Of course, it's been said several hundred times to truthers already, yet they still insist on framing the issue incorrectly. The columns strength is not the factor to consider here; the floor truss to column connectors strengths are. And why truthers fail time after time to accept this basic fact is beyond me, but they do it. They go on and on about "path of least resistence", yet they don't actually look and see what that path is.
I couldn't agree more! I join the debate late so forgive if I repeat.
It's not just the truthers who make that mistake. Several papers by an academic name "B.." something or other and a lot of debunkers who have followed those academic explanations and not updated their own understanding for years after the real mechanism became generally understood.
The columns were not in the game....
Putting the columns in line probably the commonest mistake by the debunker side as well as the truther trolls.
Then the second biggest error is the one made by DC, TS et al of looking for a jolt when the falling bit of column hits its broken counterpart which is below it....sorry folks. By the time it is falling it is already past its other half.....
...and the debunkers usually miss that little bit of a key point also...read all the rebuttals and see how often it is raised.
.....once one let go - they all did like a broken zipper allowing the entire floor to tilt down to hit the next and so on. I don't like the "pancake collapse" talk because I didn't see much evidence for it - I saw the floors tilt down almost vertical until they broke off the internal core and then continued to spiral outwards accounting for the "noughnut sliding down a stick" effect - the cores of both Towers were still substantially intact when most of the floors were at ground level or less.
I sort of more or less agree. The "cascading" effect or "zip fastener" aspect also a feature not incorporated into the reasoning of most debunker/explainers. Then, first up, I would disagree with your opposition to pancaking but I suspect that we would be closer together if we talked it through.
.....We can argue for eleven years about the exact initiator but basically the building were a timebomb waiting to be triggered - a fragile design pushed to the limits.
Again I agree with the direction you take but I am more forgiving. Sure it was a weakness once the top bit started to fall. But I don't think the design was unreasonable by the expectations of the era. It needed two big things to happen which are only clear in hindsight viz:
1) Major trauma of deliberate aircraft crash; PLUS
2) Cumulative effects of unfought fires
in the setting of the specific design of the towers.
Those two plus the inherent vulnerability of the "tube in tube" ONCE the top bit fell....your distinction between the "time bomb" and the "trigger" is spot on.
Still those are detailed differences of viewpoint. Bottom line is that no one in the high rise trade will make the same errors again - unknowingly.
Which raises another truther's false belief - the idea that such things have to be built into regulatory codes before they have any effect... The industry will be way ahead of the code writers
on projects of this scale.
And, if there is another similar scale tragedy, it will be different unforeseen factors contributing.
Toughest part of engineering - getting all the "what ifs" lined up...
...especially to avoid/prevent cascading failures. With electricity grids probably the best recognised example although drawing systemic analogies is risky on these forums.
