Maxwell's demon and WTC 7

(Background: at the end of 2008, NIST published the final official report on the destruction of WTC 7, the third skyscraper totally destroyed on 9/11. Discarding earlier official hypotheses (and based on no physical evidence, as "[N]o metallography could be carried out because no steel was recovered from WTC 7"), the institute claimed that ordinary office fires resulted in an "extraordinary event", the skyscraper's total symmetrical destruction, which progressed at complete freefall acceleration for over 2 seconds, or the span of 8 floors.)

Quoted from "The Rapid Graceful Collapse of World Trade Center Building 7" by Crockett Grabbe,
http://www.sealane.org/writings/WTC7demon.html


To fully understanding the nuances in the 2008 Report by NIST, it might be helpful for people to learn about Maxwell's demon. This demon was actually conjured up by the famous James Clerk Maxwell, one of the most innovative physicists of the 19th Century. He is most famous for developing the 4 coupled equations that completely describe the fields of electricity and magnetism. One of the other physics topics he worked on was that of thermodynamics, a subject considered essential at that time to understand how engines and other sources produce work. 3 laws had been developed on thermodynamics years before -- principles that were developed as a result of the enlightenment of the industrial revolution. But Maxwell saw a puzzling problem about the 2nd law of thermodynamics.

The 2nd law of thermodynamics says that if 2 containers side-by-side are in thermal equilibrium with each other, they will stay in thermal equilibrium. But Maxwell postulated that if there was a little demon opening up a small door between the containers, the demon could monitor thermal molecular motion by only allowing fast molecules to pass through into one container, and slow molecules to pass through into the other container. Thus over time the demon would cause the 2 containers to move out of thermal equilibrium with each other, in seeming contradiction to the 2nd law.

The resolution of the paradox formulation by Maxwell is that that little demon must of necessity be considered part of the physical system. To get the extremely large amount of information on the movement of septillions of molecules requires external work, and with that external work considered there is no violation of the 2nd law of thermodynamics. In fact 20th century statistical physics was developed to go beyond thermodyamics, and includes those extremely small remote possibilities (such as all this information being transmitted to septillions of molecules) in analysis of the expected outcome.

In the case of the ostensible collapse of WTC7 initiating by a local buckling from fires that was formulated by NIST, that demon would have to control the flow at millions of such doors along the top of the building to maintain that amazing symmetry for the under-7-second collapse. Fires in general are very asymmetrical, so the demon would have to get the burned structures in the right place at all these points for the catastropic timing of the collapse to produce this amazing symmetry. But if the architectural failure started locally from fires as the NIST Committe claims, that local asymmetry would have to result in a global perfectly-symmetric fall within hundredths of a second. All of the information from the locally asymmetric failure would have to propagate to all corners of the building and almost instaneously create a perfectly symmetric fall. The demon would have to move at an extremely fast rate to these millions of doors to control this amazing transition to global symmetry. The statistical odds of this happening are so overwhelmingly small that the scenario is patently absurd.

But again, moving between millions of doors at extremely fast speeds to obtain this amazing symmetry is not the only feat the demon would have to do. Building 7 of the WTC fell with perfect symmetry and at freefall from its very start. The establishment of freefall came from very careful timing and measurement by David Chandler in 3 videos in a series entitled "WTC7: NIST Finally Admits Freefall" he produced and placed on the web ( www.911speakout.org ). NIST admitted the building was in freefall for more than the first 2 seconds of its collapse, despite claims they made when they first released the WTC7 Report on August 21 that it was not in freefall.

The implications of the fact that the collapse was in freefall are that the gravitational energy was totally used for the freefall of the building. The well-known physics principle of conservation of energy shows that there was no gravitational energy left to break the building apart as it fell. If gravity was the only source of energy, there is no energy to cause the structure to collapse as it falls. Conservation of energy shows this could only happen if the building fell as if it was liquid water, as if all material cohesion within the building had been destroyed when it started falling. Destroying this cohesion would clearly require a separate energy source than gravitation. Freefall of the building shows that the gravitational collapse conjectured in the NIST Report cannot happen!

Thus to attain freefall of the building with perfect symmetry, Maxwell's demon would not only have to move at extremely high speeds between millions of doors to maintain this perfect symmetry, it would also have to violate well-established physics conservation laws. Maxwell's demon might be able to pull off the fantastically improbable, but he cannot perform the impossible.

Maxwell's hypothetical demon would in fact be powerless to violate physics conservation principles. No violation of these conservation principles have ever been found. It would also be extremely unlikely the demon could get the information to millions of points in time to maintain the amazing symmetry of the graceful fall of the building. For the top of Building 7 to fall at the free-fall rate with such graceful symmetry would in fact require substantial amounts of exlosive-type energy to quickly and completely obliterate the full material cohesion and create this very non-resistive state all across the building. In fact, barring explosive energy breaking up the solid material, that lower contiguous material counters falling parts from above, and conservation of energy and momentum keeps the free-fall state from ever being approached. The NIST Committee completely ignored conservation of energy and momentum in all their calculations, not only for Building 7 but also for the Towers, erroneously deducing that the buildings can collapse gravitationally at close to the "free-fall" rate from fires alone.