Sunday, August 22, 2010

Debunking Dave Thomas, Ryan Mackey, and Zdenek Bazant et al.

So the 9/11 debate between Richard Gage, from Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, and Dave Thomas, a physicist from New Mexicans for Science and Reason took place on Coast to Coast AM last night, and I forgot to tune in. A commenter at the JREF forum says they are going to post it, if so I will link it here later. In the meantime, I was scanning the comments there and in the Above Top Secret forum and found some interesting stuff.

9/11 "debunker" Ryan Mackey refuses to do such debates anymore and according to commenter "SezMe" the Coast to Coast debate justifies his position, "This was a confirmation of Mackey's 'ignore 'em' stance. Gage threw so much crap up against the wall that Dave was unable refute all of it. Sadly, I score a win for the truthers."

That's one way of looking at Mackey's refusal to debate and the admitted victory of Gage, but I think "Serpent of Arabia" on Above Top Secret probably framed it better:

This was a horrible debate. It shouldn't even be called a debate.

Almost everything Richard, and Niels was saying went over both of the opponents heads. They couldn't agree because they simply did not have any TRUE understanding of what happened, and actual science.

Dave was simply not addressing the points with any true understanding. He is a second rate scientist (if he can even be called one). He lacks all form of reason, and most likely much less intelligent than Richard. He was also annoyingly not familiar with the research material/documents of the opposing party.
Now like I said, I didn't hear the debate, but I am confident that this assessment is accurate and is exactly what Mackey is trying to avoid.

Mackey claims that:

...They can't be reasoned with. So the best way to convince them is to ignore them -- eventually they'll get bored and stop obsessing over it, though it could take years or even decades. Best way to piss them off, also, is to ignore them. The one thing the Truth Movement has always thrived on is drama...
When he chimed in to say that he "never once thought this debate would go anywhere new" and that it's "surreal talking to these people in debate," his former sparring partner, mechanical engineer, Tony Szamboti, retorted:

What I find surreal is your not admitting your two major errors in our debate.

It is now proven that the factor of safety for the core columns was 3.00 to 1 for the loads they actually had on them. You insisted it was significantly less than this and tried to say that I was overestimating the energy they would absorb in a collision. Of course, in the Missing Jolt paper we don't even get into the factor of safety and simply use the known yield strength and sizes of the columns to determine their energy dissipation, so it isn't clear why you even made this comment other than to try and create the impression that I was wrong about the column strength. The reality is that you were wrong on this point in every possible way.

The tilt in WTC 1 was not anywhere near the 8 degrees that you portrayed it to be when the upper section started descending. In fact, it was provably no more than 1 degree and there is no chance the columns could have missed each other. This has been ascertained using the simple geometry you suggested.

When are you going to publicly admit that you erred in these two cases due to your insistence on assuming NIST was correct? Remember you said "NIST doesn't make those kinds of mistakes". Well it turns out they do, and you need to be a man and admit it.
Go ahead Ryan, ignore him. I have been asking 9/11 "debunkers" to put up or shut up for awhile now.

Szamboti also left a message for Thomas:

Dave,

I went to your NMSR site per the link provided on this thread and have to say I was surprised to see that you had Dr. Bazant's early hypothesis of a 31 g dynamic load posted there. This has been shown to be impossible by those arguing for the present official hypothesis as well as those arguing against it.

First, it isn't possible for an impacting object with a factor of safety of 3.00 to 5.00 to transmit a dynamic load of 31 g's. The upper section would have come apart and that would have been the end of the pile driver.

Second, Dr. Bazant is off by a factor of ten on the axial stiffness of the columns in the tower. Their stiffness was 7.1 GN/m not 71 GN/m. Maybe it was a misplaced decimal point, but nonetheless his stiffness estimate is seriously erroneous.

Third, your test of loose rice in a bag does not legitimately represent loose rubble as the bag provides a restraint causing the rice to act somewhat in unison, which would not be true of loose rubble developed in a building collision.

With the real axial stiffness of 7.1 GN/m the largest dynamic load possible was 11 g's and even then, with the full mass of the upper section participating, the impacting structure could not survive that and thus could not transmit it. This is not to say that a dynamic load was not possible but it would have to be a lower value to conform to the observation of the upper section remaining somewhat intact past the first several floor collisions.

However, to have a dynamic load the the impacting object needs to decelerate at a rate greater than 1 g and the amplification depends on how many multiples of g the deceleration value is. There was no deceleration in the descent of the upper section of WTC 1 and the perimeter walls of the upper section were stiff enough to transmit it if there had been any. Thus the lack of deceleration or constant acceleration of the upper section proves there was no dynamic load.

Apparently, in an article to be published in the Sept. 2010 issue of the Journal of Engineering Mechanics, Dr. Bazant himself has finally entered the debate on this issue and attempts to argue that the velocity drop would have been imperceptible at the roofline. His opinion is refuted by every single Verinage demolition, where deceleration of the upper section does occur and is very perceptible and measureable at the roofline.

The evidence is that there was no dynamic load in the collapse of WTC 1. Ryan Mackey recognized this in our debate on Hardfire and tried to argue that the upper section fell on the floors due to the tilt causing misalignment of the upper and lower columns. Unfortunately for his argument, it has been shown that the tilt was not nearly significant enough to cause the columns to miss each other, and there should have been a perceptible jolt if the collapse was natural. The only reason there wouldn't be is if the column strength below was being largely removed in an unnatural way.
Furthermore, Bazant's work has already been refuted twice in the Journal of Engineering Mechanics. Anders Bjorkman M.Sc. was published in July of this year and Bazant et al. did author a Closure, which Bjorkman called "the most shameful Closure in structural damage analysis history" in his response. Is he right? Well, his response also included a challenge that puts his money where his mouth is!

Bjorkman states:
No structure of any kind collapses from top down! It is always from bottom up... So to win the Challenge you have to come up with some other type of structure that really can collapse from top down! I look forward to that. I will happily pay you Euro 10 000:- if you can do that. I cannot find any structure in Universe that meets my Challenge.
If his opponents cannot find a way to collect the money offered, then it is indeed possible that they have written "the most shameful Closure in structural damage analysis history."

Find this all a bit confusing? As Bjorkman pointed out in his original paper, "simple observations of any video of the WTC1 destruction prove the Bazant... model wrong."



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As Screw Loose Change Would Say: Moron Dave Thomas