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Ludwik Kowalski and I have discussed through private emails our approaches
to calculating the acceleration of the North Tower of the World Trade
Center (WTC) and determining whether the tower was in free-fall during its
collapse. Ludwik concludes that the tower was not in free-fall with an
acceleration of magnitude of approximately 0.3g - 0.7g. I conclude that the
tower was in free-fall with an acceleration of 0.95g - 1.05g. We are
unable to resolve this discrepancy, but we have agreed to present this
matter to the Phys-L members for discussion and possible resolution.
Ludwik found a large variation in the/snip/
calculated acceleration, depending on the number of datapoints in a set and
the location of that set of datapoints among all the data.
/snip/ These results are consistent with other
attempts, and he concludes that the tower was not in free-fall.
Carlson's approach --
Taking the data during the collapse I calculated the time since the
beginning of the collapse and the magnitude of the tower's
displacement. Using all of the approximately 120 datapoints I calculated a
best power law of the form y=at^n, where y is the magnitude of the
displacement and t is the time since the beginning of the collapse.
I look forward to comments from the group.
Thanks.
Glenn
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Glenn A. Carlson, P.E.