Swing, please learn to format replies properly.
My dog ate it.
Why would you want to criticize it? Do you not trust the engineering firm and the engineers who designed the towers? Are you qualified in the field to criticize the firm's design parameters? I'm not.
You realize that by not accepting the white paper you are calling the structural engineers incompetent or liars. That burden of proof thing you taught me about so long ago.
Okay -- first you accuse me of "doubting" it, then you ask why I would want to criticize it?
Now you say I'm accusing them of being
"liars?" Ridiculous.
If I don't even know what this alleged whitepaper even says -- the one that you say your dog ate
-- then how can I accuse them of being "liars?"
Many claims have been made about what this whitepaper supposedly showed, most claims originating from the Truth Movement. The normal story is that the whitepaper claimed (back in 1964, I believe) that a high-speed collision would leave the Towers standing, without killing people far away from the impact zone.
Depending on the details of what that paper really said, that claim may have been accurate. It all depends on whether they were referring to the structure standing
immediately after impact, or if they meant
long after impact. The former would be correct. The latter is wrong. They also might have put in language stating that they could not attempt an analysis of the fire that would ensue, and that also would be correct -- to the extent of their assumptions.
But, since once again,
nobody has seen this whitepaper, you can't use it in support of your argument. We just don't have the calculation. If the calclations were correct, someone should be able to replicate them. Nobody has.
I'm not in a position to call those who worked on this paper, whomever they are, incompetent until I see the calculations. My guess is they used grossly simple assumptions and did the best they could with the tools of the time. That's not incompetence, that's a technological limit.
So stop trying to tell me what I'm doing, tell me I'm calling someone a liar, etc. You do enjoy putting words in my mouth.
I trust the head structural engineer who designed the building and his firm's analysis. I'm not in a position to criticize their parameters.
Why don't you trust them?
What is required and what is designed are two different things of course. Again, why don't you trust the structural engineers who designed the building? Or why if you want to default to NIST, why do you think NIST did not trust the engineers who designed the building?
Who, exactly, are you saying that I "distrust?" Give me names. What parameters do you say I "distrust?" Show them to me.
Requirements are requirements. If the structure was not required to survive such a hellacious impact, there is no reason to suspect it would have, since this would involve a
drastically hardened structure. This is a pretty feeble misdirection on your part.
Trusting "the structural engineers who designed the building" means trusting Leslie Robertson, the engineer of record.
He stated to the BBC that the Towers were intended to handle a slow-speed impact, but not a high-speed impact. I trust him in this regard. It appears that it is
you who do not.
NIST disputes that the Towers should have survived the impact simply because there is no evidence that they should have. All the calculations point strongly in the other direction. This is also the result arrived at by Eagar, Bazant, Usmani, Lane, and every other researcher who's ever published a result. I stand in good company. Their work is available for inspection. You've got nothing.
Again, why don't you trust the structural engineers who designed the building? Do building codes require structures to be over designed or are they bare minimum standards that engineers must follow? And considering the engineers over designed the building in the first place, why would they chose to design their building based upon what is arguably the least case scenario regarding plane impacts...eg, slow speed?
The issue of "trust" is dealt with. What you appear to trust is a lone, brief whitepaper from 40 years ago -- strike that, you trust
someone else's summary of a lone whitepaper, a summary that is ambiguous. What I trust are (a) the comments of the Engineer of Record, (b) the calculations in NIST, and (c) the corroborating work of dozens of other scientists.
You cannot possibly believe that a structure designed to handle a slow-speed impact just might have enough margin to handle a 600 MPH impact. This is not a simple round-off error we're talking about,
Swing. This is an entirely different category of disaster. In terms of relative energy, this is like donning a bulletproof vest designed to stop 9mm Para bullets, and then being surprised when a .300 Mag goes right through you and into the next county.
I believe this is called "special pleading." It's pathetic. Stop it. If you have calculations backing up your claim that the Towers should have stayed up,
show them already. But you don't.
Ok, setting aside our differences, what kind of work are you doing at JPL? I'm curious because my brother-in-law works at Honeywell within their commercial satellite division (for lack of a better term), specifically working on satellite navigation systems.
I'm a developer of artificial intelligence technologies. Nothing that's flown in space -- yet. I'm leading a spaceflight experiment due to launch next June.
I will take that advice! 
