Major errors in assessment of World Trade Center collapses

Sept. 6, 2008 - PRLog -- The new paper by Crockett Grabbe (posted as a PDF at www.SeaLane.org) that has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Engineering Mechanics.   This is a paper where he confronts the validity  of the analysis by Keith Seffen of Cambridge  on why the World Trade Center (WTC) Towers collapsed in 2001.

As you may recall, Keith Seffen got international press coverage by the BBC last fall, in which he claimed from mathematical analysis to have uncovered the reason the WTC Towers collapsed. The press release of his paper is at:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6987965.stm

Some notes on this BBC new release:

1)  The piece says up front that Seffen's study "demonstrate that once
collapse... began, it was ... rapid & total."  "...once the collapse was set in motion, it would take only 9 secs for the building to go down."
Conservation of energy & momentum principles show this is nonsense.

http://www.journalof911studies.com/letters/g/GrabbeToNISTenergyMomentum.pdf    

Seffen lacked an understanding of these principles.

2)  "Conspiracy theorists assert that these explosive squibs can actually
be seen going off in photos & video footage of the collapse."
Not only "conspiracy theorists", but most people who examine the data.

Seffen's paper was finally published by Journal of Engineering Mechanics
in Feb. of 2008 (5 months after the press release), with an innovative mathematical
solution that in physically in error!

Crockett Grabbe followed up with this scathing "Discussion" of this paper, which discusses why his paper is in error.   His paper also challenges the conclusions of the NIST Committee in its Final Report on the Collapses of the Towers.    

As an applied physicist with over 30 years of experience, Dr. Grabbe states this nation has been presented with grievous scientific errors.  The NIST Final Report's flawed conclusions were bolstered by Seffen's paper, but several of those errors in his paper stem back to flaws in that Final Report.

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Crockett Grabbe of SLC, PhD in Applied Physics from Caltech, 1978, is an experienced physicist who does expert consulting, professional speaking & writing, & training on
physics/engineering issues, including applications requiring analytical skills.