Why Three Skyscrapers Could Not Fall Like Jenga Blocks on 9/11: Meet Galileo

By "James Madison"

In a remarkable and unprecedented phenomenon of engineering history, we are told that on 9/11 of 2001 the Twin Towers and Building 7 went down at the same speed as a replica made of giant Jenga blocks would have gone down.  A Jenga block structure has no solid joints, no millions of diagonal cross-braces bolted or welded into place onto 47 five-foot-wide vertical support columns and cross-beams with enough steel for an aircraft carrier.  Jenga blocks have nothing but air between the pieces.  For this reason when a Jenga structure falls down, it falls to the ground in mere seconds, with the pieces falling at the speed of rocks falling from the sky, which is called free-fall acceleration.

Mathematical proof that the official narrative is impossible is described below.  But first it is helpful to understand in an intuitive way how the official explanation of the three collapses is impossible.  The official NIST report, entitled "Final Report on the Collapse of the World Trade Center Towers" states on page 146:

"Since the stories below the level of collapse initiation provided little resistance to the tremendous energy released by the falling building mass, the building section above came down essentially in free fall, as seen in videos. As the stories below sequentially failed, the falling mass increased, further increasing the demand on the floors below, which were unable to arrest the moving mass."

This in essence is the progressive collapse theory of the Twin Towers, that there was "little resistance" to the collapse of upper floors, and so the towers behaved exactly as a house of cards or a Jenga skyscraper would behave at having their delicate equilibrium upset. The problem with the theory it is absurd.  

Defenders of the official theory are fond of recalling that it was also believed that the Titanic could never sink.  But the Titanic when it sank violated no laws of physics.  The Trade Center theory violates many.  

Free fall acceleration is the speed at which any object falls through thin air to the ground. It is 10 meters per second, per second.  That means that for every second an object is falling, it is going another 10 meters per second faster.  It is accelerating.  So a baseball falling for 3 seconds attains the speed of 30 meters per second.  Three seconds later it would be going 60 meters per second, and so forth.

Building 7 exactly resembled a bottom-up implosion, as if charges were cutting the structure from the bottom up, at an accelerating rate which would allow for the free fall of the upper floors.

The Towers were of a very strong construction, having won awards for their novel and ingenious design.  Frank DeMartini, and architect and the on-site construction manager for the WTC, said in January of 2001:

“The building was designed to have a fully loaded 707 crash into it. That was the largest plane at the time. I believe that the building probably could sustain multiple impacts of jetliners because this structure is like the mosquito netting on your screen door—this intense grid—and the jet plane is just a pencil puncturing that screen netting. It really does nothing to the screen netting.”

By "screen netting" DeMartini was referring to the extensive inter-connectivity of the structural members, which efficiently transferred load to surviving beams were some of the beams to be damaged or destroyed, just as cross-bracing is intended to do.

So confident was DeMartini that the buildings would never collapse that he stayed in the South Tower and lost his life saving at least 50 people.

Even Donald Trump, a builder who would in this field know what he's talking about, called the Towers two of the strongest buildings in the world.

Below is a photo of one of the towers under construction.  Note the multiple heavy sky cranes which are easily supported by the corners of the structure.  

One problem with the official theory is that it relies on the flawed idea that as mass accumulates, it goes faster.  But objects which are heavier do not fall faster than objects that are lighter, the unspoken premise of the official story. In a vacuum, even a feather and a bowling ball would fall at the same speed. An object can only go slower than the rate of free fall acceleration, as it meets resistance. This goes back to Galileo. 

 So steel frames offering massive resistance, fires or no fires, cannot fall as fast as Jenga blocks. The reason is simple. Because they are not Jenga blocks.

Think of it another way. Look at the picture below. Which block reaches the ground first? Because on 9/11, they both reached the ground at virtually the same time.  But given the difference in the mediums they are falling through, air versus the path of greatest resistance through construction grade steel, the one on the right should reach the ground first, because there is nothing between it and the ground. On 9/11, the impossible happened and they both reached the ground at the same time.

Recall that bottom three-fourths of the towers were undamaged and intact, and we can hear firefighters reporting from inside that the fires they found were small and isolated. Seven minutes before the first collapse, battalion chief Orio Palmer can be heard saying from the 78th floor of the South Tower: 

"Ladder 15, we've got two isolated pockets of fire. We should be able to knock it down with two lines [hoses]."

Another witness in the South Tower said he saw only "flames licking the wall" and that there was "no raging inferno" on 78th floor, one of the impact floors.  

This stands to reason.  Jet fuel is only kerosene.  It burns no hotter or longer, in fact in cold temperatures it can be fairly hard to light.  And most of it blew out in the fireballs.

Even when skyscrapers have burned like raging infernos from top to bottom, for 20 hours, they still didn't come close to collapsing.  That is because the forge-like temperatures required to bring large quantities of steel to the point of catastrophic failure cannot be achieved without a mechanically forced air supply, like in a blast furnace.  This would correspond to the steel approaching red hot.

The black smoke emanating from the Twin Tower fires indicate cool, oxygen-starved fires going out.  All tower office furniture and combustibles met strict fire retardant code specifications.

Below: Windsor Hotel fire, burned 20 hours, steel and concrete construction.  Didn't collapse. Twin Towers were 100% steel frame construction much stronger.  Source:  9-11 Research: The Windsor Building Fire

Twin Towers Fires

Below: Aftermath of Windsor fire.

Putting the block illustration above more scientifically, if the 15 story section is falling at free fall speed, all of its gravitational potential energy is converted to kinetic energy (movement).  It is not available to do the work of "crushing" the building below.  It would have to slow down in order to do any other work, i.e., "crushing" 80,000 tons of structural steel below, and that work quantity would have to be subtracted from kinetic energy, which is speed.  Kinetic energy, and acceleration, can only decrease as resistance is overcome.  It cannot increase.

Jenga blocks fall as they do because the no kinetic energy is expended to do the work of breaking connections, thus slowing the falling mass.  The amount of work-energy which must be subtracted from kinetic energy is zero. 

These are the irons laws of Newtonian physics.  

To illustrate what happens when a falling mass meets resistance, one only need think back to the old Prell Shampoo commercial of a pearl falling through shampoo.  The pearl sinks slowly through the viscous medium, many times more viscous than air.  Steel is thousands of times more resistant, even at high temperatures, yet we are to believe that a mass would have crushed it at the same speed it would fall through air.  

Object falling through medium denser than air

The official theory blithely dismisses the massive resistance of a steel frame which would prevent the upper stories from achieving the free fall acceleration of 10 meters per second, per second.  If resistance were not countering potential energy, all buildings should fall around our ears this moment, or tip like Jenga blocks at the slightest touch.

They do not fall around our ears because, unlike Jenga blocks or dominoes, resistance to the force of gravity is bolted and welded in throughout the building's structural members, including extensive cross-bracing and 3-inch thick steel gusset plates, placing the potential energy of the tower in static equilibrium.  Jenga, dominoes, and playing cards have zero resistance between their structural members, which is why they fall when a delicate equilibrium is even slightly upset.

From every direction, including laterally in the event of 200 mph hurricane winds, at maximum load, the Towers were designed to keep standing, as safety factors in high-rise construction are usually 5 - 6 times maximum load in any conceivable circumstances including earthquakes.  

As for the damage from planes and fuel, jetliners are basically hollow, light aluminum tubes, no match for steel. Watch how easily this steel crane demolishes a scrapped jetliner below.

Below is sliced up wreckage from one of the 9/11 airliners. 



Then of course there is Building 7, never even hit by a plane but collapsing just as fast as the towers.

In physics, the idea of resistance to free fall acceleration, in following case the resistance of air, which slows the speed of a mass, is expressed in the "drag coefficient"  of the equation for terminal velocity, below.  This becomes significant only when an object is dropped from a great height like from an airplane.



Where: 

•  represents terminal velocity,
• ${\displaystyle m}$ is the mass of the falling object,
• ${\displaystyle g}$ is the acceleration due to gravity,
• ${\displaystyle C_{d}}$ is the drag coefficient,
• ${\displaystyle \rho }$ is the density of the fluid through which the object is falling, and
• ${\displaystyle A}$ is the projected area of the object.

When a drag coefficient is very high, a falling mass reaches terminal velocity very soon, and does not accelerate anymore.  When a drag coefficient is extremely high, terminal velocity will be zero, and the falling mass will stop.  A steel frame is an example of a state of matter which would have an extremely high drag coefficient.  If this sounds like an understatement, it should, and one which renders the idea of "progressive collapse" like Jenga blocks ridiculous.

In the above equation, the drag coefficient  is in the denominator of a square root. Therefore the bigger the drag coefficient, the lower the velocity.   

Wrap your mind around the law of physics proven by Galileo, and you will see that the collapsing mass could not have gone faster as the mass got heavier. Only slower as the mass met resistance, and lots of it.  Therefore the official explanation for how the towers disappeared so quickly is false.   There is no possible collapse mechanism except pre-placed demolition charges and incendiary devices.

Proof that all objects of different weights fall to the ground at the same speed;

Ball and feather race in a vacuum:

Galileo

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Resources

Important further reading and resources

U.S. Military Officers and Patriots Question 9/11

9/11 Skeptics to Mark Anniversary with Vigils, Lawsuit

Who Did 9/11: Technology of Autopilot/Remote Flight.  Motive, Means, Opportunity

9/11Evidence.org

9/11 Truth Action Project

9/11Research

Pilots for 9/11 Truth

Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth

Documentary: 9/11 The New Pearl Harbor



James Madison is a pseudonym in the tradition of the American Revolution's Publius, in order that arguments must be judged solely on the merits.