Creative Speculation

(1) Bazant and Zhou say this:

I don't know how they could make it any more obvious that what they're modeling here isn't what they think happened -- unless, perhaps, they also commented on some of the specific differences between reality and this model ("For example, the upper part of one tower is tilting as it begins to fall...&quot . Oh, right: they did that, too.

(2) In this scenario, Bazant and Zhou say, "the upper part may be assumed to move through distance h almost in a free fall," and they give a reason. Even if you don't understand the reason, and even if you don't understand the preceding point, it's hard to think how you can fail to understand "almost."

They can use g in their expression (1) because it's an estimate of the overload ratio, which works out to 31. They can assume that their professional readership understands that replacing g with, say, 0.9g won't drop the overload ratio below 1.

Near the end of the main paper, Bazant and Zhou do appear to lowball the collapse times (while still setting them higher than they would be in free fall). I have no idea how that could be construed as good news for a CD hypothesis, unless being able to show that B&Z were wrong about anything whatsoever as of September 2001 somehow strengthens the case for CD.

(3) Meanwhile, it took me ten seconds with Google to find a YouTube video titled "Twin Towers 10 Second Free-fall" -- posted in 2008, never corrected. I myself have talked with people who told me that the Twin Towers collapsed in free fall, so I know they exist.

(4) Way to derail the thread, jesters.