You are right that that sort of collapse would require all the supporting columns to fail simultaneously, but that is not a surprising event. Large building collapses are not intuitive. Once a building starts to collapse, it introduces major vibrations and other forces that could, under the right circumstances, destroy all the supporting columns simultaneously, especially if they’d already been weakened by high temperatures.
Phlogiston made specific testable predictions about mass and combustion. Phlogiston theory was thrown out not because it was useless but because it was wrong. In this respect, phlogiston was good science.
(The fact that what you said isn’t a substantive reply to jimrandomh’s remark is a separate issue)
You are right that that sort of collapse would require all the supporting columns to fail simultaneously, but that is not a surprising event. Large building collapses are not intuitive. Once a building starts to collapse, it introduces major vibrations and other forces that could, under the right circumstances, destroy all the supporting columns simultaneously, especially if they’d already been weakened by high temperatures.
Is this the Phlogiston theory of building collapse?
Sigh. I’m not going to bother reposting the entire thing so I’ll just link:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/is/fake_causality/1vy8
Phlogiston made specific testable predictions about mass and combustion. Phlogiston theory was thrown out not because it was useless but because it was wrong. In this respect, phlogiston was good science.
(The fact that what you said isn’t a substantive reply to jimrandomh’s remark is a separate issue)