Reply #107: I was going to put you on ignore...

[AZCat]

but I'm glad I read this last post before I did that. I now understand what you were asking me, and where the confusion arose. It appears that you think my statement "The laws of physics were the same for both situations" implies there are different sets of physical laws for different conditions. This is not true. All events are subject to the same set of laws, regardless what is happening. My example of flipping change (which failed to communicate my point) is that the behavior of objects involved in any system must still be governed the same, whether a penny or a dime (or an F-4 or a 767) is the object. So the answer to your question "what same laws of physics apply to both of these impacts?" is all of them.

If you look at my first response to you (Post #13) we can see that I am commenting on the connection between the two cases: the F-4 impact test and the WTC impacts on September 11th. The purpose of the impact test (and several others, like the CID) was to improve software used in modelling precisely this sort of system - the collision of an aircraft with another object. Simulation software is effective because it can test scenarios that would otherwise be impossible, impractical, expensive, or risky. The software engineers are able to take the data collected from these various tests and develop a system where they can simulate events beyond those which were tested (i.e. switching aircraft, changing initial parameters). The NIST used a variant of this software in their investigation (later animated by Purdue). It's really not any different from what hundreds of thousands of other engineers do in lots of different fields.

Are the planes supposed to behave the same in these two cases No, of course not - the systems are different (even if they weren't, nonlinear systems frequently have different results for multiple iterations when the initial conditions are changed slightly, at least in the chaotic region). But the lessons learned from one case can be applied to the simulation of behavior of the second (again, because the rules aren't any different).


I hope this is a more acceptable response than my other posts, but surely you can see why I was getting irritated.