Reply #75: Jeez, first....

[William Seger]

... perhaps you can tell me why I should take the time to respond to all this "stuff" posted by someone who can't answer the "baslc physics" question above?

Here's the point: I certainly can give you an answer to every issue you've raised (and perhaps I will anyway when I get the time, which won't be today), but let's get one thing straight: Obviously, neither one of us is a physicist or a structural engineer. But between the two of us, your knowledge seems to be woefully inadequate to seriously engage in "rational discourse" on either topic. That "basic physics" question is absolutely relevant to the issue of a continuing collapse: mass in motion. If you don't understand how impact forces work, you will never understand why the collapses happened. You will continue to insist that it shouldn't have happened, but your arguments will be forever founded in ignorance and personal incredulity, not in physics or structural mechanics. I do believe that anyone who understands the answer to that question will immediately have some basic understanding of why the total collapse makes perfect sense. If you don't understand the answer, then you simply aren't in any position to dispute that claim.

But you don't seem to be very interested in learning anything that would contradict your "demolition" speculations: You will fend off any "rational discourse" that disputes your arguments by deluding yourself into thinking that people who don't agree with you must not have thought it through as well as you have.

In the larger picture, any debate between you and me is really irrelevant and inconsequential. While I'm certainly not an expert myself, I do believe I have some common sense with regards to whose expert opinions are trustworthy, and some understanding of how disputes among experts are worked out. You quote from Ace Baker -- the guy who wrote the theme song for the Barbie movie and who claims no planes hit the towers -- and Spooked911 -- the guy who set a bunny cage on fire to "prove" that the towers shouldn't have collapsed because of fire. But the only apparent reason for taking those guys seriously is that you like the conclusions they reach, since very little of what they say makes any sense at all, and the issues they completely ignore are staggering. Gordon Ross certainly talks a much better game -- I thought his analysis was interesting and far more impressive than anything else coming out of the "truth movement" -- but he has had over a year now to respond to his critics about claimed errors in his analysis -- criticisms that seem valid to me -- and all I've seen from him since then are attempts to raise different issues. If Gordon Ross (or anyone else) can really mount a serious technical challenge to Bazant's analysis, there's a fairly well recognized venue for fighting it out -- peer-reviewed technical journals -- but Ross only publishes on 9/11 conspiracy propaganda sites. That ought to raise a red flag to a rational person.

So, if you can, please tell me why I should take the time to answer your post, to someone who will likely not understand the answers and who has already dismissed them before I type the first one?