Quote:
Originally Posted by MediaGuy
You add such spice to the debate.
I've seen the footage. Thousand foot building. Ten, fifteen seconds? That's 10 stories a second. Faster than falling through air, practically.
and
Originally Posted by MediaGuy
Not stop it, but slowed it down. Offered some resistance. There was zero resistance. The top part that started going down had four times its mass and and conserved energy in its path. It's not like it was raised a thousand feet in the air and dropped; it had no velocity.
Even if the lower seventy floors were made of glass they couldn't have fallen so fast.
Remember the laws of motion and path of least resistance principle from science class?
Buildings can't "collapse" that way. It's physically impossible. Not without a little help.
;)
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Actually Greg you are making a wild assumption here. What would need to do is determine the terminal velocity of the building as it fell. Terminal Velocity is the downward force of gravity minus the upward force of drag. As each piece of the building gets stuck to the downward falling piece it will gain momentum until the amount of drag it hits on the way down stops the acceleration. This momentum is the limiting value of the acceleration process, since the effective forces on the body more and more closely balance each other as the terminal velocity is approached. And since there is more floors above crashing each floor below, terminal velocity is never reached until it hits the ground. Thats why everything including the ground floors are utterly destroyed.