Some Misunderstandings Related to WTC Collapse Analysis

[Tony Szamboti]

This is a technical paper refuting the Progressive Column Failure theory of North Tower Collapse from the International Journal of Protective Structures. A couple of key paragraphs:

This presentation is not so much about how the WTC towers failed, but about how they could
not fail. The objective is to eliminate erroneous concepts supported by false assumptions and
by the use of incorrect values for velocity, mass, and column resistance. The only complete
hypothesis of the global collapse mechanism of the Towers is a successive flattening of
stories associated with compressive column failure and referred to as a Progressive Column
Failure mode or PCF in brief. (In the past this mode was often referred to as pancaking, but
this term is not used here to avoid ambiguities). It is explained here why PCF could not be
the mode of the ultimate destruction....

As one can readily see, this mode of damage is a distinct process, whereby each floor
becomes crushed, one after the other. An attempt has been made to smear the process out into
a continuum event and then use differential equations to obtain a solution [2]. Yet,
....

This is Szamboti's paper and it's been pretty much debunked. It's a long "debate" but the proof is in the tasting:

http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=261678

You can fool some of the people some of the time
bit you can't fool all the people all of the time

Make up your own mind after you've availed yourself of the facts.

Jeffrey, the paper legitimately exposes Zdenek Bazant's gross overestimate of kinetic energy available and gross underestimate of column energy absorption capacity and shows the columns were essentially not involved in the resistance to the collapse of the North Tower from the beginning (of course, the next question would be "why weren't the columns involved in resisting the collapse from the beginning"?). Nobody on the JREF Forum has been able to show what we said in the paper about these things to be untrue, and all they want to say is the columns simply missed each other, which is a physical impossibility in a "natural" situation. How you can possibly say the paper has been debunked on there is beyond me. It is apparent that you will say anything to promote your point of view, and here you are certainly talking like a man with a paper you know what.