I did see the planes (didn’t see the first one hit because my position wasn’t right for that), and I did hear the sounds, saw the collapses…

I could see the windows of the second plane, but was way too far away to see any people in them. There were no pods on the planes or any such.

What I have to admit as strange, was, as the first tower collapsed, I misinterpreted what I saw. The top of the tower vanished, clearly, I saw that happen. But I thought it was because of the cloud of dust. I think that I was unwilling to accept that the towers could collapse. Even as the top of the cloud of dust was a bit cleared and I could see that the top of the tower wasn’t there, I chalked it up to not knowing precisely where to look.

Sounds stupid, eh? I was on the phone describing the whole thing to someone in London, and in retrospect, I felt kind of stupid. I recall mentioning the dust cloud is blocking the building and that I couldn’t see the top of the tower anymore.

A similar strategy is used for ductwork connections to the fire dampers at rated walls. The ductwork in the room can collapse from the fire destroying the supports without the ductwork pulling the rated wall down with it. The fire damper, which remains, closes automatically to keep the fire & smoke from getting into the adjacent space.

You can’t use it in shaftwalls (walls that are built from the inside-out around tight vertical chases…usually through rated floor systems) because you cannot board the inside. For this reason, shaftwall studs must be made of steel.

So, even people who aren’t familiar with specific melting points of various metals know enough about aluminum to deduce that is would be expected to melt in a building fire such as those at WTC, which reached as high as 2,000 F.

On the other hand, conspiracy theorists will decide that anyone with knowledge like mine is “in on it”, and not to be trusted. I’ve seen this when discussing a CERN conspiracy theory (there are people who believe CERN is developing an energy weapon, or some sort of energy technology to overthrow world governments). In that case, one proponent of the theory was going on about how it was clearly true, using a lot of arguments from final consequence, and dismissing my arguments against as uninformed. When I pointed out that I’d worked there as a physicist, he seamlessly switched to saying that nothing that I said could be trusted, because I had an interest in maintaining the conspiracy.

Yeah, right.

Dicklomat- “Countries with corrupt governments tend to circulate sensible-sounding conspiracy theories
Countries with lawful governments tend to circulate rediculous-sounding conspiracy theories”,

I was thinking that corrupt governments would result in more conspiracy theory all around – logical and otherwise. I would think that the people would become accustom to that way of thinking, since they may feel that they cannot trust what they are told from authorties. If many anti-government journalists die mysterious deaths, then it makes sense that perhaps they were killed… but in this setting I might not trust a lot of what my government is promoting even if it were legit and transparent.

Another point, though, is the question about what exactly you mean by the rate of fall. If you looked at the top of one of the towers, it’s certainly true that at most it should drop at g, but if you look at some other point to measure the rate, then it could easily be at a greater rate.

For example, if you looked at the downward speed of the “crumple zone”, i.e. the lowest point at which bending was happening, then this could theoretically move at up to the speed of sound in steel. Hit a higher floor hard enough, and you get a compression wave heading down the structure that could then cause collapse in a weak floor below. It would be entirely possible that the top ten floors (for example) dropped onto the eleventh floor down, and that the next event was the start of a failure in a floor another ten below that, a small fraction of a second later.

Given that the structure lower down is carrying much more weight than near the top, it’s perfectly plausible that the collapse point could move downwards extremely rapidly, and if you were naively using that to measure from, then you’d get a descent faster than freefall.

There’s another way too that even a more sensible measurement could give you a fall greater than g. Let’s say that you measure the fiftieth floor, as it descends. This floor was not gently set free to drop under its own weight, it was hit from above with thousands of tonnes of metal travelling at a pretty high speed. It would, almost instantaneously, accelerate to nearly the same speed that that debris was falling, and so again would have an acceleration faster than g.

I’ve seen truthers take their measurements in both the above ways (or at least claim to), and both can plausibly give faster than g falls, with no need for shenanigans at all. Basically their claim that it is suspicious is just not true.

And that’s of course before we even get to the point that when you measure it accurately everything fell much slower than my examples above allow. It turns out that the surviving floors did all slow the descent just enough that the free debris fell ahead of them.