Okay. I glanced at Ebbie's Eagar & Musso article and remembered reading it a dozen times years ago. I got to the end of the first paragraph this time and had to give it up. Such bullshit. Collapse without significant tipping. Then what's this a photo of?
The top 30 floors of the south tower falling sideways. The "angular momentum" of that part of the building should have continued sideways, and would have unless something other than the laws of nature were at work.
So, from memory, the Eagar & Musso paper was produced about 10 weeks after the attacks of 9/11. At that time, Rudy Giuliani was busy destroying the crime scene, and the U.S. govt was still more than a year away from even BEGINNING an investigation. So what data did these two scientists have to work with? None. The paper is sheer speculation. It says things COULD have happened this way, not DID, but even as speculation it fails miserably. It contradicts itself in fundamental ways that took time to become obvious to the shell-shocked public.
For example, within the paper Eager and Musso admit that the penetration of the structures would result in a redistribution of the weight bearing to the other, non-damaged steel supports in the structures. So the impact of the planes would have virtually no effect on the buildings. They also point out there was no wind stress on that day, so that leaves fire as the reason for the collapse of the towers.
And the numbers they present on fire don't take into account the probability that all the fuel would have burned in 5-10 minutes. Most of it burned in fireballs in 10-15 seconds, but some may have lasted 10 minutes. After that, you see black smoke from scattered furniture and paper fires coming from the towers. Fires not hot enough to affect steel. Firefighters radioed that they needed two hoses to knock out the remaining fires. Hardly the inferno needed to cause catastrophic collapse. So the temperatures needed to melt steel weren't there, yet much later, pools of molten steel were found beneath the rubble, at bedrock. So steel HAD melted on that day, and there's no way the numbers in Eager & Musso's paper support temperatures high enough to melt steel. (There's video on the internet of those pools of steel...footage shot by rescue workers).
But say a maximum of 10 minutes of fuel fire followed by trashcan fires DID burn hot enough to weaken the MASSIVE heat-absorbing beams in the WTC towers, the steel would only be weakened in small, specific areas. There was no raging inferno, or we wouldn't have pictures of people standing in the holes left from the planes' impacts. So the fires that were supposed to have caused loss of structural integrity were localized, and here you get back to what Eager and Musso themselves admit in their paper, that when one area of the structure is compromised, the weight-bearing shifts to other supports. So, say a half-dozen columns in the center of the building were heated to the point of compromise, the weight would just be shifted to the other 41 columns in the core.
That's just what I remember about the paper from 5 years ago, off the top of my head. The Eager-Musso "study" has been discounted for so long that I don't recall any other specifics, but they're out there, discussed in detail on the internet, if you search. And I imagine David Ray Griffin's new book does a brutal job on the paper.
The Eagar-Musso paper was junk science intended to give the green light to contractors, that's all. SOME sort of investigation-like paper was needed in order for government contracts to go forward. The govt couldn't fund building and re-building projects when it appeared to all clear-thinking people that the Newtonian laws of physics could be switched on and off, so a paper was needed to explain the WTC tower collapses more or less in accordance with those laws of physics. And this was that paper. It was intended to placate the public and grease the financial skids for the crooks who have seized the US govt.