I watched the video at least a dozen times, and I don't see that it "collapses, leaving a trail of dust from the core". I see it turning to dust, period. Then, the dust very slowly started dropping downward while it dissipated like anything else slightly heavier than air. But hey Leo, that's what you see, and that's what I see, and everyone can make their own judgment.
You probably have been looking at low-resolution/low-quality versions of the videos; it's quite typical for truther theories to be based on such "evidence". Or you're biased by what you want to see. Or both.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W0-W582fNQ
Look at the core swaying back and forth: first to the right, then to the left, then back to the right. Tell me a structure that unstable wasn't going to fall. Now zoom to 0:52 and to 1:15. If you can't see the columns falling down until they're hidden by the dust cloud, then there's nothing else that would convince you. It's as plain as day. And why wouldn't it leave a trail of dust? The core was filled with concrete staircases and gypsum walls. Instead what is more plausible to you is "dustification of steel," a phenomenon that doesn't exist in the real world.
I already have stated that there is no way that conventional explosives ALONE were used on the main towers. The experts agree with this.
Yeahhhh. "We have top men working on it right now." "Who?" "Top ..... men."
There is postulation on what was used, from mini nukes to ULF electromagnetic waves in combination with conventional explosives.
All taken very seriously by the international structural engineering community, I'm sure. After all, those are the experts all this should be painfully obvious to.
Anybody that thinks that the public is privy to ALL the weapons the Pentagon has in its possession is living in la-la land.
And that means the mind can roam free in imagining what possible exotic sci-fi weapons were used — death rays from space! — which could do astonishing things like dustifying steel!
As for the "few floors", well, yes, it was more than a few floors on the south tower, but the north tower was hit higher up, leaving only 15 or so floors that did all that pulverizing.
Only 15 floors! That's still a 15-story building being dropped on WTC1, a mass of 33,000 tons falling at a drop distance of 3.7 meters, which would deliver about 1.2 GJ of kinetic energy to the floor below. That is far greater than the estimated 500-629 MJ of impact energy needed to collapse the 240 perimeter and the 47 core columns on that floor. As far as the pulverization of concrete is concerned, each tower had an estimated 460 GJ available which was more than sufficient to crush concrete at least to 100μm size particles (which would have required 190 GJ) [1].
I simply refuse to swallow this garbage that a small section like that can pulverize 95 floors of steel
It ain't a small section. Nor does it remain 15 floors on the way down. After the initial floor collapse, it becomes 16 floors. And then 17 floors. And it keeps increasing in mass — which means an increase in strain demands on each subsequent floor — all the way down. The 80th floor was not any stronger than the 94th floor, and it had many times the mass and force acting on it than the 94th floor had at initiation. That is why the collapse was self-sustaining, once it got started there wasn't any way to stop it.
with a massive core that held up ALL of the building's weight.
OMG, you did not just say that! LOL, you are soooo wrong. This is a good example of what I meant when I said that we can't even agree on basic facts. No, the core was not designed to support the entire weight of the building.
Traditionally, skyscrapers used a skeleton of columns distributed throughout the interior to support building loads, with interior columns disrupting the floor space. The tube-frame concept, earlier introduced by Fazlur Khan, was a major innovation, allowing open floor plans and more space to rent. The buildings used high-strength, load-bearing perimeter steel columns called Vierendeel trusses that were spaced closely together to form a strong, rigid wall structure. There were 59 perimeter columns, narrowly spaced, on each side of the buildings. In all, the perimeter walls of the towers were 210 feet (64 m) on each side, and the corners were beveled. The perimeter columns were designed to provide support for virtually all lateral loads (such as wind loads) and to share the gravity loads with the core columns.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Construction_of_the_World_Trade_Center (that's just a start, you could look up the references)
Those buildings could have stood without the outside walls because they were designed that way to eliminate columns that would interrupt floor space.
Wrong. The structural columns that would normally stand in the middle of the floor space in regular skeleton steel-frame construction were moved out to the sides to the perimeter of the floors to create that uninterrupted floor space. The columns weren't eliminated — they were just moved. They're all there on the outside of the building. Your comment is akin to saying that an animal with an exoskeleton could survive without it because it was designed to live without internal bones.
You're trying to tell us that the momentum gained from 10 or 20 feet of vertical drop was enough to methodically deconstruct the towers from the top down at near free fall speed.
As I already said, the collapse was self-sustaining (any total collapse "deconstructs" a building). And the towers together had about 1.0-1.3 TJ of potential energy available (depending on how the total mass is estimated). And again, the buildings fell slower than free fall. You can see this for yourself:
That's a piece of cladding descending at free fall. The collapse itself was noticably slower.
They could have been hit by a FLEET of 757's and they would still be standing if it weren't for the explosives, nukes, ULF's or whatever they were.
Considering you didn't even know that the perimeter columns were necessary load-bearing elements, it doesn't surprise me that you think that structural failure without deliberate sabotage was impossible. Funny how what is so ovbious to you isn't obvious to the international structural engineering community (and no I do NOT mean AE911Truth as already explained before).
When's the last time a 110-story building was taken down by controlled demolition?
No building even half that tall has ever been taken down by controlled demolition.
That's what makes the controlled demolition theories so absurd. This would have been the BIGGEST UNDERTAKING in the entire history of controlled demolition — 267 stories in all!! — without leaving any evidence or clues whatsoever that would have tipped off the occupants of the offices. Yeah, sure. Very believable.
Maybe you can explain to us how it might be done with minimal damage to the surrounding area.
Minimal damage? The three towers each collapsed onto neighboring buildings. The claim that they fell neatly into their footprint is patently untrue.
