They've Got Models....

The video starts off with about 3:40 of JREF forum member and NASA engineer Ryan Mackey describing a possible model that could be used to analyze the collapse of the towers.  So far so good.  But what follows shows the flaw in casting pearls before swine.  Truther psikeyhacker builds a model that has metal washers for the floors and paper loops.  Right off the bat, he completely misses the point about scaling that Ryan was very careful to note in his discussion.

Over at Truth Action, psikeyhacker has a thread where he discusses his beliefs:

Why can't the "Academics" address a grade school physics problem?


But here we are ten years later and most of the "Academics" can't think to demand accurate data about the distributions of steel and concrete down the towers. High school physics students should have known to ask that in 2001. The "Academics" should have made the Truth Movement unnecessary.

See, he thinks that somehow the "distributions" (sic) of steel and concrete in the towers is crucial to determining whether they would actually collapse and do the damage shown.  Never mind that very good approximations can be made for the actual distributions and that when those approximations are made it has been demonstrated that the gravitational potential energy stored in the towers was quite sufficient to do the damage shown.  Note also the usual blather about how grade school or high school physics should be sufficient to prove that the towers did not come down the way we were told.  And later:

 I say this is GRADE SCHOOL PHYSICS. 7th and 8th graders should be able to understand why it is ridiculous to think that an airliners weighing less than 200 tons could totally obliterate skyscrapers more than 400,000 tons each.

What difference does the weight make?  By the "logic" he's using here, a small match, which can't weigh more than a gram at best, could never totally obliterate a large wooden house.  Note that when others mention that if this were truly the case, then physics professors would have raised a ruckus, he uses the conspiracy theorist's favorite card:

Look at it from another perspective. Suppose most physicists could figure out within days that there was no way airliners could destroy those buildings. But the buildings were destroyed. That means something other than airliners did it and some organisation that has A LOT of power does not care who they kill or how many.

So is a physicists with a career and a family going to stick his neck out?

 Yep, the physicists kept quiet because they knew the plotters would chop their necks off.  Of course, Steven Jones and David Chandler have somehow remained in the land of the living, but that's probably because they haven't pursued the "distributions" issue.  And no, psikeyhacker is not a physicist himself (which his probably why he thinks it should be obvious to 7th graders); he's apparently involved in computers somehow, although he isn't very knowledgeable about his own field:

I worked for IBM for years. I never heard the term von Neumann machine or saw it in any documentation. I soldered together my first computer while there so that is how I really learned how they actually worked despite being sent to numerous IBM courses. It wasn't until after I left IBM that I learned that IBM hired John von Neumann as a consultant in 1952 and that nearly all computers are von Neumann machines.

 Entertaining thread.