Bazant's Blatant Bogosity

Long time readers of this site will know that I spent some time a few years back going through the papers of Zdenek Bazant that attempt to support the official WTC collapse theory. Most of those critiques have been reposted in this separate blog.

So it was cool to see someone else take on Bazant-- I found this site recently. This is the beginning of a VERY thorough analysis of Bazant's papers. Kudos to this guy who did it. It would take a lot of time to go through the whole thing carefully, but what I saw in the first few sections looks very well done.

THE PROGRESSIVE COLLAPSE MECHANICS OF ZDENEK BAZANT


The vague nature of the NIST reports when describing the collapse progression mechanisms of the twin towers has led to a long series of misrepresentations of the WTC collapses in ASCE publications and elsewhere that continues to this day. An excellent example of what lies at the heart of these misrepresentations is a series of papers appearing in the Journal of engineering mechanics by Zdenek Bazant.

Dr Bazant wrote 5 papers on the WTC collapses which appear in ASCE journals. The first paper, published in 2002, is based on a simple argument that can be stated in a single sentence. In his own words: "The analysis shows that if prolonged heating caused the majority of columns of a single floor to lose their load carrying capacity, the whole tower was doomed."

He wrote 3 more papers in succession in 2007-8 in which he develops a general one dimensional mechanical model of the motion of the progressive collapse of a building and applies the model to the Twin Towers.

It is quite fascinating to observe how this model, based on the mechanics of interacting blocks and gross assumptions, had gone from being a simple 1-D formulation to something that has been taken quite literally. The block mechanics first derived in these papers is now often portrayed as the most realistic description of the collapse progressions of the Twin Towers to date. This has occurred even though it is easy to show that block mechanics grossly contradicts what is observable and verifiable within the visual record of the events themselves. Block mechanics is taken to represent the history of the towers so completely that overwhelming visual evidence that the real collapse modes were quite different goes virtually unmentioned in pretty much all professional and government literature. Even stranger, many groups and individuals that argue contrary to Bazant have adopted the same block mechanics formulation to express their own understanding of the collapse progression modes of the Twin Towers, as will be demonstrated in sections 3.6 and 3.7.

I guess the big question is whether there really is any hope for making a breakthrough on 9/11 in this sort of scientific analysis. I think the analysis is important, but is there any hope of cracking the professional scientific community with pushing this? Bazant's stuff is so fucking blatantly bad, and it's sickening that people still take the official story seriously, after all these years. But, we still run into the same stumbling blocks-- people unwilling to risk their careers in enough numbers to make a difference.