In his Phys-L post of 26 May 2003 21:29:06-0500, Brian Whatcott wrote:
"In the days following the immolation of the New York landmark. .
.[Twin towers - 1368 & 1362 ft - 110 stories - World Trade Center
<http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/buildingbig/wonder/structure/world_trade.html>].
. . there was a kinematic digitization of the towers' fall, by a
contributor to this list. The follow ups notably included an
investigation of a marked contribution to the kinematic fall model
from a sinusoid, decided (by Mallinckrodt, if I recall) to be due to
a fourier component of the step pause early in the collapse, while
the first subfloor gave way. The discussion here was as useful as
anything I saw later."
A brief visit to the generally ignored Phys-L search engine
<http://lists.nau.edu/cgi-bin/wa?S1=phys-l> brought up the crucial
contributions alluded to by Whatcott [Carlson (2001a,b,c);
Mallinckrodt (2001)], as well as a key observation due to Whatcott
(2001) himself. [I shall forego my curmudgeon <:-{ essays [e.g., Hake
(2003, 2002)] on the virtues of consulting archives and posting
references.]
Unfortunately, the URL's for additional web material on the
video-analysis of the North Tower collapse posted by Carlson (2001c)
and Mallincrodt (2001) have been obliterated by link-rot. Carlson is
no longer at St. Charles Community College and hasn't posted on
Phys-L for about a year. (Google tells me that he may now be a
physics graduate student at the Univ. of Missouri St. Louis.)
A Google <http://www.google.com/> search for ["Trade Tower" video]
(without the square brackets) yielded 236,000 hits. At 1 min/hit it
would take 164 days to examine them all, but on the first page
appears "CNN.com Specials ... Exclusive video of plane crashing into
the World Trade Center (Sept. ... Watch the dramatic video as one of
the World Trade Center Towers collapses
<http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/trade.center/multimedia.day.html>.
Naive questions:
1. Does anyone know (without going through thousands of Google hits)
whether or not professionals other than Phys-L'ers have published any
video analyses of the World Trade Center (WTC) collapse? I should
think this would be of interest to physics teachers tired of the same
old Tacoma Narrows video [Fuller et al. (1982)], structural
engineers, and those planning to move into the planned heavenly
resurrection of the WTC
<http://www.renewnyc.com/plan_des_dev/wtc_site/new_design_plans/selected_design.asp>.
There will be 5 towers, the highest with a 1776-ft-high-antenna and
70 floors.
2. I seem to recall having seen photos of collapsing chimneys in
physics texts. Have chimney collapses been video analyzed? My Google
search for ["chimney collape" video] was unproductive.
Fuller, R.G., D.A. Zollman, & T.C. Campbell, "The Puzzle of the
Tacoma Narrows Bridge Collapse" Video. Wiley.
Hake, R.R. 2002. "Why Not Give References," Phys-L post of 20 Sep
2002 15:00:25 -0700; online at
<http://lists.nau.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0209&L=phys-l&P=R30218>
Hake, R.R. 2003. "Re: An interesting reference..." PhysLrnR post of
6 May 2003 12:47:02-0700; online at
<http://listserv.boisestate.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0305&L=physlrnr&O=A&X=55E9C35B2550276F2E&Y=rrhake@earthlink.net&P=1239>.
[One must subscribe to PhysLrnR to access it archives, but it takes
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