No explanation? Or no explanations good enough. Because we already provided explanations But I'll post a little ditty Schneibster posted on another board..

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I figured out I misplaced a zero, but the sum of the kinetic energy is still pretty impressive. The energy dissipated during the fall is about 250 or 300 GJ, and the leftover energy at impact is about 600 GJ, not 6 TJ. So it’s about a quarter kiloton of TNT for the North tower and about a fifth of a kiloton for the South tower; that’s still a hell of a lot of energy, more than sufficient to liquify a pretty healthy chunk of steel, and it doesn’t change the fact that there’s a lot more energy in the office contents; having screwed up once, I ain’t gonna flap my pie hole and give numbers until I’m done calculatin that, tho.
Bingo, you should be aware that anytime you do mechanical work, the energy you do it with doesn’t just “go away” or “get used up.” Energy that does work gets dissipated, and when that happens, it turns to heat. This is a well known fact of physics, specifically thermodynamics, that was proven early (or maybe it was late? no, I’m pretty sure it was EARLY) in the nineteenth century by the gentleman for whom the SI unit of energy is named, James Prescott Joule. Go look him up on Wikipedia, or elsewhere if you’re a newb and believe what you read in the newspapers about Wikipedia. He did this experiment where he stirred water in buckets and showed it got hotter.
This, by the way, is a place where Jim Hoffman makes a serious mistake; in his paper on the dust cloud, he fails to note that he has to ADD THE HEAT BACK IN when he’s totalling things up at the end. This is a violation of conservation of energy, the First Law of Thermodynamics (and a foundational law of physics).
Truth,
What distance do you drop the load from? The floor of initial collapse: 79 for the South tower, 97 for the North. It’s a variable in the program, you can change it for yourself and run it yourself, it’s a perl. I should prolly have published it here long before now; this site deserves a lot more of me than physorg does, for sure. Interestingly, going from a 39-story to a 13-story falling section doesn’t make a great deal of difference in the energy, and makes even less difference in the energy that’s left over when the building hits the ground.
A falling building is not like a bomb or a laser beam. You’re right, but it makes heat all the same- just like all work makes heat. Feel the bottom of the bicycle pump after you’ve pumped the tire up. Where does that heat come from? Same place as this does.
_While it’s true that a 6.2 TJ bomb would have blown the *** out of several blocks, _ My bad, should be a 600GJ bomb- and it’s not several blocks, it’s about ten blocks in any direction. I had a link to a site with a damage calculator you could test on various cities, it was from the anti-nuclear-weapon-scientists-coalition-I-always-forget-the-name-of. Lemme see if I can hunt it up for you.
the WTC collapse obviously did not. While that’s true, you need to know that conservation of energy says that energy NEVER disappears. It ALWAYS winds up SOMEWHERE, and if this is energy capable of knocking buildings over for many blocks in all directions, and it didn’t knock them over, then where did it go and what did it do? Answer: it went into the rubble pile, and it melted and burned stuff in there.
There was energy spent “pancaking” or “snapping supports” if you believe those theorys (I do not). Whether it was explosives or whether it was sheer mass and momentum that snapped them (and I have excellent reason to believe it was nothing but mass- you’ll see shortly), it STILL made heat, and that head STILL went into the debris pile at the bottom. Heat is energy and energy NEVER just “goes away.”
All the collapse theories say that the weight of the top of the building is what caused the collapse… well that is HALF true. The other half that you are overlooking is that THE GROUND was pushing UP WITH EQUAL FORCE. So, this force you are estimating was largely transmitted into the ground during the collapse, not the rubble afterwards. No, although you are pedantically correct insofar as the fact that the STATIC FORCE of the building pushes down and the ground pushes up, when the DYNAMIC FORCE of the collapse occurs, it is local to whatever is moving; this is because you are not technically correct, it’s the MOTION that causes the DYNAMIC force, and that force is (and must be, to collapse the building) many times the static forces of the building just standing there.
Kinetic energy is not perfectly conserved as heat… in fact, it is mostly released as seismic waves and sound waves. This is actually untrue, and there is an article on seismic waves that says so, I believe on 9/11 Research; you might have misinterpreted this article. You need to prove this claim if you’re going to make it; it’s hopeless, because it’s not how it works when you hit a piece of steel, concrete, or wood for that matter with a hammer, but go ahead and try. You’ll need a credible source, someone who actually has a degree IN PHYSICS, or a college textbook (this is a little advanced for highschool physics, unless it’s advanced considerably since back in the day), or something like that.
Don’t argue with Snark on biology, and don’t argue with Da Schneib on physics- he’s got a degree in bio and is currently teaching it, and I’ve been playing with physics for prolly longer than you been alive. I’m not insultin you, just sayin. I’d recommend against arguing with josh or me on computer science as well, but you gotta do what you gotta do.
My question is: How did you account for other forms of energy release besides heat? Please provide specifics. Seismic waves, sound waves, the energy absorbed by the collapsing structure, debris shot upwards. The total energy of all of those put together is miniscule; the seismic waves are the greatest portion, and are well under 0.01% of the total (that’s 1/10,000 in plain ratios, or 1/100 of a percent). Have a look at that paper I referred to; it’s a pretty easy search.
Now, for the program:
**BEGIN PROGRAM**
#!/usr/bin/perl
$m = 4285500; # mass of one floor (kg)
$mt = 0; # mass of falling section
$fc = 39; # floor count of falling section (39 floors for 2 WTC)
$v1 = 0; # beginning velocity for the current step
$v2 = 0; # velocity at impact
$v3 = 0; # ending velocity for prior step
$p = 0; # current momentum
$ke1 = 0; # kinetic energy at impact
$ke2 = 0; # kinetic energy after impact
$de = 0; # total energy dissipated so far
$a = 9.80665; # acceleration of gravity (constant)
$t = 0; # cumulative time taken
$t1 = 0; # time taken for this step
$d = 3.8; # distance between floors (418m/110 stories)
$mt = $fc*$m; # initialize mass of falling section
$rfc = 110 – $fc;# initialize remaining floor count of uncollapsed floors
while($rfc > 0) {
$v1 = $v3; # starting velocity is ending for last step
$v2 = (($v1*2)+((2$a)*$d))**0.5; # impact velocity for this step by formula
print(“Impact velocity for story ”, $rfc, ” was ”, $v2, “n”);
$p = $mt*$v2; # momentum at impact
print(“Impulse delivered for story ”, $rfc, ” was ”, $p, “n”);
$ke1 = ($mt*($v2**2))/2; # kinetic energy at impact
print(“Impact kinetic energy for story ”, $rfc, ” was ”, $ke1, “n”);
$fc++; # increment falling floor count
$mt = $fc*$m; # update mass of falling section
$v3 = $p/$mt; # new velocity
print(“Velocity after impact for story ”, $rfc, ” was ”, $v3, “n”);
$ke2 = ($mt*($v3**2))/2; # kinetic energy after impact
print(“Remaining kinetic energy for story ”, $rfc, ” was ”, $ke2, “n”);
$de += $ke1 – $ke2; # add dissipated kinetic energy to total
print(“The kinetic energy dissipated for story ”, $rfc, ” was ”, $ke1 – $ke2, ”
n”);
$t1 = $d/(($v2 + $v1)/2); # time for this step by formula
print(“The time spent collapsing story ”, $rfc, ” was ”, $t1, “n”);
$t += $t1; # add step time to running total
$rfc—; # decrement remaining floor count
}
print(“The total time was ”, $t, “n”);
print(“The total energy dissipated during the collapse was ”, $de, “n”);
print(“The remaining kinetic energy at the end of the collapse was ”, $ke2, “n”
);
**END PROGRAM**
It’s a perl, you can download perl for just about anything from www.perl.org or somewhere they point. If you’re going to get involved in CS, somewhere you’re going to encounter perl, and now’s as good a time to learn it as any. I highly recommend the O’Reilly Press perl book which happens to be by the inventors of the language. Just so you can muddle your way through and derive the equations from the code above, * is multiplication, ** is raising to a power (and don’t forget that a fractional power is a root; so **0.5 is the square-root operation). The rest of the symbols are obvious, and the parentheses work the same way as they do in standard math notation. You should be aware that the single = in most languages simply ASSIGNS the value of what’s on the right to the thing on the left; usually, you’re required to put a single variable on the left of an =. The double == TESTS whether one value is equal to another, returning 1 or TRUE if it is, and 0 or FALSE if it is not.

http://cortez.gnn.tv/blogs/11271/9_11_WTC_...etal_Pics_Video

I think Gordon’s thorough bitch slapping of Common Sense turned him back into Schneibster.