9/11: Comments on Bidinotto's "It's a Conspiracy"

Now, that's 272 tons of TNT, more or less; five hundred forty one-thousand-pound blockbuster bombs, more or less. That's over a quarter kiloton. We're talking about as much energy as a small nuclear weapon- and we've only calculated the kinetic energy of the falling building. We haven't added in the burning fuel, or the burning paper and cloth and wood and plastic, or the kinetic energy of impact of the plane (which, by the way, would have substantially turned to heat, and been put into the tower by the plane debris, that's another small nuclear weapon-equivalent) and we've got enough heat to melt the entire whole thing.

Remember, we haven't added the energy of four floors of burning wood, plastic, cloth and paper, at- let's be conservative, say half the weight is stuff like that and half is metal, so 25lbs/sqft? And then how about as much energy as the total collapse again, from the plane impact? And what about the energy from the burning fuel? You know, I'm betting we have a kiloton to play with here. I bet we have a twentieth of the energy that turned the entire city of Nagasaki into a flat burning plain with a hundred-foot hole surrounded by a mile of firestorm to work with. - Schneibster edited by Debunking 911

1.5 Some Basic Concepts in Physics



Readers can skip this for now, but I want to outline some very simple and fundamental concepts in physics needed to negotiate the scientific claims and counter-claims of the IF and CD theories. (I promise that this is very brief and easily accessible to the lay person.)



The first is that when an object is raised to a height, it gains what is known as gravitational potential energy. As Loizeaux says: “Every nail that was carried up in the pocket of some construction worker is potential energy that’s at our disposal, …” In terms of physics the potential energy is calculated by the formula



E = mgh



E is the energy, m is the mass (of the nail or any other object), g the acceleration due to gravity, and h the height that the object is raised. If m is in kilograms, g in metres per second per second, and h in metres, then E is measured in a unit called Joules. When the Loizeaux family demolish a building in an implosion they are liberating this stored potential energy as kinetic energy – the energy of movement. This energy is calculated by a different formula:



E = ˝ mv2



In this case the kinetic energy in Joules is equal to half the mass of the moving object times the velocity squared. When the collapsing building hits the ground the kinetic energy is converted into other forms, such as fracture energy (energy required to break, for example, concrete into rubble), sound energy, and heat energy. To give some pertinent examples, the gravitational potential energy (mgh) of one of the Twin Tower has been estimated at 1.139 x 1012 Joules. This is roughly 1 followed by 12 noughts or a billion times a billion Joules (an American trillion). To put that in perspective, it is roughly the same energy as 272 tons of TNT exploding, or enough to melt one thousand metric tonnes of steel. The impact of the faster of the two planes released kinetic energy (˝ mv2) roughly equal to 4 x 1009 Joules, or four thousand million Joules. This is enough to melt approximately 4 metric tonnes of steel.



Of course, the energy released by the collapse of the Towers or the impacts of the plane did not go into melting tonnes of steel (though a small fraction may have). The point here is to understand the colossal energies involved in the WTC disaster, and how they are estimated in physics. Also vital to understand is the law of conservation of energy, which requires that all the energy that disappears in one form must appear in an other form or forms.

While the totality of the potential energy is huge, the temperature effect is negligible for the purposes of this discussion. Ask yourself, if you dropped a chunk of lead from the tower, how hot would it be when you picked it up?

While the totality of the potential energy is huge, the temperature effect is negligible for the purposes of this discussion. Ask yourself, if you dropped a chunk of lead from the tower, how hot would it be when you picked it up?

You just can't violate the first law of thermodynamics that states that energy cannot be created or destroyed. The total energy that can be released from a collapse is that of the total potential energy of the structure...You find that by taking every pound of the building, multiplying it by its height and summing them all up

Mike it was definitely an incredibly large amount of kinetic energy, and the transfer of that to heat must have been tremendous.

Granted none of these are large, but it's clear that gravitational potential energy is not the ONLY energy that might be liberated on collapse.