The physics extracts from Q-dip's Oracle NSA database are wonderful, true, but applied in a manner intended to mislead.
The first slight of hand is the jump from the Richard Gage quotation into the distracting math ending up at discussing WTC-1 and WTC-2 free-fall calculations. Either Q-dip is guilty of his own charge of not having listened to and understood the radio program he linked, or he is intentionally misdirecting us (which in my book is a type of lying.) You see, Gage on the radio talks mostly about WTC-7, where NIST's Final Report supports the free-fall claim, albeit buried and surrounded by other distractions to lead us away from this obvious revelation.
Q-dip's math, besides turning off those who don't understand it, offers another realm of intellectual dishonesty from this holder of a Masters of Arts in Mathematics with Minor in Physics (which too me is most unusual, because Minors are usually associated with undergraduate degrees, not Master's degrees, and my university didn't even offer undergraduate minors.) The dishonesty comes from three directions.
First, his calculations are for free-fall in a vacuum. The towers, not being in a vacuum and being subject to air resistance and whatnot, of course would not fall at an acceleration equivalent to free-fall in a vacuum. They would take more time. So Q-dip is quote-mining, hair-splitting, and in essence setting up a clever strawman.
Second, his calculations are for the entire height of the tower structures. If GuitarBill were being honest, he'd wouldn't be looking at the whole collapse for evidence of free-fall but at collapse stages. By way of a short detour through WTC-7, note that NIST documents multiple stages of its collapse, not all of them at near free-fall speed. Also note that controlled demolitions have stages that take out some (but not all) supports to initiate downward acceleration due to gravity, and then re-use this kinetic energy of the falling mass to take out the remaining (in tact) supports and structure: saves on the total amount of explosives required. The point being: various individual collapse stages will show evidence of free-fall, but putting all stages together into one monolithic stage to dispute free-fall is disingenuous.
Students of 9/11 can readily see that the towers had multiple stages of their collapse. An interesting smoking-gun stage of the towers is that the upper floors above the impacted site collapse on themselves first before the collapse wave propagates lower, very questionable indeed! And in doing so, the upper floors cannot serve as quite the "pile-driver" in destroying the lower floors as Q-dips would have us believe, but I digress.
If GuitarBill would apply his physics and math skills to calculating the collapse speed, not of the whole building but, of just the floors above the impact site, ... well... If he were intellectually honest (or had the degrees he professes), he just might have an "Oh Shit!" moment and realize he has been debating for the wrong team.
The third area of GuitarBill's intellectual dishonesty AND THE MOST GLARING is his misapplying his velocity calculation in a subsequent multiplication by a time (from video evidence) to get a distance to MEANINGLESSLY conclude:
"If the South/North Towers fell at "free-fall speed" [they] would have fallen [respectively] about 1.60/2.41 times as far as [they] actually did fall in that time."
Acceleration due to gravity is the important factor, not velocity. Velocity is not constant and changes depending on time and how much acceleration has acted on it in that time. The velocity GuitarBill calculated is only applicable to a point in time equivalent to just prior to when "the bowling ball falling in a vacuum" would impact the street. To re-use that one-time-only-applicable velocity as a constant velocity for the whole collapse in an attempt to debunk free-fall is meaningless and a dishonest use of physics. DEBUNKING FAILED!!!
Unfortunately, the distraction does not stop there.
Q-dip says:
Video evidence proves that the South Tower fell in 14.75 seconds. The North Tower fell in 22.2 seconds.
The archives prove the GuitarBill is notorious for starting the stop-watch early and stopping it late, for including in his total collapse time separate pre-stages and post-stages (like the lonely spire from a core expiring into dust). Not that this isn't valid, but it is dishonest to use these inflated times when the 9/11 Commission does not, and when NIST provided the times for the main collapse stage as 9.75/11.05 seconds respectively, which are within the margin of error (and wind resistance).
Two points of irony here. Q-dip's insistence on using (valid but) inflated collapse times puts him in disagreement with the conclusions of the 9/11 Commission Report and causes honest researchers to therefore question its validity (if we didn't already do so at the recanting of a number of its committee members who state that evidence was withheld and they were misled).
Secondly, even if all commissions and agencies adjusted their reports to accept these inflated times, the fact remains that they are closer to free-fall times than they are to times that architects and physicists would typically calculate for a building collapsing through its path of greatest resistance while at the same time diverting kinetic energy (from downward acceleration) into the huge energy sinks of (a) pulverizing contents and structure, (b) ejecting debris horizontally at high velocities [that GuitarBill should spend some time calculating], and (c) leaving excessively high temperature (according to satellite images) molten piles in the sub-basement levels that burned for weeks (without adequate supplies of oxygen).
The conclusion from this is:
[A] GuitarBill is a liar and does not possess the education he claims, for a Mathematics Master's Degree holder with a minor in Physics would not be making the simple-ass mistakes and conclusions given by his cut-and-paste entries from his Oracle NSA database.
[B] GuitarBill is a liar and purposely mis-uses physics ("psuedo-science" anyone?) to falsely debunk 9/11 free-fall claims in a clever Q Group smoke-and-mirror distraction.
[C] Both A and B.
[D] Both A and B and other fitting epitaths to his integrity, honesty, motives, and agenda.
~TwentyTen
