Thread: Architects & Engineers Discuss WTC No. 7

But really, what would your rebuttal to this video be? Do you feel the narrator is incorrect about something? Or Steven Jones, who is asking the questions on the panel? If they are correct, is the rate of collapse here not close enough to actual free-fall (so close, in fact, that even NIST seems to have retracted their initial statement and included a significant (IMO) period of free-fall), to say that it fell 'near free-fall'?

The narrator could've left out his dinky remarks, for one. Merely laying out his interpretation and leaving it at that would've sufficed. As for the rest of the video, I don't know nearly enough about that section of the report or the narrator's own calculations to comment in detail. If NIST thinks it was near free-fall after their revision (a necessary revision if they miscalculated something. That's how research works), then sure, it's near free-fall.

BUT, I can still say the collapse was not uniform given HOW it collapsed. From the (basic) knowledge I have of how demolitions go, they usually gut the building, blow all the main supports, and watch it fall. That's not how WTC7 went down (meaning, the main supports weren't all destroyed at once). This also leads me to shy away from thinking it was demolished. We can play around a bit with Occam's Razor to reach that conclusion as well.

If it is near free-fall (or, even more, if it was free-fall), would you be at all intrigued, or would it become so insignificant that you would be surprised you even doubted it to begin with?

I'll cut out the free-fall part. Evidently my interpretation of what free-fall should be is different from NIST's. No sense in mixing apple and oranges. I wouldn't necessarily be intrigued. If it fell at free-fall, then it fell at free-fall. That wouldn't necessarily lead me to think "OMG, DEMOLITION." Nor should it for anybody.

Also, you said: "(And though it may not be actually, technically, physically 'uniform, but damnit, it's close, isn't it?? Lol.)"

If it isn't physically uniform, then it isn't uniform at all, is it? When I think of a uniform collapse, I imagine a building falling all at once, each part together, inside and out. Building 7 was mostly hollow when it collapsed, so I don't really classify that as uniform.