Tuesday, March 11, 2008

The Physics of Richard Gage

I was not a physics major in college, although I did take two quarters worth, but I still know enough to be amazed this guy actually works as an architect. From an interview last week on San Francisco radio, 25 minutes in:

Gage: In the case of the North Tower, the 15 story section above the point of jet plane impact, you see it decreasing by half before it ever begins to move down. In other words, half of that mass, which we're told was so great, is decreased, destroyed, disintegrated by these explosions, and then within two seconds the rest of it is completely gone such that you don't have this 15 story mass crushing the rest of the building and its 80,000 tons of structural steel designed to resist this load for the life of that building.

He apparently does not even understand the law of conservation of mass, or the difference between a dynamic and a static force. Someone pull his license before he gets somebody killed.

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