we hear this all the time in such statements as:
Never before has a steel building collapsed from fire (alone).
The point being that there were MANY contributing factors... and they act synergistically. Some of those are more obvious because they are visible... even when we can't know how much that particular thing contributed to the entire destruction... such as heat from fire, or mechanical destruction of columns.
The take away is that this is much more complex than many want to see it as and there was enormous amount of stored energy in the structure. Imagine if you will adding up all the energy that it took to:
fashion the steel
fasten the steel
lift all the materials in place
make the concrete, wall board, pipes, wires, glass and so forth
All the energy to get that building in place was then locked in as potential energy and much of it was released by gravity. The energy it took to create the towers was within it to destroy them. Difficult to understand but that's where MOST of the destructive energy came from.
I appreciate the comment.
Jeffrey
Thank you. I am still learning about what happened and have my ideas about in a constant state of flux. I have had a leg up in the technical area but I am by no means a physicist or structural engineer. It's that I have been exposed to this and work with structure for 40 years.
Undoubtly the destruction was a very complex process as differentiated from a nuke which would simply destroy the place in a New York moment. All three towers tool measurable intervals of times to disintegrate and various mechanisms and processes and forces were in play over those intervals. This may not be intuitive to our notion of destruction or collapse... which we associate with a single cause. And we hear this all the time in such statements as:
Never before has a steel building collapsed from fire (alone).
The point being that there were MANY contributing factors... and they act synergistically. Some of those are more obvious because they are visible... even when we can't know how much that particular thing contributed to the entire destruction... such as heat from fire, or mechanical destruction of columns.
The take away is that this is much more complex than many want to see it as and there was enormous amount of stored energy in the structure. Imagine if you will adding up all the energy that it took to:
fashion the steel
fasten the steel
lift all the materials in place
make the concrete, wall board, pipes, wires, glass and so forth
All the energy to get that building in place was then locked in as potential energy and much of it was released by gravity. The energy it took to create the towers was within it to destroy them. Difficult to understand but that's where MOST of the destructive energy came from.
I appreciate the comment.
Jeffrey