The news that has made the 9/11 truthers almost orgasmic with joy is the claim that a credible scientific journal, Europhysics News, has published the results of a study that claims to verify that 9/11 was an inside job. As an example of the various reports, WND (the far right site known to some as WingNutDaily), has this claim …
9/11 CONSPIRACY GETS SUPPORT FROM PHYSICISTS’ STUDY
Europhysics magazine report finds Twin Towers brought down by ‘controlled demolition’
Europhysics Magazine, the respected publication of the European physics community, has published a report by four experts who say “the evidence points overwhelmingly to the conclusion that all three buildings were destroyed by controlled demolition.”
First a Few actual Facts
There are two rather important points to start with …
- Europhysics News is not a peer-reviewed science journal, it is just a magazine
- The article does not contain output from a formal study, it is just a magazine article
The editors did also add the following note:
This feature is somewhat different from our usual purely scientific articles, in that it contains some speculation. However, given the timing and the importance of the issue, we consider that this feature is sufficiently technical and interesting to merit publication for our readers. Obviously, the content of this article is the responsibility of the authors.
In other words, they are telling you clearly that it is not scientific, and is instead just speculation.
Incidentally, here is a link to the article in question itself.
Who Wrote it?
Four authors are listed, Steven Jones, Robert Korol, Anthony Szamboti, Ted Walter are all well-known 9/11 truthers and are not exactly un-biased sources.
Steven Jones, is a retired Professor of Physics from BYU. In reality, after he started pursuing his 9/11 beliefs in 2005, the reaction of his university was to initially place him on paid leave due to the “increasingly speculative and accusatory nature” of his various claims, and then with his agreement, cut all ties and formally retired him.
He was a professor of physics, so perhaps we should not be too quick to dismiss him, after all he does have some notable career highlights. For example …
- He was part of the cold-fusion fiasco and worked with Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann.
- He has written a paper in which he asserts that Jesus visited America (Seriously, he really did).
I’m not exactly convinced that this guy is the poster boy for the title “credible source”.
Robert Korol, is another retired elderly academic who perhaps quite enjoys a bit of public attention.
I have quite honestly no idea why Ted Walker is identified as an author. His only credentials consist of a Public Policy degree, he has no expertise in either engineering or physics.
Has anybody debunked this “study” yet?
Yep, it has only been a few days and already there is some reaction. Here is an extract …
2) Most high-rises have fire suppression systems (water sprinklers), which further prevent a fire from releasing sufficient energy to heat the steel to a critical failure state;
True enough as far as it goes, but it omits one critical detail: when WTC-2 (the South Tower) collapsed, it took the water mains with it, and thus there were no sprinklers running in WTC-1 and WTC-7 to prevent the fires from spreading. As a practical matter, I suspect that the sprinklers in WTC-1 and WTC-2 were already not functioning after the plane impacts, but even if they were they would have been insufficient to put out the massive fires in those two buildings.
But after that, the errors and omissions abound. Next paragraph:
3) Structural members are protected by fireproofing materials, which are designed to prevent them from reaching failure temperatures within specified time periods; and
Ignores the obvious, which is that the impact of the plane debris stripped away a good deal of the fireproofing. This is the usual Truther nonsense of focusing solely on the fires and not considering the enormous energy released by the two 757s when they hit the two towers.
It will not be the last word on it all either.
Is there any truth within any 9/11 Conspiracy Claim?
It is perhaps almost akin to a religious belief that is embraced by zealots for whom no quantity of evidence will ever convince. If faced with one of the many claims, then a great place to start is on the Debunking 9/11 website.
For a quick understanding of the entire 9/11 Truther landscape the Wikipedia article sums it up quite well …
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the technology magazine Popular Mechanics have investigated and rejected the claims made by 9/11 conspiracy theories.[13][14] The civil engineering community accepts that the impacts of jet aircraft at high speeds in combination with subsequent fires, not controlled demolition, led to the collapse of the Twin Towers.[15][16] This also was the conclusion of the 9/11 Commission, chaired by Governor Thomas Kean.
Why do such ideas become popular and what can we actually do?
The observation that many people take this all seriously and truly believe is itself quite interesting. There are a couple of important points to remember when encountering people who embrace conspiracy ideas …
- They are quite sincere in their beliefs.
- The degree of human intelligence plays no part, there is no correlation between the belief and how smart they are. The smarter somebody is, the better they are at dreaming up rationalizations for utterly absurd notions.
- It is not specific to a particular demography, they are not all white nerdy guys living in their moms basement.
- It is not about a lack of some information and misinformation. Generally no quantity of rebuttal to the justifications for the conspiracy belief changes the minds true believers.
- Not everybody who articulates a conspiracy idea is actually buying into the conspiracy belief, instead there are some who are simply carried by the tide of popularity for an idea. If presented with a well-reasoned fact-based verifiable arguments, then they tend to be persuaded. Others however, when faced with such arguments, do tend to demonstrate an immunity to any rebuttal.
It has perhaps always been like this with humans. What is different about 9/11, and other more recent conspiracy ideas, is that since about the mid 2000’s the Internet has acted like an amplifier for such beliefs.
So why do such beliefs take root and flourish within human minds?
University of Miami political scientists Joseph E. Uscinski and Joseph M. Parent looked into what really explains this. They noted that in laboratory experiments …
“researchers have found that inducing anxiety or loss of control triggers respondents to see nonexistent patterns and evoke conspiratorial explanations” and that in the real world “there is evidence that disasters (e.g., earthquakes) and other high-stress situations (e.g., job uncertainty) prompt people to concoct, embrace, and repeat conspiracy theories.”
In other words, when faced with a high-stress event such as 9/11, people embrace beliefs, perhaps religious or perhaps simply a conspiracy, as an attempt to explain it, and so gain some degree of control over the emotional trauma. Because it is embraced at an emotional level, any debunking of the idea will be ineffective.
It is perhaps part of our humanity that we are like this. The pattern seeking engine between our ears jumps to rapid conclusions as an attempt to explain what we encounter and we grasp that emotionally. Being able to do that gave us as a species a distinct survival advantage, hence it has been naturally selected. If we are really going to address it and overcome it, especially now in an age when the flow of information has been greatly increased, then we need to teach people to start thinking things through, not at an emotional level which leads to incorrect conclusions, but to also think things through rationally, and so empower them to work it out for themselves.
We can’t tell people what is and is not actually true, but if we equip them with richer set of cognitive tools, then there is a good probability that they will be able to rise to the challenge of this new age of myth-information and work out what is really true.
I’m sorry that you apparently haven’t read any of the earlier comments showing how and why Dave’s post is not science, skeptical or no, and ignores the science that is presented to dispute his opinions. And please know Dave is offering nothing more than opinion when it comes to 9/11, not science. Dave does get his commentary on climate science and climate scientists right; with anything regarding 9/11 research based on NIST investigation reports or on structural mechanics and fundamental physical principles by architects, structural engineers and physicists he demonstrates how worst case confirmation bias simply throws out anything that doesn’t comport with one’s opinions. Highlighting factually unsupported ideas he believes support his opinion (claiming to know the mind and intentions of people examining the available science) and relying on hand-waving away the uncomfortable parts of arguments he’s not capable of addressing, such as NIST acknowledging free fall acceleration during Building 7 failure, low intensity fires in Twin Towers based on fuel placement/consumption and empirical testing by NIST… THIS is Dave’s “science.” I’ve written a lot in comments showing Dave’s closed-minded approach dismissing obvious and immutable physical facts about the building failures. Hope you’ll take the time to explores my comments.
THANK YOU for taking the time to write this
In 1940 it only took 4 months to physically model the Tacoma Narrows bridge in a wind tunnel. They didn’t have computers for virtual models. Where are good models of the North Tower collapse?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZT4BXIpdIdo
How can you model the North Tower collapse without accurate data on the distributions of steel and concrete down the structure? It is not in the 10,000 page NCSTAR1 report by the NIST.
Engineers & scientists at NASA haven’t solved this in 20 years.
So… can jet fuel melt steel?
This is so sad Alexa play despacito
Aliens played a part of the 9/11
bullshit it was those fucking terroists
One of my favorite videos posted on youtube is called, “David Chandler 9/11 Anniversary Physics Talk 2018-9-11”. After the 57 minute mark David Chandler tells NIST that he measured the descent time of building 7 to be 3 point 9 seconds, which is free fall. So he asked them, “why did NIST claim 40% more time than 3 point 9 seconds?”. Shyam Sunder’s extraordinary answer was, “well if you look at the video the time it takes for the ROOFLINE to fall out of sight is 3 point 9 seconds, but the analysis of our structural model shows that there were 1 point 5 seconds or 40% more time, FOR THAT FREE FALL TO HAPPEN.” Contrary to that John Gross afterwards states, “NIST measured the descent time of the ROOFLINE from the video to be 5 point 4 seconds, which is 40% more time than free fall.” John Gross says nothing about adding 40% more time to the video’s time based on the analysis of a structural model. What that means is that NIST gave two different descent time stories for the ROOFLINE to fall out of sight when they answered David Chandler and then Dr. Steven Jones. One answered they added more time to the video’s time, the other answered all the time was directly from the video. David Chandler mentions how Shyam Sunder said the video time was 3 point 9 seconds, but he forgot to mention how John Gross said the video time WAS NOT 3 point 9 seconds. This took place 7 years after 9/11, so why do the two top NIST investigators have different stories, and why are both stories completely different from the NIST final graph published only 3 months after this? NIST’s answers are on the record, NIST gave two different descent time stories, and their graph is a third different descent time story?
they did some mess up s*** they just some mean b****
why did they had to do that i feel so hurt for those family member in want they go throw every day have a nice day
that so sad
This blog entry is patently absurd. It begins by encouraging us to ignore a professional physics magazine on the grounds that it isn’t “peer-reviewed”, without bothering to mention that the author of the article in question is a professor of physics with 30 years experience, who has published much independent peer-reviewed research about 9/11. Furthermore, it appears to be a different story entirely when magazines like Popular Mechanics write articles which are not peer-reviewed. We should apparently not worry about peer review when an article says what we want it to say. In sum, this crap does not belong under the heading “critical thinking” because it is the precise polar opposite of critical thinking. From the very beginning (and throughout) the author uses derision and smear as a form of argument, name-calling anybody prepared to think critically with terminology like “truther” and/or “conspiracy theorist” in an attempt to discredit them without ever even addressing their argument. It is a simple lawyer’s trick which is used to maintain the fantasy version of reality being written into the history books and it is by no means confined to individuals. People like the author of this stupid blog try to discredit entire peer-reviewed scientific journals with the same methodology every time they publish something which deviates from the party line on 9/11. The fact of the matter is that it you don’t believe 9/11 was an inside job then you have either not looked at the evidence being presented by both sides, or you are not thinking critically. It is one or the other.
“independent peer-reviewed research about 9/11” sounds great. You can of course cite an example of an article from a well-recognised credible peer-review journal such as the Journal of Engineering Mechanics.
Since there are (as you claim) “entire peer-reviewed scientific journals” then it should be easy to cite something.
The poster is very fluent in the language of “truther-speak”. Those fluent in truther-speak can sound polished as hell, but when you burst open their pinata, as it were, there’s no candy inside. They’ve learned certain rituals that reinforce the feeling of being a member of the tribe of conspiracy theorists, an Intrepid band of outsiders who are the only ones that really know what’s going on. It’s exciting as hell!
The thing is, they re not objective. They’re self-referencing. They’re self-reinforcing. At, the end of the day, there’s no beef in the burger.
Dabe: I suspect that your request for peer-reviewed Journal articles will succeed only in eliciting the deafening sound of crickets.
Reply to “Q”: There are numerous top quality Investigations by career engineers and related professionals who specialize in hands-on evaluations of why buildings collapse, which conclude that the conventional assumption — that terrorists did it with jetplanes — is far and away the most plausible and supportable hypothesis.
Somehow in your investigations you’ve missed this large body of research.
Below is just one of these links. It would be
hard to find somebody more qualified than this guy. (Read the first few paragraphs of the article for summary of his qualifications.)
Alas, if you’re like most convinced conspiracy theorists, you will not be able to really “hear” what this guy saying. You’ll block it out somehow. You will not be able to say, “You know, I might be wrong.”
That’s the litmus test of a true conspiracy theorist. They have the inability to honestly say, “I might be wrong.” They may say it in a false show of objectivity, in order to create the illusion that they’re being fair-minded, but they won’t really believe it.
If, however, you are one of those rare individuals who can actually take a deep breath and acknowledge the possibility that you might be wrong, and open-mindedly and inquisitively explore new information, I can provide a lot more high-quality links.
Here’s a start. Let me know if you you want more info like this.
Peace.
Why the World Trade Center collapsed: an interview with Charles Clifton, professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Auckland.
https://undicisettembre.blogspot.com/2014/02/why-world-trade-center-collapsed.html
Your claim to “numerous top quality investigations” is nothing more than your opinion. The politics surrounding these events precludes an honest debate of the facts and the misrepresentations (the official conspiracy theory) that pass as facts. This is what you and Dave continually fail to acknowledge.
Experts such as Greening, Bazant, Garcia and several others have made efforts to support the official conspiracy theory. But in every case the counter-factual arguments made by equally top quality physicists, architects, structural engineers ONLY takes place outside of official journals because the politics of these events necessitate silencing any and all opposition that casts doubts on the official narrative protecting the Bush admin accomplices, and what has become the dominant driving theory behind American foreign policy regarding extremist Islamic ideology for the last 17 years.
Bazant’s theories have been credibly challenged by structural engineer Gordon Ross.
http://www.journalof911studies.com/volume/200704/NISTandDrBazant-SimultaneousFailure-WTCCollapseAnalysis2.pdf
(Please if you choose to argue that the Journal of 911 Studies isn’t a credible source of information, as Dave is wont to do WITHOUT actually addressing the arguments any of the authors there make, and in this case which Ross makes in his response to Bazant, realize that doing so doesn’t support Bazant’s theories or dispute Ross’s. If that is how you want to respond — with a specious argument that dodges the actual discussion between two notable experts — you aren’t worth debating in this forum, imho. So, please, stick to the expert’s arguments if you want to respond.)
David Griscom has written with regard to another expert, Manuel Garcia’s claims in Counterpunch in support of the official conspiracy theory. Both men are highly credentialed, but this dispute also can not be made in official journals because of the politics involved. Honest observers will evaluate the scientific arguments in their dispute. The fact that these two experts can present varying views and these views can be seen and judged is not invalidated because the journals refuse to have the debate because of the sticky politics. Such limitations are artificial and stymy intellectual debate on issues that the public isn’t ready to openly debate.
Griscom writes in his blog post: “Hand Waving” the Physics of 9/11:
“Manuel Garcia, who has his Ph.D. in Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering from Princeton and works as a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has written a recent series of articles for CounterPunch, which is described by the editors as a “widely applauded primer on the laws of physics and the myths of conspiracists (sic)” concerning the collapses of World Trade Center towers 1, 2, and 7.
Below, I will take issue with Dr. Garcia’s primer. He doesn’t get MY applause.
I too hold a Ph.D. (in Physics) from an Ivy League university (Brown) and have worked as a physicist at a national laboratory (33 years at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC).”
Please follow the argument Griscom makes and take issue if you choose but recognize this is a serious refutation between two top quality experts whose view of the 9/11 events are very different for very legitimate reasons. http://impactglassman.blogspot.com/2007/01/hand-waving-physics-of-911.html
Greening, as an accomplished expert in his field, has submitted written responses to the physicists and engineers who founded the Journal of 911 Studies and has had replies offered in return by equally accomplished experts. These exchanges between experts can be found here: http://www.journalof911studies.com/journal-of-911-studies-index-of-letters/.
(Again, ad hominem insults, such as for example, “the Journal experts are not experts” is not an argument. Everyone involved has had long careers in their respective areas of expertise and regardless of one’s disagreeing with their assessment of what happened on 9/11, disparaging them by insulting the expertise of their long careers, awards, professional publications is small-minded and not conducive to an honest discussion.)
Dave rests his close-minded opinion that independent 9/11 research cannot be valid because it hasn’t made its way into scientific journals, although it has in limited ways. He doesn’t acknowledge that the politics prevents such a thing, AT THIS TIME. He ought to be able to acknowledge that unpopular ideas have in the past in the history of scientific publication been supplanted by prevailing but false notions of the given era, and that it is only with time that the unpopular and unrecognized supplant the false notions that suppressed them. I read a great book a while ago about the death of President James Garfield. He had been shot by a would be assassin. The shooting isn’t what killed him though. What killed him was the infection that resulted from his head-strong doctor, who refused to hear about sepsis and germ theory which was just emerging at the same time. His doctor, and others, repeatedly probed the wound with his finger trying to find the bullet to remove it. Garfield slowly and painfully over many months succumbed as his body became toxically poisoned from the infection that resulted. Had germ theory been recognized, he likely would have recovered.
So, Mr. Oeming, while there is a great body of evidence in photographs, video, eye witness testimony, in data and in experimentation done by accomplished experts at NIST AND at the disposal of independent investigators the fact that very little of any of the current official and unofficial investigations in support of the government’s conspiracy theory actually supports that theory if you are unable to make credible arguments based on that great body of evidence you really don’t have much to say about it. Simply disparaging information you don’t know about, don’t acknowledge, don’t examine because of your prejudice against those you can’t agree with because of your bias, this is no argument and proves nothing. Dave is equally guilty of this logical fallacy, appealing only to the authorities you choose to appeal to. If you were actually objective you would learn what arguments the opposition makes and debate the different views of evidence. So far everything you have posted on this thread since Dave published it all those month ago has done the opposite.
You are entitled to your opinion, but not to your own facts. Same goes for Dave.
Regarding your link to the interview of Charles Clifton, I have only read the first couple of questions put to him and his answers are largely completely at odds with the simulations and analysis NIST wrote up in their NCSTAR 1 report.
For instance, Clifton says: “The floors offered effectively no resistance to the plane at all and so the core took much of the impact, so the plane destroyed a large chunk of the core immediately at impact and severely weakened the rest of it.”
The NIST report in NCSTAR 1-2 Chap 8.2.3 Aircraft Impact Damage Results, Finding 16, using simulations that created different estimates based on its design criteria says regarding damage to the 47 core columns from the plane entering WTC 1, the North Tower, “Subject to the uncertainties inherent in the models, the global impact simulations indicated that a total of three core columns were severed, and four columns were heavily damaged in the base case, compared to six columns severed and three columns heavily damaged in the more severe case and one columns severed and two columns heavily damaged in the less severe case.”
Clifton’s statement simply doesn’t jive with what NIST researchers estimated. Both buildings stabilized and redistributed the load above the crash zones onto the remaining core columns and remained standing. In the base case estimates for WTC 1 the load was distributed to the remaining 40 core columns; in the severe case to the remaining 38 columns, and in the less severe case to the remaining 44 columns. Clifton’s credibility, with me anyway, pretty quickly is going downhill given what I’ve learned so far.
Similar results were found in the analysis applied to WTC 2, the South Tower, which was struck in a very different way than WTC 1. (“Subject to the uncertainties inherent in the models, the global impact simulations indicated that a total of five core columns were severed, and four columns were heavily damaged in the base case, compared to ten columns severed and one column heavily damaged in the more severe case and three columns severed and two columns heavily damaged in the less severe case.”)
The perimeter and core columns suffered damage from the initial strikes but the load quickly was redistributed onto the remaining intact columns and the buildings stabilized. It was only after multiple eye witnesses in the buildings and on the ground began hearing several large explosions, at least three in rapid succession coming from the top of the South Tower, did the buildings begin to come apart and disintegrate all the way to ground level at near free fall acceleration. Clifton suggests the weight of floors building up on lower intact floors created the force destroying the intact floors below the crash zones, ignoring the visual evidence of debris ejected laterally and outside the footprint of the perimeter of the buildings all of which would exert no force, no mass onto lower floors.
I could continue to critique Clifton’s interview but what I’ve read so far tells me he is completely ignoring the data and analysis NIST put together, and the obvious visual evidence, making claims that simply don’t appear in NIST’s report or that make sense according to physical norms. From this I surmise Clifton is hand waving his physics in much the same way Manuel Garcia did in his Counterpunch articles.
The politics denying the obvious falsity of the official conspiracy theory is simply not something the public is prepared to examine and debate. Dave and yourself is proof of that.
what dis this have to do with 9/11
Whether the magazine article and its authors werent credible, the author of this ridiculous article lends absolutely no credibility to himself, when his attempts at debunking them, is also done with speculation. Saying, that the sprinklers didnt work because the building came down, or the impact of the plane disabled them, or the fires were too big, isnt scientific or credible, in fact, its complete and utter nonsense. I understand challenging the credibility of others, but not where our credibility has to be questioned as well. This is just garbage.
After many months of not visiting this thread, I’ve come back to it. I’m very impressed with your summary of how conspiracy theorists think. I’m cutting and pasting it and saving it in my email box for reference. Thank you.
Just read the section “Why do such ideas become popular and what can we actually do?” and think that the official story is the conspiracy theory, it is also a perfect fit. So I do not think it is a valid point.
For those who feel the ‘offical explanation’ for what happened on 9/11 is the truth – you need to watch the follwoing articles. Please put any bias or prejudice to one side and just look and listen to the facts, as if you are hearing about this for the first time. It’s a really big deal for people to accept that their government had any hand in such a heinous crime, but the facts I’m afraid speak for themselves – as more and more information and study of that information comes out more and more people are coming to accept that 9/11 was a indeed a massively audacious false flag that has plunged our world into an awful mess.
Until 9/11 is investigated properly, and the real culprits brought to justice, we will live in a world of fear and confusion, and be enslaved by the consequences of it.
9/11 explosive evidence experts speak out
Solving 9-11, Deception That Changed The World
The controlled demolition hypothesis appears to be quite far-fetched.
Following is information about the great amount of effort and labor required to set up the controlled demolition of a large building. To suggest that this could’ve been done on the sly, with no one speaking up, for WTC 1, 2 and 7, is preposterous. Here is a blurb from the webpage purportedly addressing the amount of time it would take to set up a controlled demolition for just ONE TOWER (let alone three).:
“it would still take over 72 days with 12 people doing nothing but loading explosives. That’s just one building. Add the second tower and WTC7 and you see where this is going. It quickly becomes absurd. As if this absurdly complex plan was the ONLY way to scare Americans.”
Why would anyone go to even a fraction of this effort just to create a false flag when the airplanes already would have done the job? (Saying it was to avoid asbestos removal is an explanation very badly in need of substantiation.)
Click on the following link then scroll down to the bottom to the line “Just a few numbers that make 9/11 conspiracies nearly impossible.”
http://www.debunking911.com/freefall.htm
It would have required a 150-person crew for a major demolition company that worked only at nights when all the security guards were distracted to set the charges for a WTC 7 implosion
(WTC had been under a state of heightened security until just a few weeks before 9/11. A demolition crew would’ve had to somehow worked around this security.)
It takes about four months of focused effort to bring down ONE 60 story building (about the size of WTC 7).
This doesn’t take into account the effort that would be required to bring down WTC 1 and 2.
The above info comes from this following page (which is about the 9/11 conspiracy theory in general).
http://politicalmythsdebunked.blogspot.com/2006/10/911-conpirators-math-doesnt-add-up.html
As someone who says it is “an appeal to authority” using Newton’s laws which describe Force, Momentum, Acceleration, Velocity about someone who uses those laws to describe and analyze how a mass in motion interacts with a static object, I certainly can’t trust you have a servicable knowledge of physics to continue this conversation. Enjoy your “debunker and denier” sites. They suit your Luddite approach to the issue. They confirm your bias in the exact way you need them to.
Points to consider when evaluating controlled demolition hypothesis:
1) No intact building has ever been destroyed by controlled demolition –
Hours or days of preparation and internal demolition work needs to be done prior to attempting a controlled demolition. No evidence of any such preparation or internal demolition work has ever been discovered either prior to 9/11 or in its aftermath.
2) None of the planners of the 9/11 event who have been captured have ever attested to controlled demolition being done –
Khalid Sheik Muhammad has apparently disclosed the majority of the 9/11 plot but yet has never mentioned anything concerning planting explosives prior to the attack on the buildings.
[The above is from the Quora website.]
Until these points are thoroughly refuted, it is not plausible or scientifically or logically justified to consider controlled demolition is being an overwhelmingly probable hypothesis. At best, the controlled demolition hypothesis is merely one of many hypotheses to put on the table.
I’m not at all sure what you mean in point #1. Lots of buildings have been destroyed by controlled demolition. And if the WTC towers were brought down by controlled demolition, it is safe to assume it was no standard CD job.
On point #2 besides the 1993 attempt to blow up one of the towers, it is not commonly thought plausible Al Qaeda would have had access to the interior structure or the time needed given the necessary preparations to “rig” the buildings. That doesn’t mean others with the access to the buildings, to the elevator shafts and the access ports in the shafts to the floor trusses couldn’t have.
Ignoring such obvious observations as near free fall for the twin towers, and actual free fall for Building 7 does not give one license to dismiss how such symmetrical and rapid destruction could occur and not question it. The MMM society description isn’t enough to prove anything.
The writer’s point is that in order to do a controlled demolition, you have to deliberately weaken the building ahead of time. This prep work is conspicuous and takes time.
You cannot do a controlled demolition on an entirely intact building.
His point is, there was no evidence or sign that this prep work had occurred.
Thus, the hypothesis of a controlled demolition is being strongly challenged.
I believe that was the writer’s point.
*******
I believe you may have been trying to say in your response that the WTC situation is a special case, and therefore there’s no need to find any evidence of prep work, that we can ignore this when addressing this issue .
You wrote:
“And if the WTC towers were brought down by controlled demolition, it is safe to assume it was no standard CD job.”
Did I understand your point correctly?
I think there would have to be prep work, and there is evidence of it although I’ve tried to remember the fellows name who discusses it. I haven’t looked at that for some time and looking around last evening I couldn’t pull up the name. He is featured prominently in one of the longer films and was a tenant. He discussed coming into his office everyday for several days sometime prior to 9/11 and finding significant dust on everything in his office which he would clean up. He also discussed having to move his office at the request of management. I’ll continue trying to find who he was and where he says these things but I don’t have it now.
William Rodriquez was the head of maintenance in the North Tower and has talked about hearing unusual activity of empty floors. I don’t have that link either but will try to find his discussion of it.
The floor trusses were accessible from elevator shafts and any prep work down in this spaces would have been private and out of sight of tenants.
You seem to be using your conclusion as a premise. You seem to be saying in effect, “Since the towers were brought down by controlled demolition, therefore they used some special hidden way of doing it, that has never been demonstrated prior to this in the real world.”
This appears to me to be what you are saying.
Does this sound correct to you?
No, I’m not saying that at all. The observation one can make when being presented with the towers failing as they did after such a short amount of time, less than an hour and about an hour and a half, is astounding. This has never happened. Never in the history of high rise building fires. Starting from THAT premise one has to ask, how could that happen. Large high rise buildings have been on fire before. Some have had nearly the entire building engulfed in flames, for hours and not failed. A curious person asks why the discrepancy? To have the official explanation come down to, almost immediately as I say below, on the same day within minutes of the event, to plane strike, fire, and gravity makes sense to some but not to folks who start looking more closely at the physics problems that explanation has. I didn’t start looking until around 2005. Up until that time I didn’t think too deeply about it, and just accepted the explanation.
So, no, the physics drives my curiosity about it, not a need to have the better or more special answer than anyone else. Plane strike, fire, and gravity for all the reasons I’ve stated here do not explain the physical observations or fit the available evidence as to how these buildings came apart as they did.
Here is ab analysis supporting the hypothesis that WTC 1 & 2 collapse was due to the heat of burning jet fuel. First I’m going to put a summary of the analysis. Then, I’m going to put a more extended analysis. (This was taken from the Quora website.)
Summary:
The steel wasn’t melted but the temperature differences between the fire inside of the column and the fire outside the column, exposed to wind, caused the columns to expand at different rates which caused the structure to buckle. Once it started to buckle it could no longer support the 10 floors worth of weight above it and collapsed like dominoes downward.
Detailed analysis:
From the Minerals, Metals and Materials society:
It is known that structural steel begins to soften around 425°C and loses about half of its strength at 650°C. This is why steel is stress relieved in this temperature range. But even a 50% loss of strength is still insufficient, by itself, to explain the WTC collapse. The wind load controlled the design allowables. The WTC, on this low-wind day, was likely not stressed more than a third of the design allowable, which is roughly one-fifth of the yield strength of the steel. Even with its strength halved, the steel could still support two to three times the stresses imposed by a 650°C fire.
The additional problem was distortion of the steel in the fire. The temperature of the fire was not uniform everywhere, and the temperature on the outside of the box columns was clearly lower than on the side facing the fire. The temperature along the 18 m long joists was certainly not uniform. Given the thermal expansion of steel, a 150°C temperature difference from one location to another will produce yield-level residual stresses. This produced distortions in the slender structural steel, which resulted in buckling failures. Thus, the failure of the steel was due to two factors: loss of strength due to the temperature of the fire, and loss of structural integrity due to distortion of the steel from the non-uniform temperatures in the fire.Nearly every large building has a redundant design that allows for loss of one primary structural member, such as a column. However, when multiple members fail, the shifting loads eventually overstress the adjacent members and the collapse occurs like a row of dominoes falling down.
The perimeter tube design of the WTC was highly redundant. It survived the loss of several exterior columns due to aircraft impact, but the ensuing fire led to other steel failures. Many structural engineers believe that the weak points—the limiting factors on design allowables—were the angle clips that held the floor joists between the columns on the perimeter wall and the core structure. With a 700 Pa floor design allowable, each floor should have been able to support approximately 1,300 t beyond its own weight. The total weight of each tower was about 500,000 t.
As the joists on one or two of the most heavily burned floors gave way and the outer box columns began to bow outward, the floors above them also fell. The floor below (with its 1,300 t design capacity) could not support the roughly 45,000 t of ten floors (or more) above crashing down on these angle clips. This started the domino effect that caused the buildings to collapse within ten seconds, hitting bottom with an estimated speed of 200 km per hour. If it had been free fall, with no restraint, the collapse would have only taken eight seconds and would have impacted at 300 km/h. It has been suggested that it was fortunate that the WTC did not tip over onto other buildings surrounding the area. There are several points that should be made. First, the building is not solid; it is 95 percent air and, hence, can implode onto itself. Second, there is no lateral load, even the impact of a speeding aircraft, which is sufficient to move the center of gravity one hundred feet to the side such that it is not within the base footprint of the structure. Third, given the near free-fall collapse, there was insufficient time for portions to attain significant lateral velocity. To summarize all of these points, a 500,000 t structure has too much inertia to fall in any direction other than nearly straight down.
The following describes what NIST believes happened during the strike of the North Tower:
“The impact severs some columns on the north side of the North Tower. Each tower is designed as a “tube-in-tube” structure and the steel columns which support its weight are arranged around the perimeter and in the core. The plane, which weighs 283,600 lb and is traveling at an estimated speed of around 430 mph (see October 2002-October 2005), severs 35 of the building’s 236 perimeter columns and damages another two. The damage to the South Tower’s perimeter will be similar (see 9:03 a.m. September 11, 2001). [NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF STANDARDS AND TECHNOLOGY, 9/2005, PP. 5-9, 20, 22] The perimeter columns bear about half of the tower’s weight, so this damage reduces its ability to bear gravity loads by about 7.5 percent. [NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF STANDARDS AND TECHNOLOGY, 9/2005, PP. 6] The actual damage to the 47 core columns is not known, as there are no photographs or videos of it, but there will be much speculation about this after 9/11. It will be suggested that some parts of the aircraft may have damaged the core even after crashing through the exterior wall. According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST): “Moving at 500 mph, an engine broke any exterior column it hit. If the engine missed the floor slab, the majority of the engine core remained intact and had enough residual momentum to sever a core column upon direct impact.” [NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF STANDARDS AND TECHNOLOGY, 9/2005, PP. 107] According to NIST’s base case computer model, three of the core columns are severed and another ten suffer some damage. [NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF STANDARDS & TECHNOLOGY, 9/2005, PP. 189 pdf file] If this is accurate, it means that the impact damage to the core reduces the Tower’s strength by another approximately 7.5 percent, meaning that the building loses about 15 percent of its strength in total. This damage will be cited after 9/11 by NIST and others researchers as an event contributing to the building’s collapse (see October 23, 2002 and October 19, 2004). In addition, some of the fireproofing on the steel columns and trusses may be dislodged. The original fireproofing on the fire floors was mostly Blazeshield DC/F, but some of the fireproofing on the flooring has recently been upgraded to Blazeshield II, which is about 20 percent denser and 20 percent more adhesive. [NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF STANDARDS & TECHNOLOGY, 9/2005, PP. XXXVI, 83 pdf file]”
This describes what NIST believes happened at the South Tower, which in less than an hour later came apart:
“The impact severs some columns on the south side of the South Tower. Each of the Twin Towers is designed as a “tube-in-tube” structure and the steel columns which support its weight are arranged around the perimeter and in the core. The plane, which is traveling at an estimated speed of around 500 mph (see October 2002-October 2005), severs 33 of the building’s 236 perimeter columns and damages another one. [NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF STANDARDS AND TECHNOLOGY, 9/2005, PP. 39] The perimeter columns bear about half of the tower’s weight, so the damage to them reduces the tower’s ability to bear gravity loads by about 7.1 percent. [NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF STANDARDS AND TECHNOLOGY, 9/2005, PP. 6] The actual damage to the 47 core columns is not known, as there are no photographs or videos of it, but there will be much speculation about this after 9/11. It will be suggested that some parts of the aircraft may be able to damage the core even after crashing through the exterior wall (see 8:46 a.m. September 11, 2001). [NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF STANDARDS AND TECHNOLOGY, 9/2005, PP. 107] According to NIST’s base case model, five of the core columns are severed and another five suffer some damage. [NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF STANDARDS & TECHNOLOGY, 9/2005, PP. 235 pdf file] This may reduce the tower’s ability to bear loads by a further approximately 8 percent, meaning that the aircraft impact accounted for a loss of about 15 percent of the building’s strength. This damage will be cited as an event contributing to the building’s collapse after 9/11 (see October 23, 2002 and October 19, 2004). NIST’s base case estimate of damage to the North Tower’s core will be similar, even though the aircraft impact there was dissimilar (see 8:46 a.m. September 11, 2001). Flight 11 hit the North Tower’s core head on, whereas Flight 175 only hits the corner of the South Tower’s core. [NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF STANDARDS AND TECHNOLOGY, 9/2005, PP. 20-23, 38-41] In addition, some of the fireproofing on the steel columns and trusses may be dislodged (see 8:46 a.m. September 11, 2001). [NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF STANDARDS & TECHNOLOGY, 9/2005, PP. XXXVI, 83 pdf file] Photographs and videos of the towers will not show the state of fireproofing inside the buildings, but the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) will try to estimate the damage to fireproofing using a series of computer models. Its severe case model (see (October 2002-October 2005)) will predict that 39 of the 47 core columns are stripped of their fireproofing on one or more floors and that fireproofing is stripped from trusses covering 80,000 ft2 of floor area, the equivalent of about two floors. NIST will say that the loss of fireproofing is a major cause of the collapse (see April 5, 2005), but only performs 15 tests on fireproofing samples (see October 26, 2005). [NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF STANDARDS AND TECHNOLOGY, 9/2005, PP. 41] According to NIST, less fireproofing is stripped from the North Tower (see 8:46 a.m. September 11, 2001).”
So which tower is the above Minerals, Metals, and Materials society excerpt referring to? The two towers were struck in very different ways. There is very little to suggest they would come apart in the same way. The segment above the damage site on the South Tower rotated and tilted as much as 23 degrees before the lower building gave way, while the North Tower remained intact as the upper block above the damage site accelerated straight down into the intact structure below. Accurate and precise measurements of motion of the roofline of the North Tower taken from video recording the event show acceleration into the lower floors. There was no resistance seen from the lower floors, or deceleration measured at the roofline of the upper floors as the upper block disintegrated into the structure below.
And how does MMM society deal with the actual free fall acceleration of Building 7? How can free fall acceleration be explained if the idea is there was a serial progression of column failures? At some point, a vast number of connections had to let go simultaneously for a symmetrical, straight down free fall to occur.
The improbability of all of the perimeter columns and intact core columns failing simultaneously in both WTC 1 and 2 due to thermal expansion and “crushing” the intact floors that existed below is very high. It is very highly improbable for it to happen in under only one scenario, likely impossible for it to happen twice under two different scenarios on the same day, within half and hour of each other.
The following discussion takes up this simultaneous failure of intact perimeter and core column thing:
“Dr. Garcia next describes the multi-volume Final Report by the National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST), issued in September 2005, as the “official word” on the events of 9/11, particularly regarding the collapse the World Trade Center (WTC) towers. He tells us that NIST “did not proceed to a detailed simulation of the collapses to the ground” and that “NIST justified this on the grounds that there was sufficient energy in the descending blocks to crush the lower structures, once failures had occurred.”
In other words, Dr. Garcia is telling us that NIST hand waved the physics of 9/11!
In my opinion, this is unforgivable! Americans have a right to know exactly what happened on 9/11, and this right justifies a major effort to simulate every millisecond of the collapses by means of supercomputers and perhaps mechanical scale models. For $20 million taxpayer dollars, NIST should already have delivered such. That they did not is inexcusable.
But let’s return to Dr. Garcia’s physics tutorial.
In the section called “Problem 1 Force Balance” he considers the force due to the “upper block” of a WTC tower (defined as the part of the building above where the airplane struck) pushing downward on the rest of the building. He uses Newton’s 2nd Law of motion (F = ma, where “F” is force, “m” is mass, and “a” is acceleration) to set up equations for the dynamic force that would be imparted to the lower part of the building in the event that all vertical support members between two of the floors (nominally at the airplane-strike level) should instantaneously lose all of their strength. He concludes this section with this tautology: “Clearly, the lower structure will crumble when F is greater than the maximum force it can support…”
Clearly. But what IS the maximum force the lower structure can support? Dr. Garcia never tells us. Indeed, it sounds rather like he is setting us up for a “proof by intimidation”…
In fact, things really ARE known about “maximum force the lower structure can support.” For example, in the April 2, 1964 issue of Engineering News Record, we read about the “tremendous reserve strength” designed into the exterior columns of the WTC towers: “Live loads on these columns can be increased more than 2,000% before failure occurs.” http://911research.wtc7.net/mirrors/guardian2/wtc/eng-news-record.htm
But let’s hear Dr. Garcia out.
In “Problem 1, Numerical Example of Progressive Collapse,” he sets up equations for free-fall times and speeds as functions of drop distance without air resistance. Specifically, he calculates the free-fall speed after the “upper block” has dropped 3 meters (the approximate height between floor slabs in a WTC tower) assuming no air resistance – AND assuming absolutely zero resistance by the 47 massive central steel columns or the approximately 200 intact exterior support members. Possible fire weakening notwithstanding, this final assumption is totally unjustified, and I shall have more to say about it below.
But first we’ll see where his calculation leads.
He calculates the total (static plus dynamic) force exerted by the “upper block” upon striking the lower structure after this 3-meter free-fall as being 6.1 times the weight of the upper block. The number “6.1,” as given, has two significant figures (the 6 and the 1), normally implying that any error in this calculation should be no larger in magnitude than plus-or-minus 0.9. So is the number 6.1 really so accurate? Well, it’s accurate if you accept Dr. Garcia’s OTHER assumptions to be accurate.
What other assumptions?
Well, he picks out of thin air a value for the change in speed (dv) that the “upper block” experiences when it hits the floor below it. And the value for the time interval (dt) during which this speed is lost is also arbitrarily chosen by him. Hidden a couple paragraphs before his actual calculation is Dr. Garcia’s assertion without proof or argument that “Impact is a very brief process whose duration is dt = 1/100 [second].”
Whoa, Nellie! It turns out that this value, dt = 1/100 second, is critical to his thesis but he doesn’t tell us where it came from!
So how accurate is this number anyway?
Well, to have such a small value of dt would require that the bottom of the falling “upper block” meet the floor below without the slightest tilt. For example, accepting Dr. Garcia’s free-fall speed calculation of 7.7 meters/second, tilting of a 63.4-meters-on-an-edge WTC floor by mere 1 degree would increase dt from his guesstimate of dt = 0.01 second all the way to dt = 0.14 second, giving the instantaneous total force of the falling “upper block” on the lower structure of just 1.3 times the static weight of the “upper block” instead of the 6.1 times as estimated in his “example.”
So did the “upper blocks” of WTC1&2 fall without tilting?
Well, according to NIST’s final report (Section 6.14.4, p. 146): “Failure of the south wall in WTC 1 and east wall in WTC2 caused the portion of the building above to tilt in the direction of the failed wall.” And in films (and the photo above!), the “upper block” of WTC2 is seen to tilt as much as 23 degrees!
Therefore, if we accept NIST’s last word on the subject, Dr. Garcia’s guesstimated dt parameter is egregiously wrong, and his calculations prove nothing – not even “by intimidation.”
Moreover, if for the sake of argument we were to accept Dr. Garcia’s calculation of a static-plus-dynamic force of 6.1 times the weight of the “upper block,” this number is still far less than the “2000%” live loads (20 times the weight of the block) that the exterior columns alone were designed to withstand for brief moments (see above).
And yet the real elephant in the room still remains Dr. Garcia’s tacit assumption that the intact core columns (most of the original 47) and the about 200 visibly intact perimeter columns between the two adjacent floors in question SIMULTANEOUSLY lost 100% of their strength at the precise moment of collapse initiation.
Why simultaneously?
Well, Dr. Garcia’s dynamic-force calculation assumes the “upper block” to have been in unimpeded free-fall for the full 3 meter drop, whereas if some steel columns simply refused to bend or break at the same time, the “upper block” would have descended those 3 meters without picking up nearly as much speed.
In fact, Dr. Garcia’s concealed assumption that all support columns lost ALL of their strength – from floor to ceiling – during a single very short time interval (much shorter than the 0.78-second 3-meter free-fall time) is unsupported by any evidence, or even by any claim made by NIST.
Moreover, even neglecting the different strengths of steel at different temperatures, it is astronomically improbable that approximately 250 steel columns would fail due to “natural causes” within the same very short time interval. In more popular language, this hidden assumption underlying Dr. Garcia’s calculation is “statistically impossible.”
But there IS one way that all 250 some columns could have lost all strength simultaneously. It’s called CONTROLLED DEMOLITION.
David Ray Griffin has web-published a splendid, highly footnoted account of “The Destruction of the World Trade Center: Why the Official Account Cannot Be True”:
http://911review.com/articles/griffin/nyc1.html#multipleevidence
This scholarly work, rich in eyewitness accounts, includes 11 separate pieces of evidence that the World Trade Center towers 1, 2, and 7 were brought down by explosives.
Thus, with his hidden assumptions exposed, Dr. Garcia’s analysis does NOT support the official hypothesis that fires initiated the collapse of the World Trade Center towers on 9/11/01 and does NOT contradict Dr. Griffin’s compilation of evidence that they were brought down by controlled demolition.”
http://impactglassman.blogspot.com/2007/01/hand-waving-physics-of-911.html
I don’t think the MMM society has done a sufficient job discussing how improbable their scenario is.
This describes who Dr. Manuel Garcia is, and who Dr. Griscom is in the above discussion, as Griscom writes in his blog post. Two very accomplished physicist “duking it out” as it were…
“Manuel Garcia, who has his Ph.D. in Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering from Princeton and works as a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has written a recent series of articles for CounterPunch, which is described by the editors as a “widely applauded primer on the laws of physics and the myths of conspiracists (sic)” concerning the collapses of World Trade Center towers 1, 2, and 7.
Below, I will take issue with Dr. Garcia’s primer. He doesn’t get MY applause.
I too hold a Ph.D. (in Physics) from an Ivy League university (Brown) and have worked as a physicist at a national laboratory (33 years at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC).”
Here is another analysis, James, that shows that the MMM society proposal doesn’t agree with the observational evidence that the upper mass would have either sufficient momentum or mass to crush the intact building it had been sitting on for the 30 years prior. Not only was the lower portion of the building intact and undamaged, it became structurally more substantial with each of the lower floors. The core columns tapered as the ascended through the building. If all of the supporting columns holding the upper mass up off of the lower building suddenly let go the upper mass would need to strike the lower building with such force as to crush the lower building. There would be a deceleration of the upper mass as that strike took place according to Newton. That didn’t happen, and this analysis shows that it didn’t happen.
http://www.journalof911studies.com/the-missing-jolt-a-simple-refutation-of-the-nist-bazant-collapse-hypothesis/
And please, critique the methodology used in the analysis and the content of the article, if you wish to dispute it, not where the article is being hosted or by whom.
It seems to me this 27 page paper boils down to two arguments. 1) the top part had to stay entirely rigid to flatten the bottom part in short order. 2) Newton said it had to happen this way, so that’s how it happened. This is a glorified appeal to authority.
My thoughts:
1) He’s making an exceedingly complicated and unnecessary analysis of something that was pretty straightforward. It was like if I am carrying a 200 pound sack of potatoes on my shoulders, and I was doing it pretty well — but, if suddenly, my knees started to buckle, I would go down very quickly. Once that 200 pound sack of potatoes got the best of me, it would be sayonara, senor – I’m going down! The sack of potatoes does not have to be rigid. All it has to do is maintain some sort of cohesiveness and unity.
The top part of the building certainly retained a good deal of cohesiveness, and could act in concert. It did not turn into an atomized mist, nor did even turn into individual bricks and pieces. Instead, it was like a sack of potatoes that acted as a unit.
The guy makes way too much emphasis on the need for rigidity. There’s a continuum from utter rigidity to being atomized. The top of the building was still well on the end of the continuum toward rigidity.
2) He’s trying to boil down a complicated mess into a single Newtonian equation, then he tries to invoke Newton like an appeal to authority.
The bottom line is, a sack of potatoes was pressing down and then the building started to give way and the thing went down really fast. It was a riot of vectors and factors and forces, and you can pick through those vectors and factors to assemble all sorts of arcane hypotheses, but the big picture was, that sack of potatoes flattened the bottom of the building. This is a case of not seeing the forest for the trees, is my read.
It’s not rocket science. He’s trying to make it into rocket science.
My read.
Mr.Oeming, I read where the steel melted and created holes, what I also read that so m eone or a couple of people spread a chemical on the steel to create the softness and the holes, they also said only the military carries that chemical. What about the pentagon, it barely shows the plane coming in the building. Were there explosives there too and chemicals to make it extremely hot too.
Another extremely interesting and valuable resource completely ignored by the “denier and debunking” community is the Complete 911 Timeline at historycommons.org. An excellent place to start is with the entries for the World Trade Center investigations.
These entries detail in near exhaustive detail what has been published in the world print and broadcast media, books, or in public access studies, such as the NIST NCSTAR1 and FEMA studies, as it relates to the attacks starting well before the WTC Towers were built. For instance, a group of real estate developers in NYC published a full-page ad showing a commercial jet heading for one of the towers in 1963 warning of the dangers the proposed towers would be subject to. One of the developers was the owner of the Empire State Building, which had been struck by a plane in July 1945.
As this is a timeline it provides a chronological record of what was being discussed in world media relating to terrorist activities, funding, and threats that in hindsight foretell of the attacks. The specific timeline in the above link details security arrangements for the towers, ownership, insurance arrangements; statements publicly made about the buildings design, reporting about the 15 fires that had occurred in the North Tower during the span of time from 1975 to 2001, reporting on the opening and controversy surrounding Guiliani’s Emergency Command Center in WTC 7, dubbed “The Nut Shell” by WABC in NYC, and never used to respond to a terrorist attack or other natural catastrophes. “The 50,000 square foot center has reinforced, bulletproof, and bomb-resistant walls, its own air supply and water tank, beds, showers to accommodate 30 people, and three backup generators. It also has rooms full of video monitors from where the mayor can oversee police and fire department responses. It is to be staffed around the clock and is intended as a meeting place for city leaders in the event of an act of terrorism.”
Here are two entries that discuss how exploding jet fuel is treated by an eyewitness, a magazine article, and by NIST’s modeling and estimations of fire effects on columns:
(8:47 a.m.-9:50 a.m.) September 11, 2001: Engineer Finds Major Damage in Basement and Lobby of North Tower
Mike Pecoraro, an engineer who is part of the crew that services the World Trade Center complex, is at work in the mechanical shop in the second subbasement of the north WTC tower when it is hit. When the room he is in starts filling with white smoke and he can smell kerosene (jet fuel), he heads upstairs with a co-worker toward a small machine shop on the C level. Yet, he will later recall: “There was nothing there but rubble. We’re talking about a 50 ton hydraulic press—gone!” He then heads for the parking garage, yet finds that “there were no walls, there was rubble on the floor, and you can’t see anything.” He ascends to the B level where he sees a 300-pound steel and concrete fire door, which is lying on the floor, wrinkled up “like a piece of aluminum foil.” Pecoraro recalls seeing similar things at the WTC when it was bombed in 1993 and is therefore convinced that a bomb has gone off this time. When he makes it into the main lobby, he sees massive damage. “The whole lobby was soot and black, elevator doors were missing,” he will describe. “The marble was missing off some of the walls. Twenty-foot section of marble, 20 by 10 foot sections of marble, gone from the walls.… Broken glass everywhere, the revolving doors were all broken and their glass was gone.” Pecoraro will say he only later hears that “jet fuel actually came down the elevator shaft, blew off all the [elevator] doors, and flames rolled through the lobby. That explained all the burnt people and why everything was sooted in the lobby.” He makes it out of the North Tower before it collapses. [CHIEF ENGINEER, 8/1/2002]
Entity Tags: World Trade Center, Mike Pecoraro
Timeline Tags: 9/11 Timeline
Category Tags: All Day of 9/11 Events, World Trade Center, 9/11 Investigations, WTC Investigation
8:57 a.m. September 11, 2001: Jet Fuel in North Tower Burns Up
The jet fuel that spilled from Flight 11 when it hit the North Tower (see 8:46 a.m. September 11, 2001) has mostly burned up by this time. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which investigates the collapses, will say “The initial jet fuel fires themselves lasted at most a few minutes.” [NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF STANDARDS AND TECHNOLOGY, 9/2005, PP. 183] Engineering professor Forman Williams will say the jet fuel “burned for maybe 10 minutes.” [POPULAR MECHANICS, 3/2005] Flight 11, a Boeing 767, had a fuel capacity of 23,980 gallons, but was only carrying about 10,000 gallons when it hit the WTC. NIST will estimate that less than 1,500 gallons were consumed in a fireball inside the tower and a comparable amount was consumed in the fireballs outside the building. Therefore, approximately 7,000 gallons splashed onto the office furnishings and started fires on various floors. However, after the jet fuel is used up, office fires burn until the building collapses. NIST will calculate that there were about four pounds per square foot of combustibles in the office space, or about 60 tons per floor. Offices in the WTC actually have fewer combustibles than some other similar spaces due to the small number of interior walls and limited bookshelf space. NIST will later find that only three of sixteen perimeter columns it recovers reached a temperature of 250°C and neither of the two core columns it retrieves reached this temperature. NIST will also find that none of the samples it acquires reaches a temperature above 600°C (see August 27, 2003). Although steel does not melt until its temperature is about 1,600°C, it may begin to lose significant strength at over 500°C. [NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF STANDARDS AND TECHNOLOGY, 9/2005, PP. 20, 29, 24, 77] The jet fuel will also burn up in the South Tower about 10 minutes after it is hit (see 9:13 a.m. September 11, 2001).
Entity Tags: Forman Williams, World Trade Center, National Institute of Standards and Technology
Timeline Tags: 9/11 Timeline
Category Tags: All Day of 9/11 Events, WTC Investigation, World Trade Center
Please note that Pecoraro says “he only later hears that “jet fuel actually came down the elevator shaft, blew off all the [elevator] doors, and flames rolled through the lobby. That explained all the burnt people and why everything was sooted in the lobby.”
The salient point is that this observation was not his own. He was coached as to how to explain these events.
Another example similar to this that comes out of this archive is the following.
Before 9:59 am, that is before the South Tower disappears: “In the lobby of Building 7 of the WTC, EMS Division Chief John Peruggia is in discussion with Fire Department Captain Richard Rotanz and a representative from the Department of Buildings. As Peruggia later describes, “It was brought to my attention, it was believed that the structural damage that was suffered to the [Twin] Towers was quite significant and they were very confident that the building’s stability was compromised and they felt that the North Tower was in danger of a near imminent collapse.” Peruggia grabs EMT Richard Zarrillo and tells him to pass on the message “that the buildings have been compromised, we need to evacuate, they’re going to collapse.” Zarrillo heads out to the fire command post, situated in front of 3 World Financial, the American Express Building, where he relays this message to several senior firefighters. He says, “OEM says the buildings are going to collapse; we need to get out.” (OEM is the Mayor’s Office of Emergency Management, which has its headquarters in WTC 7.) Fire Chief Pete Ganci’s response is, “who the f___ told you that?” Seconds later, they hear the noise of the South Tower as it collapses. [CITY OF NEW YORK, 10/23/2001; CITY OF NEW YORK, 10/25/2001; CITY OF NEW YORK, 10/25/2001; CITY OF NEW YORK, 11/9/2001] Others also appear to have been aware of the imminent danger. Fire Chief Joseph Pfeifer, who is at the command post in the lobby of the North Tower, says, “Right before the South Tower collapsed, I noticed a lot of people just left the lobby, and I heard we had a crew of all different people, high-level people in government, everybody was gone, almost like they had information that we didn’t have.” He says some of them are moving to a new command post across the street. [CITY OF NEW YORK, 10/23/2001; FIREHOUSE MAGAZINE, 4/2002; DWYER AND FLYNN, 2005, PP. 214] Mayor Giuliani also says he receives a prior warning of the first collapse, while at his temporary headquarters at 75 Barclay Street (see (Before 9:59 a.m.) September 11, 2001).
Entity Tags: Richard Rotanz, Joseph Pfeifer, John Peruggia, World Trade Center, Richard (“Dick”) Cheney
Timeline Tags: 9/11 Timeline
Category Tags: All Day of 9/11 Events, WTC Investigation, Key Day of 9/11 Events, World Trade Center
The salient point this entry shows is that senior fire officials had sent hundreds of responders into the buildings on the basis of their collective experience handling high rise office building fires. The sequence of events describe here suggests knowledge of imminent collapse of the North Tower preceded actual collapse and rendered the senior fire chiefs’ collective experience worthless. This was even in light of the two firefighters who had made it to the 78th floor of the South Tower minutes before the building disappears and report seeing only two small fires (see 9:52 a.m. September 11, 2001: Firefighters Reach 78th Floor of South Tower; Find Two Isolated Fires. Another survivor relates the following, also on the 78th floor of the South Tower:
“Brian Clark, the executive vice president of brokerage firm Euro Brokers, was on the 84th floor of the South Tower, where his firm’s offices are, when Flight 175 crashed into it. He had headed out, going down Stairway A, which is the only staircase in the tower that remains intact from top to bottom, and was soon joined by Stanley Praimnath, who also works in the South Tower. They reach a point that Clark later guesses to have been around the 77th or 78th floor, where the stairway walls are cracked, allowing them to look through. This would be around the lower end of the floors where the plane impacted. However, Clark sees no large fire. He later says, “[Y]ou could look through the cracks and see flames. They were just quietly licking up, not a roaring inferno. And there was some smoke there, but again I think the stairs were pressurized, pushing the air out so we had less smoke in the stairway than you might imagine.” [BBC, 3/7/2002; NEW YORK TIMES, 5/26/2002; SUN, 9/6/2002; 9/11 COMMISSION, 5/18/2004] This apparently contradicts later claims that the tower was subjected to “extreme fires” prior to its collapse. [NEW YORK TIMES, 10/20/2004] Firefighter Orio Palmer will make it up to this level of the tower later on, and also report only finding small fires there (see 9:52 a.m. September 11, 2001). Clark and Praimnath continue down the stairs and make it out just minutes before the collapse. They are two of only four people who were at or above the impact zone after Flight 175 hit, who are able to escape from the South Tower. [CNN, 9/9/2002] A further 14 people are able to get out of the building from its 78th floor, which is the lower part of the crash zone. [DWYER AND FLYNN, 2005, PP. 255]”
So where did the foreknowledge of imminent collapse come from and what was it based on? The firefighters reporting from inside the structures? Did the NIST study treat this as relevant information in their analysis? Did the 9/11 Commission treat this as relevant? The answers to these questions are, we don’t know how they looked on this foreknowledge because there is no public record of what this information was based on, besides what was reported as noted above.
This video clip from an on the street interview has always interested me in that the individual being interviewed pretty much to a tee describes what has become the common theme of the official explanation for the destruction of the towers. In a live interview on the street on 9/11 just minutes after the buildings came down the meme that plane strike, intense fire, and gravity brought the towers down was already being broadcast to the world. I don’t vouch for the “commentary” in this clip but what the individual says, “Mark Walsh,” said to be a Fox News freelancers, is what is important.
What the History Commons archive offers is a detailed look at how the events related to the 9/11 attacks have been publicly discussed, who knew what when, how investigative journalists from the world press were digging into the details and reporting them both before and after the actual events. This activity is itself a search for truth, the only agenda being to dig into the record and report what is found. The picture it paints differs considerably from the official conspiracy theory suggesting the reality of those events has yet to be understood. This is why the 9/11 truth community has continued to call for a truly independent investigation, and will continue to do so regardless of deniers and debunkers working to keep the public in the dark as to the true nature of these events.
Some points… Dave writes, “He [Steven Jones] was part of the cold-fusion fiasco and worked with Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann.” This is offered in a manner meant to diminish Jones’s career, tying him to the discredited work of Pons and Fleischmann, and by extension to discredit the article Dave is attempting to critique.
Steven Jones did work on cold fusion, but did not work with the Pons and Fleischmann team, or have anything to do with Pons and Fleischmann other than to coordinate the release of their separate, unrelated research papers, according to the Wikipedia article Dave links to.
Is Dave lying with this “worked with” connection, creating a connection where none exists to support the obvious bias in this posting? Is he confused about something he believes he’s read but doesn’t reveal? The Wikipedia entry makes no mention of a working collaboration between Jones’s research and Pons and Fleischmann on the subject of cold fusion.
Calling the work examining whether muon-catalyzed cold fusion is a viable line of research or not “the cold fusion fiasco” is unscientific. This is not how valid criticism of scientific work is conducted by anyone purporting to be a “skeptic” on the side of science. Is this too simply a biased slur meant to discredit Jones because Dave rejects his 9/11 writing and work? Seems so.
Another assertion in the same vein as slurring Steven Jones is how Dave puts emphasis on what the publishers of the Europhysics News article added as a disclaimer at the beginning of the article: “This feature is somewhat different from our usual purely scientific articles, in that it contains some speculation. However, given the timing and the importance of the issue, we consider that this feature is sufficiently technical and interesting to merit publication for our readers. Obviously, the content of this article is the responsibility of the authors.”
Dave emphasizes the use of the term “speculation.” He editorializes: “In other words, they are telling you clearly that it is not scientific, and is instead just speculation.”
Well, no… The publishers of Europhysics News warranted the article relevant, citing “the importance of the issue,” saying the article is “sufficiently technical and interesting to merit publication.” That is decidedly not labeling the article “just speculation.” They would not have published it if it was “just speculation.” Dave demeans and editorializes on the decision made by the publishers of a respected publication of the European Physical Society. The publisher’s disclaimer indicates speculation exists in the article, not that it is speculative and unscientific.
Dave further casts unscientific aspersions on Europhysics News vis a vis Popular Mechanics, as if PM is more reliable, more scientific a publication than Europhysics News. The European Physical Society’s publication is sent out to its membership, as it were, to 42 national physical societies. Popular Mechanics, which certainly has it place in the popular science magazine market, is designed and written for a very different audience than what is published and written for the physics communities that are served by Europhysics News.
Let’s compare some recent headlines between Europhysics News and Popular Mechanics:
EN: Properties of nuclei probed by laser light; Ion Coulomb crystals: from quantum technology to chemistry close to the absolute zero point; Pattern Formation Induced by Fixed Boundary Condition; Novel plasma jet offshoot phenomenon explains blue atmospheric jets; Fluctuational electrodynamics for nonlinear media.
PM: Why the C-130 Is Such a Badass Plane; 7 of the World’s Most Crucial Ports; Everything You Want to Know About North Korean Nukes (But Were Afraid to Ask); The 50 Best New Board Games; Russian Bombers Sighted off Alaska for Second Straight Day.
The militaristic nature of the content of Popular Mechanics says something about how and of what they seek to inform their audience.
Dave writes that Europhysics News is “just a magazine,” and in the comments below makes a straw man argument with the fact it is not a peer-reviewed journal. He sets up the straw man by claiming certain websites and people say it is (which some mistakenly do,) and then knocks down the straw man pointing out it isn’t, as if the straw man, Europhysics News not being a peer-reviewed journal, invalidates the 9/11 article.
When the publishers of Europhysics News says the 9/11 article was published because of the “importance of the issue,” and “sufficiently technical and interesting to merit publication,” given the nature of their audience I believe they are advancing a scientific ideal in a much purer, unbiased way than Popular Mechanics has. Dave, however, cites Popular Mechanics as one of the definitive authorities validating the official theory that plane strikes, fire and gravity can scientifically, with structural engineering perspicacity explain the destruction of the three World Trade Center towers. PM, in my opinion, is much more “just a magazine,” one with a militaristic leaning.
I discuss in a comment below the failings of one section of the Popular Mechanics article that came out in 2005 that claims atomized jet fuel caused death and damage in the lobby and other parts of the buildings. The section is unscientific, with vague references to things people saw attributed to exploding jet fuel. None of it is supported by actual evidence or analysis, such as comparing which elevators in the lobby were blown out with the elevator schedule in the leaked set of blueprints of the North Tower. Very few elevator shafts with access in the lobby actually accessed the damaged floors. Even the express elevators didn’t access the damaged floors, requiring passengers to disembark, walk up a set of stairs to another level to board another elevator to higher levels. I also reference a first person account of a survivor in the main utility elevator which account contradicts the innuendo used in the PM article.
For those still reading, please check out the comment Dave makes at September 18, 2016 at 15:28. It is descriptive of how Dave treats information that differs from his view. The comment directly above that comment is a copy, with citations, of an article by an Australian PhD chemist, Frank Legge, who wrote a serious critique of the official explanation for the collapse of the WTC towers. Dave ignores the content, saying not one word about any of the points made, attacking instead where the article appears, as if that is the most important feature of Legge’s critique. This is another example of the unscientific approach being taken in this posting.
Dave’s reliance on websites like 9/11Myths, Metabunk, or an article from Popular Mechanics allows him to dismiss any responsibility to validate what is said in those publications. Metabunk disputes microspheres of iron found in the dust from lower Manhattan are the potential product of a high energy thermitic reaction associated with controlled demolition with some thoughtful but far from conclusive evidence the microspheres were produced by the methods they suggest. The discussion is somewhat closer to a scientific treatment of the matter, as good science is always about challenging one’s assumptions. What Metabunk fails to do, and what Dave could never begin to do, is actually prove anything and especially that the microspheres are not the result of a thermitic reaction. Microspheres of iron were found in abundance in the dust, as work from the USGS and RJ Lee environmental studies indicate. The article linked to claims such spheres “could” come from sources of iron like steel wool or office materials. Steel wool set alight does produce spheres of iron, but so does thermite. The article suggests “blast furnace” conditions being produced by chimney effects in elevator shafts creating microspheres of iron from some possible sources. That is all well and good as far as speculation goes, but again, the elevator schedule is a resource casting doubt on this theory.
The South Tower stood for less than an hour before disappearing in about 10 to 15 seconds. Visual evidence shows the floors below the damage site were not fully engulfed in flames but were intact. There is very little “hurricane force blast furnace like wind” existing before the building came apart. The smoke billowing from the building was black and slow moving. In fact two firefighters had made it to the 78th floor of the South Tower minutes before the building came apart and described two small fires.
http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=a952firefighters#a952firefighters
What many of these “debunking analyses” primarily do is throw whatever they can against the wall and hope to see if something sticks well enough to muddy any thoughtful consideration about the obvious: how a 110 story, massively built building could come completely apart in 10 to 15 seconds after less than one hour of poorly ventilated, poorly fueled fire. The NIST study, as I’ve quoted in comments below, estimated temperatures reaching their maximum of near 1800 degree F lasted at any place in either building for only 10 to 20 minutes, a condition simply not “blast furnace,” or the raging result of “a 90,000 L Molotov cocktail,” and certainly not long enough to cause the highly redundant steel structure to fail, even if fireproofing had been knocked off in the plane strike. NIST fire experiments with floor assembly mockups didn’t show significant deflection (weakening) of the assembly under longer (hours long) and higher temperature conditions. (Another example of empirical evidence not supporting the conclusions drawn.)
In short, neither the official studies nor the debunking analyses support the conclusions that fire and gravity caused the destruction seen. The available evidence supports the theory some other energy source had to have been involved to create the observed results. Controlled demolition is the best explanation for the symmetry, the rapidity, and thoroughness of the destruction. Fire and gravity simply don’t create the physics necessary to explain what was so clearly and obviously observed.
More sheeple……https://youtu.be/TJNzaMRsN00
IT HAS BEEN SCIENTIFACALLY PROVEN THAT THE OFFICIAL 9/11 EXPLANATION BY THE GOV AND MEDIA IS TOTALY WRONG…..SO THIS ARTICLE HAS NO VALUE WHAT SO EVER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I think you need to have your Caps lock key checked, it appears to be stuck. The ‘!’ character also appears to be sticking as well.
You seem to be thinking with your adrenaline glands and not your brain.
Suggestions for improving your analytical skill:
1) Use spell check;
2) Turn off your caps lock;
3) Use the exclamation point rarely and judiciously.
By taking these simple steps,, I bet you’ll find the quality of your analyses will improve by helping to remove an urgent “panicky-ness”,in your thinking. It will help introduce more calm deliberateness, and reduce emotional “static.”
As it is, you appear to be emotionally reacting more than dispassionately analyzing. This is making you less discerning and perceptive.
Dave uses Popular Mechanics as one of the “authorities” he relies on to support his biases. Not an expert himself, he relies on opinion from others. When his expert’s opinion is found to be faulty he has little to fall back on to defend either his expert’s or his own biases. It happens repeatedly throughout this thread.
Here is an excerpt from the Popular Mechanics article that shows several things wrong with the shallow thinking that went into their criticism of those that criticize the official conspiracy theory. First though, Dave also calls upon the NIST study as one of his expert authorities without himself being terribly familiar with the study. PM relies on people who put the NIST study together which hardly makes the PM analysis independent. There is much good science in the NIST study that should not be thrown out. The conclusions drawn from that work however do not do justice to the work because the work in many places simply doesn’t support the conclusions the lead authors needed to come to. That will become clear with this excerpt.
“FACT: Following up on a May 2002 preliminary report by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), a major study will be released in spring 2005 by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), a branch of the U.S. Department of Commerce. NIST shared its initial findings with PM and made its lead researcher available to our team of reporters.
The NIST investigation revealed that plane debris sliced through the utility shafts at the North Tower’s core, creating a conduit for burning jet fuel—and fiery destruction throughout the building. “It’s very hard to document where the fuel went,” says Forman Williams, a NIST adviser and a combustion expert, “but if it’s atomized and combustible and gets to an ignition source, it’ll go off.”
Burning fuel traveling down the elevator shafts would have disrupted the elevator systems and caused extensive damage to the lobbies. NIST heard first-person testimony that “some elevators slammed right down” to the ground floor. “The doors cracked open on the lobby floor and flames came out and people died,” says James Quintiere, an engineering professor at the University of Maryland and a NIST adviser. A similar observation was made in the French documentary “9/11,” by Jules and Gedeon Naudet. As Jules Naudet entered the North Tower lobby, minutes after the first aircraft struck, he saw victims on fire, a scene he found too horrific to film.”
“NIST shared its initial findings with PM…” From this it is safe to assume PM isn’t thinking independently and is simply reiterating what the official findings are believed to show.
Atomized jet fuel will most certainly explode with great force when ignited. But the elevator schedule describing which shafts actually reached from the 94 floor to the lobby show very specifically the path that would be taken. Saying the path is hard to know is not true. What is also not true is that a single release of atomized jet fuel bursting down through the building would selectively blow out lobby elevator doors. Marlene Cruz was in the utility elevator of the North Tower, the shaft of which reached from the top of the building to the lowest sub basement and she survived but didn’t describe a blast that would have blown out lobby elevator doors yet not effect her in the elevator car with the elevator operator who also survived. The PM description is a vague, nonsensical rebuttal to the issue it purports to address.
The number of elevator shafts that actually travelled the entire distance from the damage site to the lobby was very limited. The vast majority of shafts were short, local runs, sealed at both top and bottom to prevent a chimney effect in the event of a fire. The utility floor around the 78th floor was penetrated by only a couple of elevator shafts to the upper floors: the main utility shaft, and one or two others. Even express elevators from the lobby stopped at around the 78th floor where passengers disembarked, walked up stairs to access elevators to higher floors.
Another failure of this shallow description of jet fuel causing so much havoc is the fact that so many people reported multiple blasts, not simply one that would cause elevators to blow out, hurt people in the lobby, who were then found by firefighters entering the lobby, or by the film crew. Multiple major explosions were described in all parts of the buildings, top to subbasements, at various times throughout the pre-collapse time period. These are described in the NYFD Oral History project, and in the accounts by WTC workers and firefighters on the Patriots Question 9/11 website.
As one firefighter described, he was invited to give testimony to the 9/11 Commssion, another of Dave’s expert authorities he relies on as support for his biases, and the firefighter eventually walked out because they refused to hear what he had to say about explosions.
http://patriotsquestion911.com/survivors.html#Cacchioli
That is just one segment of the PM article and it fails entirely. Yet, it is Dave’s expert authority upon which he rests so much of his biases.
You are correct to call out the falsity of Dave’s posting. It fails on many, many levels.
Ad hominem attacks? So technically you state someone can’t investigate something for what he is qualified because the proofs he got took him to confirm the official narrative is improbable… Very scientific. When someone tries to destroy someone else’s credibility with personal attacks they just get to make people think why…
Skeptic-science.com this is my first and last time I’ll check out your site. This article that you posted is complete garbage, it is a lost opportunity to communicate intelligently about a pivotal moment in history. Please scientifically prove that the author of this article ‘Dave’ has any worthy credentials to validate his statements.
Tom. What are you credentials?
Fires have raged for much longer……been much more substantial…..and never taken down a steel high rise…..FIRE can never reach hot enough temperature to compromise steel (SPRINKLERS OR NO SPRINKLERS)…….even if it were possible for this to happen the building would not fall symetrically the way the 3 WTC buildings did……IS THERE ANY TRUTH IN ANY TRUTHER CLAIM ? What an idiotic question……The question is …..IS there any truth in the official story……..THIS IS A BAD ARTICLE …….The Physics Professionals are correct.
Such articles as what sceptical-science posted here are what contribute to a hugely dumbed down world population.
First and foremost I do not want you to believe what I believe but there are a hell of a lot of unanswered questions regarding the events leading up to 911 that are still unanswered. There is an unwillingness for this to be discussed which frustrates quite a lot of well educated independent scholars, professors, not to mention those who have lost loved ones. More and more people around the globe, particularly Americans want answers but they know that they will never get them so they speculate, sometimes wildly (and across polarised camps). Some will be termed “conspiratory theorists”, simply because they do not and cannot believe the ‘official’ story and others will look at the next scientific hypothesis because they simply cannot believe that their own Government could ‘let’ this happen – I say let because there was an abundance of intelligence information indicating this was about to happen and they played war games and stood down as it was unfolding…very convenient.
For one, the extreme irrationality of those who attack “conspiracy theories” has been exposed by communications professors Ginna Husting and Martin Orr of Boise State University. In a 2007 peer-reviewed article entitled “Dangerous Machinery: ‘Conspiracy Theorist’ as a Trans-personal Strategy of Exclusion,” they wrote:
“If I call you a conspiracy theorist, it matters little whether you have actually claimed that a conspiracy exists or whether you have simply raised an issue that I would rather avoid… By labelling you, I strategically exclude you from the sphere where public speech, debate, and conflict occur.”
https://news.boisestate.edu/update/2015/03/31/martin-orr-and-ginna-husting/
Wondering what actually blew up or caused the WTC towers 1,2 & 7 to collapse is irrelevant to the real reasons why they fell. It just divides opinions into two camps, i.e., those who accept the official story and those that think outside the box and need real answers. I for one do not believe that three towers came down, (first time in worldwide history) uniformly and with absolutely no resistance (newtons third law of physics most definitely defied) due to the impact of two planes. I would imagine that it would take many planes to partially disrupt a structure of such strength (next hypothesis, the concrete and steel were sub standard). WTC 1 & 2 were designed to take multiple hits from planes, even with fuel. Aside from WTC1 & 2, WTC 7 is the smoking gun here. NIST and FEMA have failed to independently and adequately prove otherwise – from pancake collapse to buckling, what’s next?.
The real problem is this, more and more people are reading up and looking at the data, the NIST and FEMA ridiculous calculations, the noise around the day, military stand down, the failed intelligence reporting and they are wondering why a fella in a cave in Afghanistan could have pulled this off without the help of internal or outside intelligence. It does not make sense, none of it, absolutely none of it.
As a former Engineer , a certified advanced firefighter and ABS certified steel worker I will just add that anyone can be swayed a certain way via a short article. I have no doubt of the the fires consequences but know that the fire COULD NOT have been the cause of the collapses in all 4 buildings. Also I doubt anyone commenting has talked to a demolition expert because there are very few in the world with their expertise – I have. High rise architects engineers ( including both who were in charge of the WTC building construction ) all know full well what happened on that fateful day was not what it appeared
1) Many who have credentials similar or stronger than yours who disagree with you. Can you account for this? Your certificates do not mean you are right. The history of science is full of examples of august authorities proclaiming that XYZ is not possible, then being shown to be wrong.
2) Why blow up WTC 1 and 2 when plowing planes into them would be sufficient to create a false effect?
3) Why blow up WTC 7 without plowing a plane into it? This would seem to bring unwanted attention to clandestinely blowing up WTC 1 and 2. Why do this?
Correcion… meant to write “Why blow up WTC 1 and 2 when plowing planes into them would be sufficient to create a false FLAG effect?”
The asbestos removal in the buildings would’ve cost more money then it cost to build them….
1) Many who have credentials similar or stronger than yours who disagree with you. Can you account for this?
Who?
Your certificates do not mean you are right. The history of science is full of examples of august authorities proclaiming that XYZ is not possible, then being shown to be wrong.
Funny coming from a dubunker, you people are always appealing to a consensus when the consensus agrees with you.
2) Why blow up WTC 1 and 2 when plowing planes into them would be sufficient to create a false effect?
3) Why blow up WTC 7 without plowing a plane into it? This would seem to bring unwanted attention to clandestinely blowing up WTC 1 and 2. Why do this?
Does his inability to answer this question to your satisfaction – he cannot – make the pancake theory any more possible? Either the pancake theory can demolish steel and concrete into dust or it cannot….and it cannot, you do not need specialized knowledge to know this..
Why do “skeptics” demand their opponents speculate?
You are a perfect example of the saying “People can be so skillful in their ignorance.” You do a stellar job of dancing around issues without addressing the substance. Now let’s sit back and watch you dance some more. E… Start dancing… Pass the popcorn…
Close examination of Dave’s arguments reveals that his arguments are disconnected in the Engineering sense. More like an English major stringing words together that sound good.
Two of the others have very sound Engineering arguments! Logically, the Engineering arguments carry the day in this debate to the conclusion that the most probable cause of the WTC collapse was controlled explosives.
Follow the evidence. Did the controlled explosives keep the WTC from toppling sideways for 1000 feet or so? Did the controlled explosives keep the destruction down to a realitively small footprint?
Common sense would seem to indicate that without controlled explosives, the WTC would have fallen sideways and had a much bigger impact at ground zero!
No matter what the truth of 9/11 is a great deal of what has happened since then is totally ridiculous. Buildings over 1,000 feet tall mus hold themselves up. Doesn’t that mean greater strength and therefor more steel toward the bottom. So where in all of these discussions do “engineers” and “scientists” even ask about accurate data on the distribution of steel in the towers. The entire NCSTAR1 report from the NIST does not even mention the total amount of concrete that was held up by the steel for 28 years.
Didn’t the designers of the Twin Towers have to figure out the distributions for the steel and concrete? They used an IBM 1620 computer to do calculations for the columns.
9/11 has been scientific nonsense so our problem is the psychology of our engineering schools. The physics should have been resolved by 1/1/2003.
You will find a discussion of the type of core columns used in the central spine of the two towers (47 columns in total in a lattice arrangement,) the two formats described in news articles describing the construction, also photographs made during the construction indicating the redundancy of cross-bracing, and a link to detailed architectural drawings for the North Tower, leaked to Steven Jones in 2007 at this site: http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/arch/core.html
Photographs of the construction can be found here: http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/evidence/photos/construction.html
The North Tower architectural drawings can be found here: http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/evidence/plans/index.html
The complete list of released drawings can conveniently be browsed here: http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/evidence/plans/table.html
The core columns are described as:
“The core columns were steel box-columns that were continuous for their entire height, going from their bedrock anchors in the sub-basements to near the towers’ tops, where they transitioned to H-beams. Apparently the box columns, more than 1000 feet long, were built as the towers rose by welding together sections several stories tall. The sections were fabricated by mills in Japan that were uniquely equipped to produce the large pieces. 2
Some of the core columns apparently had outside dimensions of 36 inches by 16 inches. Others had larger dimensions, measuring 52 inches by 22 inches. 3 The core columns were oriented so that their longer dimensions were perpendicular to the core structures’ longer, 133-foot-wide sides. Construction photographs found at the Skyscraper Museum in New York City indicate that the outermost rows of core columns on the cores’ longer sides were of the larger dimensions. Both the FEMA’s World Trade Center Building Performance Study and the NIST’s Draft Report on the Twin Towers fail to disclose the dimensions of the core columns, and the NIST Report implies that only the four core columns on each core’s corners had larger dimensions.
Like the perimeter columns — and like steel columns in all tall buildings — the thickness of the steel in the core columns tapered from bottom to top. Near the bottoms of the towers the steel was four inches thick, whereas near the tops it may have been as little as 1/4th inch thick. The top figure in the illustration to the right is a cross-section of one of the smaller core columns from about half-way up a tower, where the steel was about two inches thick. The bottom figure shows the base of one of the larger core columns, where the steel was five inches thick. The bases of the columns also had slabs of steel running through their centers, making them almost solid.”
The detailed architectural drawings of the North Tower show floor by floor the placement of the core and perimeter columns, and include as well the location of elevator shafts, stair wells, escalator wells, and utility and mechanical floors that held air handling systems, work spaces, parking and access ramps, in short, a fairly complete set of drawings for one of the Twin Towers. One can see from these drawings that the vast majority of elevators, for instance, were local lifts, sealed at top and bottom so as not to act as chimneys in the event of fire. In the case of these events the vast majority of elevator shafts didn’t act as conduits for jet fuel to infiltrate the building. The shafts that could act in that manner were limited as far as I can see from these drawings.
This diagram: http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/arch/plan.html shows how Express elevators took passengers to the Sky Lobby at around the 77th floor where they had to exit that elevator, walk up a set of stairs to access the local, upper level elevators that serviced the upper floors. The implications from this arrangement are significant as excess jet fuel unburnt or otherwise bound up in the carpeting of the upper floors below the crash site in the North Tower (around the 96th floor) would be further hampered from infiltrating the building by the Sky Lobby and mechanical floor blocking the way. Air handling passageways and other building conduits may have provided some means but potentially much less than unimpeded elevator shafts extending several floors.
I have always questioned the scene the first firefighters encountered in the street level lobby. They describe having to step over a gruesome pile of dead and dying people in front of a blown out elevator, the door of which was blown outward. If this elevator was a local lift that extended to only the 20th or 30th floor levels, it would have been impossible for jet fuel to be the cause of the damages and death as that elevator would have been hermetically sealed from the destruction 1000 ft above. (This testimony seems to support my thoughts about this: http://patriotsquestion911.com/survivors.html#Walsh) If it was an Express elevator the question still arises was this blast caused by jet fuel, and if so, did every access point to this elevator blow out similarly as the supposed explosion of vapor travelled down the building?
That last scenario is called into question as there were in fact two people traveling upwards in the main utility elevator shaft that ran from the lowest subbasement to the highest level in the North Tower when the first plane struck the building. The cables to Cab 50, the car they were travelling in, were severed and the car dropped several floors before coming to rest as the emergency braking system engaged. While they suffered relatively minor injuries from the fall, they didn’t experience an explosive blast, were evacuated from the car and the building and lived through the experience, unlike the people in the lobby. The Cab 50 elevator shaft was directly exposed to the crash site but didn’t experience an explosive blast. The incident is described by one of the survivors here: http://patriotsquestion911.com/survivors.html#Cruz
The other person with Marlene Cruz in Cab 50 was the elevator operator. His wife was also an elevator operator in a local lift that serviced floors above the 78th floor when the plane struck. The shaft her elevator was in DID experience an explosive blast; she was severely burned in the incident but survived.
I believe what the firefighters encountered in the lobby was the results of explosive charges, not jet fuel. Many other people at the lobby level experienced sever blast conditions that simply don’t seem to plausibly have come from jet fuel induced explosions. Such as: http://patriotsquestion911.com/survivors.html#Keane
In order to bring down these massive buildings, the steel columns would have to have been attacked at many points throughout the buildings. It appears that is what took place as explosions have been described in great detail by many people in all quarters of the buildings.
Dave asks: “So why do such beliefs take root and flourish within human minds?” And then quotes a couple of psychologists to bolster his own particular (peculiar) bias about those who cannot accept the official conspiracy theories to give this bias a veneer of scientific respectability. Sorry, Dave, but I call bull shit, deep and broad.
There is perhaps a psychological weakness that compels someone to demean and relegate noted academics, structural engineers, professional physicists, architects, literally a thousand other professional people in a range of professions from research scientist to head of state to intelligence officials to international finance to commercial pilot, law enforcement, government… to demean and relegate these highly capable people to be hapless slaves to their emotions unable to resist the lure of ideas outside an official orthodoxy deliberately promulgated complete with gaping holes a mile wide.
Here are a few minds immune to the weaknesses Dave requires to uphold his silly denial of the science behind why so much of the official conspiracy as described by the Bush Administration, in nonsensical. That regime took the liberties afforded them by these shock and awe events and fashioned two wars, both arguably illegal under international law, extending the battlefield to encompass the entire planet, a torture regime, a domestic surveillance system that makes the East German Stazi look like middle schoolers spying on their classmates… just to name a few of the consequences that flowed directly from the events of 9/11.
David L. Griscom, PhD – Research physicist, retired in 2001 from Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) in Washington, DC, after 33 years service.
Lynn Margulis, AB, MS, PhD – Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Geosciences, University of Massachusetts – Amherst. Elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1983. Former Chair, National Academy of Science’s Space Science Board Committee on Planetary Biology and Chemical Evolution. Recipient of the National Medal of Science, America’s highest honor for scientific achievement, in 1999.
Larry L. Erickson, BS Aeronautical Eng, MS Aeronautical Eng, PhD Eng Mechanics – Retired NASA Aerospace Engineer and Research Scientist. Conducted research in the fields of structural dynamics, aerodynamics, aeroelasticity and flutter. Recipient of NASA’s Aerodynamics Division Researcher-of-the-Year Award. 33-year NASA career. “Serious technical investigations by experts seem to be lacking from the official explanations.”
Robert H. Waser, BS ME, MS ME, PE – Retired Research and Development Engineer, U.S. Naval Ordinance Lab. 33 year career, of which 15 years were as Chief Engineer of the laboratory’s wind tunnel complex, which includes the world’s largest hypervelocity wind tunnel. “The ‘official’ 9/11 story seems to violate laws of physics and engineering analysis, specifically with respect to the collapse speed and the temperatures of molten iron. The only explanation that seems to be in accordance with all observations is controlled demolition.”
George M. Campbell, PhD – Retired Research Scientist, Los Alamos National Laboratory, specializing in plutonium chemistry 1963 – 1991. “Pictures of collapse are not consistent with a burning building. I believe that someone is covering up the facts for some reason.”
Raymond L. McGovern – 27-year CIA veteran. Former Chairman, National Intelligence Estimates (NIE), the consensus reports of all U.S. intelligence agencies. Responsible for preparing and presenting the President’ Daily Brief (PDB) to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and for providing intelligence briefing to their Vice Presidents, Secretaries of State, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and many other senior government officials. Upon retirement in 1990, McGovern was awarded the CIA’s Intelligence Commendation Medallion and received a letter of appreciation from then-President George H. W. Bush. “It has long been clear that the Bush-Cheney administration cynically exploited the attacks of 9/11 to promote its imperial designs. But the present volume confronts us with compelling evidence for an even more disturbing conclusion: that the 9/11 attacks were themselves orchestrated by this administration precisely so they could be thus exploited. If this is true, it is not merely the case, as the Downing Street memos show, that the stated reason for attacking Iraq was a lie. It is also the case that the whole ‘war on terror’ was based on a prior deception.”
William Christison (1928 – 2010) – Joined the CIA in 1950, and served on the analysis side of the Agency for 28 years. From the early 1970s he served as National Intelligence Officer (principal adviser to the Director of Central Intelligence on certain areas) for, at various times, Southeast Asia, South Asia and Africa. Before he retired in 1979 he was Director of the CIA’s Office of Regional and Political Analysis, a 250-person unit responsible for political analysis of every country and region in the world. “I now think there is persuasive evidence that the events of September did not unfold as the Bush administration and the 9/11 Commission would have us believe. …
An airliner almost certainly did not hit The Pentagon. Hard physical evidence supports this conclusion; among other things, the hole in the Pentagon was considerably smaller than an airliner would create. …
The North and South Towers of the World Trade Center almost certainly did not collapse and fall to earth because hijacked aircraft hit them. A plane did not hit Building 7 of the Center, which also collapsed. All three were most probably destroyed by controlled demolition charges placed in the buildings before 9/11. A substantial volume of evidence shows that typical residues and byproducts from such demolition charges were present in the three buildings after they collapsed. The quality of the research done on this subject is quite impressive.”
Michael Scheuer, PhD – Former Chief of the CIA’s bin Laden unit (aka Alec Station), the Osama bin Laden tracking unit at the Counterterrorism Center 1996 – 1999. Special Adviser to the Chief of the bin Laden unit, September 2001 to November 2004. 22-year CIA career. Currently author, political analyst and media commentator. Adjunct Professor of Security Studies, Georgetown University. “Judge Napolitano: Was the 9/11 Commission report a whitewash as Colonel Shaffer says and as one of the 9/11 Commissioners to whom he spoke, and you heard him talk about this person, pretty much agrees?
Michael Scheuer: It was a whitewash and a lie from top to bottom, Judge…”
Major General Albert Stubblebine, U.S. Army (ret) – Former Commanding General of U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command, 1981 – 1984, commanding 15,000 intelligence and security personnel. Also commanded the U.S. Army’s Electronic Research and Development Command and the U.S. Army’s Intelligence School and Center. Former head of Imagery Interpretation for Scientific and Technical Intelligence. 32-year Army career. “One of my experiences in the Army was being in charge of the Army’s Imagery Interpretation for Scientific and Technical Intelligence during the Cold War. I measured pieces of Soviet equipment from photographs. It was my job. I look at the hole in the Pentagon and I look at the size of an airplane that was supposed to have hit the Pentagon. And I said, ‘The plane does not fit in that hole’. So what did hit the Pentagon? What hit it? Where is it? What’s going on?”
Lt. Col. Robert Bowman, PhD, U.S. Air Force (ret) – Director of Advanced Space Programs Development under Presidents Ford and Carter. U.S. Air Force fighter pilot with over 100 combat missions. (PhD in Aeronautics and Nuclear Engineering, Cal Tech). Former Head of the Department of Aeronautical Engineering and Assistant Dean at the U.S. Air Force Institute of Technology. 22-year Air Force career. “Scholars and professionals with various kinds of expertise—including architects, engineers, firefighters, intelligence officers, lawyers, medical professionals, military officers, philosophers, religious leaders, physical scientists, and pilots—have spoken out about radical discrepancies between the official account of the 9/11 attacks and what they, as independent researchers, have learned.
They have established beyond any reasonable doubt that the official account of 9/11 is false and that, therefore, the official “investigations” have really been cover-up operations.
Col. George Nelson, MBA, U.S. Air Force (ret) – Former U.S. Air Force aircraft accident investigator and airplane parts authority. Graduate, U.S. Air Force War College. 34-year Air Force career. “In all my years of direct and indirect participation, I never witnessed nor even heard of an aircraft loss, where the wreckage was accessible, that prevented investigators from finding enough hard evidence to positively identify the make, model, and specific registration number of the aircraft — and in most cases the precise cause of the accident. …
The government alleges that four wide-body airliners crashed on the morning of September 11 2001, resulting in the deaths of more than 3,000 human beings, yet not one piece of hard aircraft evidence has been produced in an attempt to positively identify any of the four aircraft. On the contrary, it seems only that all potential evidence was deliberately kept hidden from public view. …”
Lt. Col. Karen U. Kwiatkowski, PhD, U.S. Air Force (ret) – Former Political-Military Affairs Officer in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Also served on the staff of the Director of the National Security Agency. 20-year Air Force career. “It is as a scientist that I have the most trouble with the official government conspiracy theory, mainly because it does not satisfy the rules of probability or physics. The collapses of the World Trade Center buildings clearly violate the laws of probability and physics. …
There was a dearth of visible debris on the relatively unmarked [Pentagon] lawn, where I stood only minutes after the impact. Beyond this strange absence of airliner debris, there was no sign of the kind of damage to the Pentagon structure one would expect from the impact of a large airliner. This visible evidence or lack thereof may also have been apparent to the secretary of defense [Donald Rumsfeld], who in an unfortunate slip of the tongue referred to the aircraft that slammed into the Pentagon as a “missile”. …
I saw nothing of significance at the point of impact – no airplane metal or cargo debris was blowing on the lawn in front of the damaged building as smoke billowed from within the Pentagon. … all of us staring at the Pentagon that morning were indeed looking for such debris, but what we expected to see was not evident.
The same is true with regard to the kind of damage we expected. … But I did not see this kind of damage. Rather, the facade had a rather small hole, no larger than 20 feet in diameter.”
Scott C. Grainger, BS CE, PE – Licensed Professional Civil Engineer and/or Fire Protection Engineer in the States of Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, Utah, Virginia, Washington, and Wyoming. “Approximately 50% of my work is forensic. I am licensed in 9 States. In addition to my forensic work, a good portion of my work is in the design of structural fireproofing systems.
All three [WTC] collapses were very uniform in nature. Natural collapses due to unplanned events are not uniform.”
Jonathan H. Cole, BS CE, PE – Licensed Professional Civil Engineer, States of Connecticut, Florida, and New Hampshire. Over 28 years experience in civil engineering and construction management, including building, bridge, utility and infrastructure design. “There is so much evidence that has yet to be ‘debunked’ or explained by the ‘official story’.
The initial antenna drop in WTC 1 before the perimeter walls drop, accelerating into the path of most resistance, the concrete dust analysis and energy it took to make it, why the corners of the towers did not collapse at the same rate as the floors, the cut up core columns at ground zero, the lack of any photographic evidence whatsoever of any ‘pancaked’ floors, the time it took to collapse, the energy needed to throw steel hundreds of feet, the squibs well below the collapse wave, and of course the collapse of WTC 7.
Until such time that all this can be clearly explained without the use of explosives, I will throw my lot with fundamental laws of physics rather then the ‘official story’ which defies those laws.”
Christopher Hahn, PE – Licensed Professional Engineer, State of Illinois. Mechanical Engineer with over 15 years of experience. “The collapses do not add up. Even with manipulated models, getting the results they have tried to show seems impossible.”
I could list another thousand people who in their professional capacities have expressed serious doubts as to the explanation contained in the official conspiracy theory.
Dave has stated here that architects and engineers who have expressed doubts simply do not match up to the “millions” of others who haven’t expressed doubts. He states: “Scientific American, Popular Mechanics, the American Institute of Architects, the Royal Institute of British Architects, and quite literally millions of other architects and engineers beg to differ and have not been persuaded…” The fault in this argument is that Dave has no idea what any of these “quite literally millions” actually think, beyond what the limited authors at Popular Mechanics or any of the others have published, and to call on these millions has no validity or logic as a rational response to those that do have doubts. Dave calls on these millions to support his own biases knowing nothing about what most people think.
The page views of the EuroPhysics article as of a couple of weeks ago was up to 350,000. Does Dave really know what these people are thinking?
Again, Dave, my apologies, but I call BULL SHIT. Those who can’t bring themselves to think it possible that a high motivated, tightly controlled, highly compartmentalized operation of experts didn’t have the means, motive, and opportunity to rig the three towers with charges capable of destroying those buildings simply has a deficit of imagination. The elevator shafts provided discrete access to the inter-floor crawl spaces and structural components of the buildings. With the means, motives and opportunity to provide the world with a grand spectacle of shock and awe with an aim to manufacture consent for a political agenda playing out to this day, Machiavelli would have instructed the Prince, “go for it…” It is my considered opinion that something along these lines is a better explanation to what happened besides fire and gravity…
I don’t understand why they needed to blow up the buildings. If it was a false flag operation, wouldnt the planes have been sufficient?
Also, why blow up multiple buildings? Wouldn’t the the World Trade Center towers have been enough? Why would they expose themselves to the increased risk of detection?
Good question, certainly. It has been widely speculated that the twin towers were white elephants, were losing tenants to other more modern, more versatile buildings, and were aging being built in the 1960’s and had outlived their usefulness. Retrofitting older buildings such as those would have been costly and would never be able to compete with newer buildings and the technology newer buildings afford.
That might be a banal, pragmatic way of looking at it, but I don’t reckon we will ever really know. The key indicators that lead many experts to be suspicious about the official explanation are Physical in nature and can’t know about this sort of question without clear documentation outlining the thinking. The science of the destruction of the three towers is itself a testament to the failure of the official explanation to answer questions that arise from observed phenomena, so while documentation detailing the planning may not exist, the science makes many descrepancies very obvious.
Steven Demetri You have a tremendous amount of patience to respond to such a stupid article with such a quality response, I commend you for your effort to bring truth and understanding to such idiocracy. This will be my last time logging into this stupid website, I can’t stomach this trash. Thank you.
Well, Tom, I agree Dave is completely wrong when it comes to 9/11 stuff. But I’ve taken note that in his many other postings on other topics he presents good arguments and refers to good research and evidence supporting his posts. I think he tends to “appeal to authority” when posting and most of the time he appeals to good authority, except when it comes to 9/11. He appeals to biased sources of information, deniers and the publications that publish denier articles and attitudes.
When actual science is presented debunking the treatment supporters of the official conspiracy theory give questions like free fall acceleration of Building 7, near free fall acceleration of the two towers, the symmetry in all three, molten metal evident in the dust and in the rubble, the contradictions in NIST’s empirical experimentation and estimations with observation and visual evidence, and some of NIST’s simulation estimates that directly fly in the face of the final conclusions NIST study administrators came to in spite of their own estimates, experimentation, and simulations… when it comes to questions like these Dave takes refuge in the shoddy logic of his chosen authorities unable to make those arguments himself.
I don’t think he is familiar with the NIST study well enough to argue from it. I don’t think he is aware of what other longtime physicists and structural engineers have argued, dismissing them without due consideration because his mind is set on what his authorities say, being unable to see beyond their bias. I don’t hold it against him but I think showing the shoddy work of his sources is key to showing what is a better analysis of the issues involved. Having an authority is a powerful incentive to not wander too far from the fold but it can impede a thorough analysis when someone doesn’t want to exert much effort to independent thought. To really argue against a proposal one has to dive into and understand the counterarguments, and I think Dave doesn’t do that well. He relies on his sources for that, and not to his advantage.
Here is a pretty good example of two highly competent physicists falling on different sides of this matter, one resorting to handwaving and resting on his credentials while the other is presenting the science that makes the other “authority” less credible. Manuel Gracias is no doubt highly competent and well informed in general. However he falls into the trap of letting other biases influence his thinking on the failure of the official conspiracy theory. David Griscom makes the proper corrections… how science often works…
http://impactglassman.blogspot.com/2007/01/hand-waving-physics-of-911.html?m=1
good to see no one is swallowing this SMEARING ….
The laws of physics are the bedrock to our understanding of the terrestrial world. Those laws applied to the most basic of observations of 9/11, the motions of the disintegration of WTC1,2 & partial free-fall collapse of WTC7 disprove the physics free official conspiracy theory & require engineering to have occurred. https://youtu.be/NiHeCjZlkr8
So does the author believes NIST’s ” study” that allegedly shows that one failing intersection , out of over 4, 000 intersections, caused the global collapse of WTC 7?! What does the author think about NIST refusing to release their computer models thstbremarkablynshow a single intersection failing caused a global collapse?! How does the author explain the building being in freefall for 80 to. 100 feet , which requires an 80 foot high section of the entire structure to be somehow removed BEFORE the top section begins to descend ?! Best source: youtube “experts speak out / the final cut !”
Vlado: Answer this. Why didn’t the fires ignite the alleged explosives on WTC 7?. Also, why would they want to blow up WTC 7 when they didn’t fly a plane into it? What use was that? Also, they were going to blow up WTC 7, why did they wait so long? Also, why would they blow up WTC 7 in order to create a false flag effect, when WTC 1 & 2 were sufficient? We both know you cannot answer these questions. We both know you will find some convoluted way to dodge them. Have a nice day.
I and many others with physics or engineering degrees know very well that those buildings could not have come down in the manner that they did without the assistance of explosives, which were quite obvious to any who have actually looked and listened to videos of the collapses. The so-called debunkers have repeatedly ignored or denied evidence, used the wrong figures, and did not follow through on their calculations.
I believe that ‘Dave’ has a degree in child care or music or something related but has no understanding of Newtonian physics and has no common sense. This is perfect fodder for a dumbed down society which is marching forward into the abyss of ignorance, complacency and paralyzed fear.
2500 + ARCHITECTS AND ENGINEERS. http //www.ae911truth.org/
http://www.opednews.com/articles/genera_alan_mil_080112_twenty_five_u_s__mil.htm
http://patriotsquestion911.com/Counterterrorism_Veterans.pdf
Every person on here didn’t even consider that the terrorists did both the bombs and the planes so that we would blame our own government? Jesus, what does it take for people to think critically?
Conspiracy theories are nothing more than suggestions that question and point out gaps in the official narrative of events. In this case, it is the narrative of a government who are well known for manufacturing reasons to persuade the American public to go to war. The arguments presented here demonstrate a strawman technique mixed with logical fallacy. True skeptics question everything and in this case the author has chosen discrediting and misdirection, along with an article that fails to address any of the real points of the 911 argument to make his case to other fake skeptics.
The inconsistencies in the official narrative are too numerous to count. Articles like this rarely address them and this one in particularly in no different.
I agree with you wholeheartedly–steel girders cannot be cut into an airplane shaped cutout by an aluminum “balloon” i.e airplane. The composite nosecone could not possibly make it through to the other side as we were “shown.’ Case closed.
How do you know that? Did you perform an experiment?
Anyone can see that all three buildings were destroyed by controlled demolitions. Its obvious to the naked eye. To belive otherwise you have to be blind or perhaps american. I travel a lot and whenever i meet americans i discuss 9/11 and it seems most of them have a kind of blind spot here.
I Think it might be too hard to take in that your goverment kills its own people in order to invade other countries. But to the rest of the world this comes as no surprise.
It is a terrible thing to come to a conclusion that some in the Bush admin would resort to murder to advance their visions of Pax Americana. One has to keep in mind that these are folks that designed and executed an official state policy of torture which in its execution has made a mockery of the rule of law, both international and domestic. Some of the very same people flouted Congressional mandates and sold weapons to Iran in the 80’s to fund death squads and monsters in Central America fighting a political war in Nicaragua. Innocent blood wasn’t part of the calculus used in determining those actions either. Your comment is a disturbing but true commentary on how many in the world view my country.
Answer these questions:
1) Why blow up three buildings, when two would do, to get the “false flag” job done?
2) If “inside jobbers” wanted to hide their tracks, why would they blow up a building that wasn’t hit by a plane (WTC 7)? Wouldn’t that look “fishy”?
3) And, why would they delay blowing up WTC 7? Wouldn’t that cast suspicion obmn the “terrorists-did-it” narrative?
Ulf: I have $100 waiting for you if if cleanly and these questions. I suspect my money is very safe. Also, I strongly suspect you’ll have the guts and intellectual courage to admit that you can’t answer these questions. Prove me wrong.
The above reply was posted with writing errors. I’m unable to correct them. I’m reposting with corrections…
Ulf: Answer these questions:
1) Why blow up three buildings, when two would do, to get the “false flag” job done?
2) If “inside jobbers” wanted to hide their tracks, why would they blow up a building that wasn’t hit by a plane (WTC 7)? Wouldn’t that look “fishy”? Wouldn’t that attract attention?
3) And, why would the false flaggers delay blowing up WTC 7? Wouldn’t that cast suspicion on the “terrorists-did-it” narrative?
Ulf: I have $100 waiting for you if you cleanly and cogently answer these questions. Seriously. I suspect my money is very safe. Also, I strongly suspect you won’t have the guts and intellectual courage to admit that you can’t answer these questions. Prove me wrong.
Same questions are directed to you, Stephen Demetriou. 1) Why blow up three buildings when two would achieve the same false flag effect? 2) Why blow up a building (WTC 7) that wasn’t hit by a plane? That would attract attention to the false flag conspiracy.
Here’s another question: Why even blow up the buildings? Isn’t crashing planes into them enough to create a false flag effect?
Can you answer these questions clearly and logically?
Why blow up WTC 7?? Well, take a look into what was in WTC 7….
It appears no one answered my question. Why blow up buildings when flying a plane into them is enough to create a false flag effect? Stephen Demetriou? Anyone? (Kurt’s answer wasn’t satisfactory. Simply saying “Take a look at what was in the building” didn’t answer the question.)
The building contained offices for the Department of Defense, the CIA, the Secret Service, the New York City Office of
Emergency Management, the Securities and Exchange Commission. I’ve read files related to the Enron litigation were stored there. One theory is the building may have contained the office that held the details for planning the attacks and destruction. It would be convenient to destroy the evidence of the attack in the process of conducting the attack. Difficult to prove but plausible.
The Project for a New American Century is where the term “a new Pearl Harbor” comes from in a report called Rebuilding America’s Defenses. In order to implement the agenda set out in that Sept 2000 report a catalyze has event, a new Pearl Harbor, would be necessary to galvanize support. The Wikipedia account of the report offers a good overview of the authors agenda:
“One of the PNAC’s most influential publications was a 90-page report titled Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategies, Forces, and Resources For a New Century. Citing the PNAC’s 1997 Statement of Principles, Rebuilding America’s Defenses asserted that the United States should “seek to preserve and extend its position of global leadership” by “maintaining the preeminence of U.S. military forces.”[45] The report’s primary author was Thomas Donnelly, and Donald Kagan and Gary Schmitt are credited as project chairmen. It also lists the names of 27 other participants that contributed papers or attended meetings related to the production of the report, six of whom subsequently assumed key defense and foreign policy positions in the Bush administration.[46][47] It suggested that the preceding decade had been a time of peace and stability, which had provided “the geopolitical framework for widespread economic growth” and “the spread of American principles of liberty and democracy.” The report warned that “no moment in international politics can be frozen in time; even a global Pax Americana will not preserve itself.
According to the report, current levels of defense spending were insufficient, forcing policymakers “to try ineffectually to “manage” increasingly large risks.” The result, it suggested, was a form “paying for today’s needs by shortchanging tomorrow’s; withdrawing from constabulary missions to retain strength for large-scale wars; “choosing” between presence in Europe or presence in Asia; and so on.” All of these, the report asserted, were “bad choices” and “false economies,” which did little to promote long-term American interests. “The true cost of not meeting our defense requirements,” the report argued, “will be a lessened capacity for American global leadership and, ultimately, the loss of a global security order that is uniquely friendly to American principles and prosperity.”[45]
Rebuilding America’s Defenses recommended establishing four core missions for US military forces: the defense of the “American homeland,” the fighting and winning of “multiple, simultaneous major theatre wars,” the performance of “‘constabular’ duties associated with shaping the security environment” in key regions, and the transformation of US forces “to exploit the ‘revolution in military affairs.'” Its specific recommendations included the maintenance of US nuclear superiority, an increase of the active personnel strength of the military from 1.4 to 1.6 million people, the redeployment of US forces to Southeast Europe and Asia, and the “selective” modernization of US forces. The report advocated the cancellation of “roadblock” programs such as the Joint Strike Fighter (which it argued would absorb “exorbitant” amounts of Pentagon funding while providing limited gains), but favored the development of “global missile defenses,” and the control of “space and cyberspace,” including the creation of a new military service with the mission of “space control.” To help achieve these aims, Rebuilding America’s Defenses advocated a gradual increase in military and defense spending “to a minimum level of 3.5 to 3.8 percent of gross domestic product, adding $15 billion to $20 billion to total defense spending annually.[45]”
The shock and awe of the attacks in NYC, on the Pentagon, and the destruction of Flight 91 over Pennsylvania provided just such a catalyst the Bush Administration needed to push on with the PNAC agenda.
Very very true…
Haha! I love how the author is gradually talking himself into ‘trutherism’! Good on you though, there are just too many damn red flags… I think it’s worth noting the CIA’s close ties to Osama and and many of his affiliates throughout the late 80’s and 90’s. Osama was believed by many in Saudi Arabia to have been dead since the late 90’s. If this is true, that would make him the ultimate scapegoat 9/11. Bush’s complete lack of desire to catch Osama within a year of the invasions shows that once they had what they wanted (boots on the ground in the middle east) they payed little mind to the Osama facade they had created.
*Thank you for this article and the dialogue it spurred!
You’re not the author and I. A piece of shit
All of those questions relate to motive and the technical evidence that the destruction of these buildings cannot be explained by aircraft strikes, fire, and gravity is the more important question to address before establishing motives. The NIDT NCSTAR1 report says the fires could not have lasted in any given spot at temperatures sufficient to weaken massive core columns or the perimeter assemblies having burned for only about 20 minutes. NIST researchers determined this time period based on both the visual evidence and the modeling that was used to generate the simulations.
Dave, the author of this site, is offering skewed information based on an appeal to authorities of his own choosing while ignoring both the official estimates, data, eyewitness testimony of people both inside and outside the buildings.
ulf WHAT A GREAT AND TRUE COMMENT!!!
Instead of computer modeling, why not a scale model to replicate the collapse? Should be doable based on the claims of the official narrative.
RationalWiki has a good page on 9/11 conspiracy theories
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/9-11
Not arguing for or against conspiracy theories, just curious. If “when WTC-2 (the South Tower) collapsed, it took the water mains with it, and thus there were no sprinklers running in WTC-1 and WTC-7 to prevent the fires from spreading,” is the case, then what prevented the fire prevention systems from preventing the collapse of the south tower?
Its a good question.
For a quick general overview, an engineering summary from back in 2001 can be found here … http://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/jom/0112/eagar/eagar-0112.html
To specifically address the question … no designer of the WTC anticipated, nor should have anticipated, a 90,000 L Molotov cocktail on one of the building floors. Skyscrapers are designed to support themselves for three hours in a fire even if the sprinkler system fails to operate. This time should be long enough to evacuate the occupants. The WTC towers lasted for one to two hours—less than the design life, but only because the fire fuel load was so large. No normal office fires would fill 4,000 square meters of floor space in the seconds in which the WTC fire developed. Usually, the fire would take up to an hour to spread so uniformly across the width and breadth of the building. This was a very large and rapidly progressing fire.
A key to the water question is this. We know that the sprinkler systems were activated because survivors reported water in the stairwells. If the sprinklers were working, how could there be a “raging inferno” in the WTC towers?
Both the NIST calculations and interviews with survivors and firefighters indicated that the aircraft impacts severed the water pipes that carried the water to the sprinkler systems. The sprinklers were not operating on the principal fire floors.
Even if the automatic sprinklers had been operational, the sprinkler systems—which were installed in accordance with the prevailing fire safety code—were designed to suppress a fire that covered as much as 1,500 square feet on a given floor. This amount of coverage is capable of controlling almost all fires that are likely to occur in an office building. On Sept. 11, 2001, the jet-fuel-ignited fires quickly spread over most of the 40,000 square feet on several floors in each tower. This created infernos that could not have been suppressed even by an undamaged sprinkler system, much less one that had been appreciably degraded.
WTC 7 collapsed straight down in 7 seconds at almost the speed of gravity for an object with no resistance. Video shows no signifigant fire throughout the building to cause such a symmetrical collapse. Even if fire could have been the culprit it would have most definitely not have been a symmetrical collapse. Your explanation also ignores the fact there have been much worse fires that burned extremely hot for much longer and almost none suffered even a partial collapse and the partial collapse that did occur were not symmetrical. It also ignores that in the towers there was at least 50 floors that fires would have little if any effect on. I built and repaired railroad freight cars. I know steel. I’ve seen the size an thickness of those beams. Without explosives there would have been no less than 30 stories of steel standing and most likely more. Aside from that there’s no wreckage at the Pentagon or Shanksville. In Shanksville they expect us to believe a 757 completely buried itself in the ground with no visible obvious wreckage. You’re in denial or getting paid to cover for the government. Whose responsible shouldn’t even play into it. There’s just to many conflicting details to accept the commission report. If you want to talk science of it there’s 2500+ architects and engineers who say the collapse of all three buildings couldn’t have happened as described by NIST. These men are licensed professionals whose job is to make sure building are safe and their claim is valid that since NIST is claiming the collapses were from fire it needs further investigation from a public safety perspective but NIST refuses to share the modeling they used to draw that conclusion.
Hi Ralph,
CLAIM: // WTC 7 collapsed straight down in 7 seconds at almost the speed of gravity for an object with no resistance. … Video shows no signifigant fire throughout the building to cause such a symmetrical collapse.//
In one word … Nope, those are myths. https://www.metabunk.org/debunked-ae911truths-wtc7-explosive-demolition-hypothesis.t1727/
CLAIM: // there’s 2500+ architects and engineers who say the collapse of all three buildings couldn’t have happened as described by NIST //
Scientific American, Popular Mechanics, the American Institute of Architects, the Royal Institute of British Architects, and quite literally millions of other architects and engineers beg to differ and have not been persuaded, they are generally convinced of the credibility of the NIST report. I suspect it would be possible to find 2500+ architects and engineers named “steve” who say that the collapse of all three buildings happened as described by NIST.
Counting all the engineers who haven’t spoken up in your favor is quite dishonest. Of course, you need to do this, because if you were to stick to those that have spoken up, the numbers would not be in your favor.
You also state that the free fall speed of WTC7 is a myth, which is even more mind boggling, because not only did NIST admit to it, it is also in the final report.
Dave, let’s see if you have the cohones to admit this, or whether you’ll prove once more that you don’t really know what you’re talking about.
As I’ve said many times before, seemingly the only thing you do know, is that “conspiracy theorists” are never right, and you’ll apply whatever mental gymnastics it takes to keep that belief alive.
What would it take for you to follow science and facts instead of resorting to lies and logical fallacies?
Ken,
// What would it take for you to follow science and facts instead of resorting to lies and logical fallacies? //
How about facts that are actually factual, that would be a good place to start.
For example your claim that NIST admitted WTC 7 collapsed in free fall speed is not actually something I believe to be true at all. You can of course easily present a rebuttal to that. Simply present a link to exactly where NIST did confirm exactly that, and I’ll change my mind.
Read the final report, or go on YouTube and search for “NIST admits free fall”.
https://youtu.be/Rkp-4sm5Ypc
Do your homework before you attack people based on your own ignorance.
Mr Chandler who created that clip is not exactly an unbiased source. If you check out NIST, you discover that NIST specifically states …
Dave, I’ve been reading some of your other posts on other subjects, and enjoy them. I really don’t know why you are being so obtuse on this particular subject. Your arguments here are not what they are in other subjects you chose to post on. You really should give up commenting on this. You are out of your element and are making comments that have nothing to do with science, or even skepticism.
David Chandler is biased? He can only be biased in as much as he differs from your poorly founded opinions. He found an error in the draft report you quoted, showed NIST the error in a public forum he was accepted by NIST to participate in, and was rewarded with a (partial) correction in the Final Report. If he is biased in any way it is in defense of understanding the physics of the collapse as seen in the observable evidence.
Chapter 12, pg 602 of the pdf (http://ws680.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=861611) contains the statements:
“The slope of the straight line, which represents a constant acceleration, was found to be 32.2 ft/s2 (with a coefficient of regression R2 = 0.991), equivalent to the acceleration of gravity g. “
Further described a little later, “In Stage 2, the north face descended at gravitational acceleration, as exterior column buckling progressed and the columns provided negligible support to the upper portion of the north face. This free fall drop continued for approximately 8 stories (105 ft), the distance traveled between times t = 1.75 s and t = 4.0 s.”
Chandler in the following three videos describes NIST’s initial error, and then how NIST fails to draw the correct conclusion from what they had initially missed to begin with, instead clouding the issue by trying to show free fall doesn’t matter by choosing a false start time to the collapse sequence that better fits their modeling results.
If you want to challenge the physics described by Chandler you have to reconcile the result of NIST’s modeling and how their model diverges from observation, which is impossible because the model inputs and assumptions are kept secret, with the impossibility of free fall occurring through a serial progression of column failures. NIST’s model and free fall are incompatible. Controlled demolition and free fall are compatible in just about every instance controlled demolition is used to bring down a building.
https://youtu.be/Rkp-4sm5Ypc
Ken, I just think that Dave is an idiot, the world is full of them so it should not surprise anyone. Would you like some Kool-Aid, Dave? Exceptional Red, White and Blue flavoured crystals made by NIST, just for you and your friends Dave.
Ralph Lower. You wrote “I know steel” as a justification for your reasonings. Yet, many others know steel better than you, and don’t buy your conclusions. Are you able to acknowledge that?
“no designer of the WTC anticipated, nor should have anticipated, a 90,000 L Molotov cocktail on one of the building floors”
Then why did one of the people responsible for its construction state in a 2001 documentary, pre 911, that that was exactly what they figured would be the biggest issue? Why did he say that the buildings were constructed to withstand multiple impacts?
Quote:
Skilling explained that they performed an analysis that concluded that the WTC towers would survive the impact and jet fuel fires from a Boeing 707:
“Our analysis indicated the biggest problem would be the fact that all the fuel (from the airplane) would dump into the building. There would be a horrendous fire. A lot of people would be killed… The building structure would still be there.”
http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis.cgi/web/vortex/display?slug=1687698&date=19930227
Dave’s ad hoc e plantation of 4000 sq ft being filled with a large fire within seconds is nonsense. Section 1-5 of the NIST NCSTAR1 report goes into great detail on the fire simulations they performed, while other chapters model the damage estimates from the aircraft based on speed, mass, and estimates of the distribution of the fuel. From that they try to model the behavior of the fires. Dave doesn’t appear to have much experience with any of that. If he did I believe he would accept, maybe, that the initial fireball within the building was quickly tamped down being limited by the available oxygen being consumed rapidly. The fires can be seen in video and still photos to greatly diminish immediately after the initial fuel explosions, only to pick up again as oxygen made its way back into the buildings. This behavior was different for each building because of the differences in the strike angle and the number of windows seen to be broken out.
Reading through Dave’s reply to you it is obvious he doesn’t know what the NIST report says about their estimates and simulations of fire behavior. The report is online and can be read for yourself.
Let me add that Dr. Legg’s description of some of the issues regarding these building failures, which I posted below is an expert analysis of problems with the official conspiracy theory Dave is, in a rather hamfisted way, is advocating for.
Hi Tony,
It is perhaps worth noting a few additional points …
1) Mr Demetriou is clearly very passionate about this, but then if you google his name you discover that he has been banging on about this since 2008. That is a lot of time invested in a conspiracy theory, so he will not really be open to any alternatives
2) Yep, I speculated on the fly, but note that the NIST report does not actually refute the generic observation I made.
3) I confess that I’m a tad bemused by his use of the NIST report. He generally takes the stance that it is all wrong and part of the cover-up, but will still lean upon it for support when it is useful to do so.
4) much of what he notes is correct regarding initial fireballs and oxygen, etc… but that does not in any way refute the argument that dumping a fully fuelled aircraft on to one floor would have completely overwhelmed the sprinkler system, which if operational, could not have coped with that.
5) I also note with further amusement that his stance is that the official highly research conclusions are a “conspiracy” and all wrong, and a conspiracy on a grand scale of a controlled demolition is supposedly the “truth”.
For interest, here is a link to the NIST reports. https://www.nist.gov/engineering-laboratory/final-reports-nist-world-trade-center-disaster-investigation
You speculate on the fly in nearly everything you have said here. Your long response below doubling down on your opinion of the European Physical Society magazine is proof of that, and the “proofs” you speculate on regarding vaporized glass and silicates, molybdenum, the molten metal “flowing like lava,” “like a foundry” as fire responders described seeing is all hand waving and speculation that denies observed phenomena. I must say you have the official justifications for the cover up down pretty good. I am hearten though to see the push back you are being given in the comments. How about a scale model, eh? Should be able to model a scaled mock up. I suspect that isn’t on anyone’s agenda because of the failure encountered when mockups of the floor assembly fires didn’t produce the deflections necessary to satisfy the actual observations.
In short, Dave, you are a fraud perpetrating the myth of the official conspiracy theory that anyone with a little bit of intellectual honesty and objectivity can see is also a fraud. The physics you resort to to prove your myth is the stuff of science fiction. No amount of hand waving can make the fiction fit what is clear with clear eyed observation.
The distribution of the fuel into the buildings was modeled by NIST and there is every reason to believe the modeling was reasonably good. The people doing the actual work are accomplished people. The flaws come when the conclusions drawn from the fire behavior modeling don’t agree with actual observations, such as when the modeling show the areas around the core columns cooler, well within their tolerances, at the time of their supposed failure. NIST actually says “The simulations and the visible evidence suggested that the duration of temperatures in the neighborhood of 1000 degrees C at any given location on any given floor was about 15 min. to 20 minutes.” Sec 1-5F Chap 6.6.2 pg 109. Steel doesn’t lose a great deal of its structural strength after 15 or 20 minutes. The Eagar paper you cite was written weeks after the event and has none of the insights that came from the NIST study.
The fact that vaporized glass, lead, iron, and molybdenum were present in the dust samples examined by USGS, RJ Lee, and that vaporized steel was found by WPI and NIST structural engineers doesn’t prove controlled demolition but it is conclusive evidence of extremely high temperatures, temperatures well beyond the ability of organic fuels or kinetic energy from a gravity induced fall from 1100 ft to produce. To suggest otherwise for such a well understood phenomena as to what it takes to vaporize glass, lead, steel, or molybdenum is grand hand waving of a monumental scale. The fact that controlled demolition does repeatedly and consistently produce these types of temperatures is significant and relevant as controlled demolition better fits with the observed phenomena of sudden onset of destruction, actual and near free fall acceleration of destruction, total destruction right down to the ground.
For Christ’s sake why doesn’t somebody argue the simplicity of what took place on September 11, 2001. I agree with Stephen and as for what Dave says, meh.
There are simple logical proofs that force one to deduce that it was controlled demolition.
All of what I’m going to state is easily found in the record so look it up for yourselves.
The Twin Towers were built with a redundancy factor of 3-4 times. The perimeter walls took 40% of the load, principally the floor weight. Therefore *absent* the melting of the perimeter walls they could have held up the building on their own–at least for some time, minutes even hours. Did anyone see the perimeter walls melting? Furthermore after the forced release of the firefighter’s tapes we hear a firefighter reach the 78th floor of one of the towers and radio back that there were just a few spotty fires that could “easily be knocked down with a couple of lines (hoses).” Moments later the building collapsed catastrophiclly. It is beyond idiotic to say they collapsed due to fire.
Finally, even if they could have collapsed just due to fire it would have been a slow agonizing collapse not the explosive disintegration we saw.
This argument is so damn tiresome.
I mean yeah you can argue with me until youre blue in the face but not once did I read you trying to debunk building 7. Debris from the plane two blocks away tho amirite? Despite that there was reported to be minimal structural damage not to mention the BBC announced 7’s collapse before it even happened while still standing in the background on live national television. Not to mention the pixels around the plane in the famous pictures moments before it hit. What a shit photoshop job. Just shows how ignorant ppl are. It looks like a grade schooler copy pasted a Clipart plane in there.
The cause of the collapse of WTC 7 is well documented and fully understood (google is your friend if interested).
Regarding the suggestion that there were no aircraft and that the picture was faked, you need to consider that there was a city full of people who saw it happen along with the rest of the nation watching on live TV. After the first impact, all human eyes and media outlets turned their eyes that way and saw the second plane hit.
Regarding the claim that the BBC announced 7’s collapse early. The BBC has stated that many news sources were reporting the imminent collapse of 7 WTC on the day of the attacks. Jane Standley, the reporter who announced the collapse prematurely, called it a “very small and very honest mistake” caused by her thinking on her feet after being confronted with a report she had no way of checking.
The fire had been raging for quite some time and all those on the ground monitoring expected it to collapse, hence the rumour that it had circulated and was reported as fact.
I do have one prediction, none of the above fact-based and verifiable explanations will change your mind.
NIST Data Disproves Collapse Theories Based on Fire
Frank Legge (Ph D) Logical Systems Consulting Perth, Western Australia. [email protected]
Abstract
An argument is presented that all theories of progressive collapse of the Twin Towers fail because the initiating event could not have occurred. The NIST report appears to be unsatisfactory in that it fails to deal with certain observations.
The NIST report of the tragic events of 9/11 includes a study of the factors which led to the Twin Towers being ‘poised for collapse’. The report did not go on to address the mechanism of the actual collapse of the towers. Readers are left with the assumption that, from that moment, collapse was inevitable. 1 The report has been rightly criticized on the grounds that NIST, in omitting reference to the collapse mechanism, failed to perform the fundamental task it had been given. 2
There has been much speculation about the mechanism of collapse and various hypotheses have emerged. There is the ‘pancake’ theory which has been augmented by addition of the ‘pile driver’ concept. In this theory collapse is initiated by the sudden disintegration of one storey. This allows the top of the building to fall through the gap and the resulting impact causes the storey below to collapse. The mass of this collapsed storey adds to the mass of the falling block. This then falls on the storey below, which in turn is dislodged. A chain reaction thus develops in which all lower storeys collapse and the entire building is destroyed.
There is also the ‘global collapse’ theory. 3 This appears to be no more than a name as it lacks an explanation. It requires that heat-damaged connections and columns fail, but how this could progress from one floor to the next where there has been no fire appears to be causing a problem. NIST let a contract in 2003 to a firm of consultants seeking their explanation for the global collapse of building 7. 4 No response has yet been published. The pile driver theory at least provides a superficially plausible explanation for progress by suggesting that the mass of the falling block will be sufficient to destroy the supports in the unheated region below.
The pile driver theory has been elaborated to include calculations involving momentum and kinetic energy. Greening has provided a paper intended to show that the collapse, once initiated, would be sustained. 5 Ross has provided calculations in refutation of this claim. His paper shows that the impact from the falling block would be absorbed by the structures above and below the impact area and would not be sufficient to result in a progressive collapse. 6 A comprehensive paper showing the falsity of the official explanation has been given by Ryan. 7
There have been many attempts, both official and unofficial, to explain the collapses, several of which are contradictory. Wikepedia provides a convenient list. 8 The essential point to note is that all authors supporting the official view accept that the damage due to plane impact was not sufficient by itself to cause collapse and that the ultimate cause was the high temperature experienced by the steel structure due to fire, facilitated by the loss of fireproofing caused by plane impact.
This brief paper takes a different approach from those which attack the assertion that the collapse could ‘progress’ and simply refutes all such theories on the grounds that at the moment of collapse, at least for WTC 1, the building was in fact not ‘poised for collapse’ and could not have produced the initiating event.
The conclusion of the NIST report is that fire and aircraft damage caused the initiating event that brought down the towers. Within the body of their report however is the statement that no steel was found which had been heated above 600oC. 9 This arouses suspicion as such temperatures should not be sufficient to bring about collapse. 9
The NIST report provides diagrams depicting plane damage and data derived from their fire and temperature simulations. The report asserts that the simulations correspond to a satisfactory degree with the observed fires as recorded in videos and photographs. From these it appears that the initial collapse in WTC 1, if it had occurred, would have been at storey 95 or 96. That is the region where the building was most damaged by plane impact. There is little damage shown for storey 97. 10 There is at least one video showing collapse starting at storey 96. 11
Study of the NIST diagrams shows that at the time of collapse the perimeter columns were not hot enough to place the building at risk. Most significantly the diagrams also show that the core areas of all storeys listed, from 92 to 99, spanning the plane damaged region, had cooled down substantially prior to collapse. The core area was hottest at the 30 and 45 minute readings but collapse did not occur until 102 minutes had elapsed, by which time the environment of the core had dropped to be mainly in the range 100 to 600 oC. 12 Roughly half the area is shown in shades of blue, indicating temperatures no higher than 150 oC. Videos show that the core started to collapse before the perimeter. 13
Bearing in mind the substantial heat sink properties of the columns there are three possibilities to consider: the temperature of the steel columns of the core at the moment of collapse might have been (a) rising toward the environment temperature, (b) steady or (c) falling. In case (a) or (b) collapse would clearly have been impossible as half the columns would be below 150oC and nearly all the rest between 150 and 600oC.
Case (c), with column temperature falling, remains to be examined. Regardless of the final steel temperature, the core could not now collapse as it had already survived a higher temperature without collapsing and must have gained strength as it cooled.
The NIST report states that sagging floors pulled the central portion of one wall inward, causing it to lose strength. Sagging of the core was said to transfer load to the weakened wall which then failed. This is not reasonable however because there were three remaining walls, including four undamaged corners, which provided a rigid structure holding the core vertical by means of the hat truss. Collapse, if it were to occur, must therefore have been vertical, involving all core columns and the perimeter columns simultaneously. We have already seen that the core could not have failed due to heat. Initiation of collapse was therefore impossible. In the absence of initiation there could be no progressive collapse. An alternative mechanism for the collapse is therefore required: the use of explosives in a controlled demolition fits all observations.14
It appears reasonable to believe that the NIST report stops short of dealing with the mechanism of collapse precisely because their early modeling showed collapse due to fire and plane damage to be impossible. As the conclusion of their report is not in accord with their own data it appears that the report was written under duress. Investigation of this possibility is urgently required.
End Notes
1. NIST NCSTAR 1-3. Executive Summary of Mechanical and Metalurgical Analysis of Structural Steel.
http://wtc.nist.gov/pubs/NCSTAR1ExecutiveSummary.pdf
2. NIST fails to address its basic task.
http://911review.com/coverup/nist.html
http://www.911review.com/coverup/wtcinquiry.html
3. Progressive Collapse – Global Collapse
http://911review.com/coverup/fantasy/progressive.html
4. NIST lets a contract for the study of global collapse of WTC 7.
http://wtc.nist.gov/solicitations/wtc_awardQ0186.htm
5. Greening, F. R., “Energy Transfer in the WTC Collapse.”
http://www.911myths.com/WTCREPORT.pdf
6. Ross, G., “Momentum Transfer Analysis of the Collapse of the Upper Storeys of WTC 1”, Journal of 9/11 Studies, (June, 2006).
http://journalof911studies.com/
7. Ryan, K., “What is 9/11 Truth? – The First Steps”. Journal of 9/11 Studies, (August, 2006). Professional knowledge of the steel used in the towers gives this paper added significance.
http://journalof911studies.com/
8. Wikipedia provides a convenient summary of numerous authors who have attempted to describe, or have avoided describing, the mechanism of collapse.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_the_World_Trade_Center
9. NIST NCSTAR 1-3. See page xli for upper temperature limit. Note that this test shows only that no steel was found which had exceeded 600 oC. The steel could have reached any temperature below this. They also state that little steel was found which had exceeded 250 oC.
See page 111 for Temperature / Yield graph. This shows the steel at 600 oC would have been at about half of its cold strength. As the lowest reported safety factor is 2.2 this should have been strong enough, especially as at any time the columns would have been at a range of temperatures depending on the progress of the fires, some considerably colder. Also the hat truss, in conjunction with the walls, would have prevented any leaning towards the weakest portion: all columns would therefore have had to give way simultaneously, regardless of temperature.
http://wtc.nist.gov/NISTNCSTAR1-3.pdf
10. NIST NCSTAR 1-5. See pages 148 to 153 for structural damage.
http://wtc.nist.gov/NISTNCSTAR1-5.pdf
11. Careful study of this video shows collapse starting at storey 96 where a line of dust is appearing. The rate of collapse of this storey however does not appear to be as fast as the downward motion of the roof, showing that at least one other storey must have started collapsing close to the same time. A clue to where this might be located is given by the appearance of another line of dust a few storeys higher. This would be an improbable coincidence, if the official theory is accepted, as it would require two initiations. This finding is much more readily explained as being due to explosives.
http://www.911research.com/wtc/evidence/videos/docs/north_tower_collapse.mpeg
12. NIST NCSTAR 1-5. See pages 112 to 127 temperature charts.
The charts refer to “upper layer temperatures” (see sample below). This is in recognition of the fact that convection moves hotter gases upward. The model assumed that there was some obstruction preventing hot gases from escaping too easily from each storey and that a hot layer would be trapped there. Presumably this was to allow time for the hot gas to transfer some of its heat to the columns.
13. It should have been impossible for the core and the perimeter to collapse separately due to the presence of the very strong hat truss connecting them. This video shows that the antenna, mounted over the core, started to move 0.4 seconds before the edge of the roof. In this time the core would have dropped about 2.5 feet. This suggests explosives were planted in the hat truss and were fired at the initiation of the collapse sequence. Severing of the core must have occurred at the same time or shortly before.
http://www.911research.com/wtc/evidence/videos/docs/n_tower_1st24.mpg
14. Legge, F., “9/11 – Evidence for Controlled Demolition: a Short List of Observations”, Journal of 9/11 Studies, (June, 2006).
http://journalof911studies.com/


A paper published in a journal named “Journal of 9/11 Studies” … seriously? Anybody familiar with the landscape will know that this is a crank-reviewed, online, open source pseudojournal that gives 9/11 Truthers a place to “just ask questions”.
No, actually, anybody familiar with argumentation will take your ad hominem insult of the authors published at that site as evidence you don’t have an argument and must rely on demonizing the source rather than disproving the argument. That is primarily what you did above in your post, seeking to discredit EuroPhysics News rather than approaching the content of the article EuroPhysics News found worthy of publication. It is what nearly every “debunking” site relies on; discredit the ones making the argument, not the argument itself with irrefutable evidence the argument doesn’t stand up. You can’t make those types of arguments stick when what you rely on is innuendo that has no empirical support behind it. This site is called, Skeptical Science but, at least in your post, presents no science whatsoever. You posted hypotheticals, “validated” by your “resort to authority,” another logical fallacy in argumentation which doesn’t support your contention.
The NIST study treats the supposed lack of fireproofing by testing mockup floor assemblies to approximate how much deflection could be expected under their four test conditions. Under none of those conditions does 56 minutes of fire, intense or otherwise, produce the deflection necessary to support the notion deflection of floor assemblies pulled in the perimeter column assemblies setting off local failure of the remaining columns supporting the floors above the damage site. In fact, NIST’s own estimations puts none of the perimeter columns being subjected to temperatures much beyond, as Frank Gayle, a lead NIST investigator suggests, “most perimeter panels (157 of 160) saw no temperature above 250C,” and which an executive with Underwriter’s Lab familiar with the ASTM E119 certification of the steel asked Gayle about. (The time temperature curves for this standard require the samples to be exposed to temperatures around 2000F for several hours.) Not only does NIST fail to provide evidence this local failure theory is valid, it does absolutely nothing to prove this local failure set off global failure of the entire, presumably intact structure below. And they admit as much…
Yeah, I’m asking questions… based on science. You are not, and should.
There are a couple of points I wish to make.
First, the issue of criticising the credibility of the authors is wholly appropriate. I did not in any way criticise EuroPhysics News as you claim, but rather explored the credibility of the authors of that one article that the editors of EuroPhysics News specifically (and correctly) label as speculation. The issue of their credibility is promoted by the article itself and attempts to utilise it as an appeal to authority.
Secondly and finally, just a friendly bit of guidance. I would really advise on not using the term “I’m asking questions” or similar. This is so overused these days that it has become a bit of a cliche. It also a tactic that absolves you from actually formulating an actual hypothesis. For example, are you seriously promoting the idea that three buildings were rigged with explosives without anybody noticing, by who exactly, and/or that flying a fully laden aircraft into the towers played no part?
No please don’t answer any of that, I think we are done. You have stated your position and I’ve replied. Anybody curious about such questions can google and search for impartial independent answers (or not).
Of course I’ll respond to your deflection. Europhysics News is not peer reviewed and nobody claims it is. It is a widely respected topical magazine that is read by an informed audience. Saying it is not peer reviewed is of course an attempt to diminish it’s standing and credibility.
The editors deemed the subject matter worthy of publication and while saying the article contaned speculation the editors did not disqualify the article on the basis of what they deemed speculative. You, in an uninformed and speculative manner, didn’t “explore” the authors of the article, you denigrated Steven Jones, dishonestly misrepresenting his cold fusion work and his religion. His muon-catalysed cold fusion research is not what Pons and Fleischmann focused on and bears no resemblance to their discredited work. What else can I say about attacking ones religion to discredit their professional work. That is bigotry writ large.
I think we are done. You don’t have a grasp on the necessary facts or skills to approach this honestly and with objectivity. Attacking the credibility of the authors rather than the merits of the argument is, as I said, a false argument. You parrot common, unsupported nonsense from sources you consider authoritative unable to actually address point by point the arguments presented by the authors, accepted as worthy of publication by EuroPhysics News. And then in response to me you expect me to accept your call to speculate about things that have no bearing on the questions at hand: not who did what, how, and why, but why doesn’t the official investigation include explanations for molten metal. Free fall acceleration, low temp fires and the redundancy built in to the structures. You aren’t equipped to discuss any of this, that is obvious.
OK, let’s take this step by step then.
// Europhysics News is not peer reviewed //
I agree, that is my point (at least we can agree on something).
// and nobody claims it is.//
I quite honestly am not finding that to be the case …
These guys do … “www.newsbbc.net/2016/09/its-official-european-scientific.html”
and these guys refer to it as a science journal … http://nsnbc.me/2016/09/12/europhysics-news-published-report-questioning-official-911-building-collapse-narratives/
and here … http://thefreethoughtproject.com/physics-study-911-controlled-demolition/
and here … http://motls.blogspot.co.uk/2016/09/europhys-news-911-saw-controlled.html
and so on.
In summary, while you do not, many others implicitly do with the use of the term “Science Journal”.
// Saying it is not peer reviewed is of course an attempt to diminish it’s standing and credibility. //
This will not exactly come as a shock to you, but I don’t agree. Pointing out that it is not is rather obviously a rebuttal to the many many 9/11 sites and articles that misrepresent it.
// you denigrated Steven Jones, dishonestly misrepresenting his cold fusion work and his religion.//
Once again, I do not agree.
– Was he suspended by his university for the “increasingly speculative and accusatory nature” of his various claims and then “retired”? I don’t need to denigrate him, his own university did that.
– Most humans embrace specific religious beliefs for cultural reasons and tend to hold such views with varying degrees of confidence, often without really giving it much thought. The observation that Mr Jones has taken his specific belief to the rather odd extreme of striving to “prove” specific aspects of his cultural inheritance is both wholly appropriate, fact-based and not bigotry. It simply highlights his rather eccentric nature.
– Jones himself personally claims that he invented the term “Cold Fusion”.
– I agree he started down the track of muon-catalysed fusion, but he did abandon that, leapt on Fleischmann and Pons’s ideas and and began collaborating with the chemistry department on the same electrolytic approach to cold fusion. You can read all about that in B. V. Lewenstein and W. Baur, “A Cold Fusion Chronology,” J. Radioanal. Nucl. Chem.
// I think we are done. //
I agree. I did however already make that observation within a previous comment, so it would appear that we now have a second point that we both agree upon.
// in response to me you expect me to accept your call to speculate about things //
I specifically suggested that you should not do so, I was simply musing in print regarding what your hypothesis actually is. I suspect you most probably lean towards the idea that the Bush Administration specifically planned for it to happen.
// molten metal. Free fall acceleration, low temp fires and the redundancy built in to the structures. You aren’t equipped to discuss any of this, that is obvious.//
I have learned from experience that long running comment threads tend not to be a productive, they generate rather a lot of heat and very little illumination. Would discussing any of it actually change your mind?
Let’s take the first as an example. I’m assuming that the term “Molten Steel” is essentially the following claim.
Claim: Molten steel was discovered in the basements of the collapsed WTC. Fire couldn’t raise the temperature high enough to melt steel, but explosives, particularly thermite, could.
Details covered here … http://911myths.com/html/wtc_molten_steel.html … which in essence confirms that there is no evidence for this claim. You will be familiar with that rebuttal.
You will have rationalised it away so that the commitment to the idea can remain intact. Now please do not take that as a personal attack, it is a generic human attribute, we all do this to one degree or another.
Each and every one of the claims you offer has a robust rebuttal, and proceeding through them one by one will not in any way shake your deeply felt emotional commitment to these ideas.
Each of us is personally convinced that the other is wrong, and we can either come to terms with that and move on, or continue to take verbal pot-shots at each other. Personally my preference is the former. From my viewpoint, we have each said our bit, it really is time to move on.
The European Physical Society, of which EuroPhysics News is its flagship publication, boasts as its membership 42 national physics societies. For you to diminish the significance of the journal, peer-reveiwed or not, shows that you are arguing out of ideology, not from a scientific point of view. My guess is EPNews has a very good reputation for presenting current and relevant topics in Physics, much more than your amateurish treatment, slurs, and slanders commend as your ideological motivation. What that ideology is one can only guess, but given the lack of scientific integrity in what you say, and the links you provide to substitute your argument for you, and the slander and bigotry in your attack of Jones, it is not an ideology that has a respect for civil debate around observed phenomena.
I must say I appreciate 911Myths attempts at treating the science more than your failure to do so. Your claim that there is “in essence confirms that there is no evidence for this claim…” certainly doesn’t follow from what they present. Here, again, you fail at the science. Their mission was to muddy the waters by cherry picking facts, quotations, and presenting ambiguity as proof the claim is false, when the evidence is overwhelming.
A US Geological Survey study released in 2005, and a study of dust samples by the firm RJ Lee in 2003 both confirmed the presence of iron-rich spheres in the samples they examined. The Lee study also discovered silicates, glass-like compounds, which had a “Swiss cheese appearance as a result of boiling and evaporation.” The temperature required to produce spheres of silicates is roughly 1450C. The temperature needed to vaporize, or boil, a silicate is about 2760C. The Lee study also found evidence of vaporized lead. Vaporization of lead occurs at around 1740C.
One of the more unusual finds came about through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the US Geological Service for data regarding the 2005 results the USGS had published. Not published with the original data are micrographs showing spheres of molybdenum, a metal with a melting temperature of 2623C, over one thousand degrees hotter than that necessary to melt iron. Finding spheres of molybdenum in the dust of the WTC collapses is evidence that temperatures, by some mechanism, may have reached at least 2623C.
Researchers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute also discovered evidence of extremely high temperatures completely unexplained by any of the official studies completed, or underway, to date. Prof. Jonathon Barnett found steel possessing a “Swiss cheese like appearance.” Examining structural steel from WTC 7 he wrote, “A one-inch [steel] column has been reduced to half-inch thickness. Its edges – which are curled like paper scroll – have been thinned to almost razor sharpness. Gaping holes – some larger than a silver dollar – let light shine through a formerly solid steel flange. This Swiss cheese appearance shocked all of the fire-wise professors, who expected to see distortion and bending – but not holes.” 2.
“//www.wpi.edu/News/Transformations/2002Spring/steel.html”
A live link to the article is here:
http://911research.wtc7.net/cache/wtc/evidence/metallurgy/wpi_steel.html
Abolhassan Astaneh also found the phenomena the WPI people found in his examination of WTC7 steel. This evidence has to be denied for the fire conspiracy to hold up. What also has to be denied are the couple of hundred of people who either saw, heard, felt, were directly involved in explosions in every part of the buildings prior to their complete destruction, and that evidence is also denied. More on that later.
So, 911Myths, and you, can obfuscate, deny, lie, slander and slur all you want, but what it amounts to is hand waving, not science.
Clearly Mr Demetri, you are deeply passionate about all of this and want to carry on.
OK, so be it, let’s continue then.
// EuroPhysics News //
It’s not a science journal, it is not peer-reviewed, and it really is simply just a magazine.
– Does EuroPhysics News describe themselves as a magazine? (Hint: yes they do)
– Did the editors label the article in question as one that contained some “speculation”?
– Did the editors clearly state “the content of this article is the responsibility of the authors.”?
– Have the editors ever added such a note to any other article … ever?
– What exactly do you think all of the above tells their readership?
// Molten Steel … Your claim that there is “in essence confirms that there is no evidence for this claim…” certainly doesn’t follow from what they present. //
Actually yes it does. Simply claiming that it does not is just hand-waving denial.
It is not the only rebuttal, there are many more, but since we are discussing the 911Myths rebuttal, then …
Your claim that // Their mission was to muddy the waters by cherry picking facts, quotations, and presenting ambiguity as proof the claim is false, when the evidence is overwhelming. //
OK, let’s test this …
– What is your source and evidence for your claim regarding what their mission is?
– What is your evidence that they cherry-pick facts and quotations?
– Give a specific example of them presenting ambiguity as proof the claim
Now moving on to more specifics beyond the above, but related.
// iron-rich spheres //
No this is not evidence of thermite … metabunk covers it … https://www.metabunk.org/debunked-iron-microspheres-in-9-11-wtc-dust-as-evidence-for-thermite.t2523/
// silicates, glass-like compounds //
Where exactly do you think all the glass in the towers went?
Since you state that you appreciate 911myths, then you will of course be interested in their take on this as well … http://www.911myths.com/html/traces_of_thermate_at_the_wtc.html
// molybdenum //
Finding molybdenum is no great mystery or evidence of what you think is a conspiracy. Check the International Molybdenum Association web site. Yes it is used to strengthen construction steel and, yes it has a very high melting point, but … it is also a coating for architectural stainless steel which was the principal cladding material of the two towers.
Incidentally, construction steel strengthened with Molybdenum was not used in the construction of the WTC towers. No really, do check it,
– Tishman Realty and Construction — the company that erected the WTC in the early 70s — used ASTM A36 steel, a non-molybdenum carbon steel, for the towers’ framework.
– A36 has a tensile strength of about 60,000 pounds per square inch and melts at around 2500 degrees Fahrenheit.
– Raw Molybdenum has a tensile strength of 120,000 pounds per square inch and melts at 4700 degrees Fahrenheit.
If they had used an alloy with Molybdenum such as type1 316 LM (which is commonly used in construction) then even that bumps the tensile strength to 75,000 pounds per sq inch and also bumps the melt point by 300 degrees … the towers would not have fallen.
// Swiss cheese steel //
I do agree that jet fuel will not melt steel … however, you do also need to factor in the rather obvious as well. A fall of 1,000 feet with a sudden stop is rather a lot of kinetic energy that will be converted into noise and heat, Small amounts of melted steel around the base is not exactly a surprise.
If indeed you are rolling with the thermite claim, you do also need to factor in a few other considerations …
1. Controlled demolition does not cause molten steel in the rubble. In other words, traces of molten steel, if verified (I currently reject the claim that it was) does not imply controlled demolition.
2. Thermite is not used on vertical columns in controlled demolitions. Because the way thermite works, it is not effective in cutting a vertical load bearing column.
3. Thermite = iron oxide + aluminium. You would expect to find molten iron at the base of the building. Did anyone find unusually high quantities of it at WTC?
OK, so moving on to witnesses …
// couple of hundred of people who either saw, heard, felt, were directly involved in explosions in every part of the buildings prior to their complete destruction //
Actually no, there were none at all. For example, a common claim is the supposed explosions felt and seen coming out of windows as the towers fell was actually debris being expelled as the floors pancaked on top of each other.
OK, that’s a tad simplistic, it is all actually a bit more complex. There was of course rather a lot of water in the towers (sinks, bathrooms, etc…) which, when rapidly heated, will expand violently and explosively.
… and of course the usual salutation to sign off with …
// you, can obfuscate, deny, lie, slander and slur all you want, but what it amounts to is hand waving //
[Proceeds to wave back]
In reply, I’d simply suggest that your deep emotional attachment to the idea blinds you to the truth of what really happened. You really should pause and seriously ponder the possibility that you just might be wrong.
OK, I have one further thought to toss into the mix that is perhaps a tad out of scope …
For the record, I am convinced that there really is indeed a conspiracy and a coverup that surrounds it all. Specifically …
– The Saudi money that financed what happened …
Saudi Arabia has spent somewhere between $100 and $200 billion of oil revenue promoting their rather extreme variation of wahhabism since the mid 70s … the birth of radical and quite extreme variations of Islamic belief is the harvest we reap from that, and 9/11 was just one manifestation of it.
– the cover-up by the various administrations of the Saudi link … basically because of the financial threat by the Saudi’s to withdraw billions
– The manner in which what happened was utilised by the Bush administration to wage wars under completely false pretences
etc…
but as for an actual controlled demolition orchestrated by the Bush administration? Nope, I’m quite honestly not finding any credible evidence for that.
Why do you think that might be the case?
You should definitely proceed through the claims one by one. I am very curios to hear your logical rebuttal to the free fall and thermite residue. Ad hominem attacks and appeal to authority are both logical fallacies.
The issue is, you’re not applying critical thinking. Seriously? The Free Thought Project? A site that likes to peddle conspiracy theories and nonsense in general? OF COURSE they’d call it a scientific journal.
Honestly, you have a long way to go.
“Journal of 9/11 Studies” is pseudoscience, not science. And which scientific body is ““Journal of 9/11 Studies” recognised by? None? I thought so.
Tell me, which scientific journals do you read? How are you able to recognise the difference between pseudoscience, not science?
Which architects and engineers do you pay attention to that aren’t the small number of so called “truthers” or associated with the business that is ae911truth? There’s only a TINY number of so engineers worldwide (that can’t be fully verified) who, it seems, most likely for profit (appear to) disagree with the overwhelming majority of scientists, architects and engineers worldwide regarding 9/11. So much for ae911truth being a “non profit organisation as they falsely claim > https://www.metabunk.org/threads/why-dont-architects-and-engineers-for-9-11-truth-fund-research.2832/ And even IF every one of those who you advocate were fully verifiable and legit, that is such a TINY minority out of the millions worldwide, wouldn’t you say? Now, if you disagree, then going by your logic, that’d mean the tiny handful of creationist scientists are right over the overwhelming majority of evolutionist scientists who, going on evidence, understand evolution. The thing to do is, go with the evidence, not try to make the evidence fit your beliefs (which the evidence won’t). That is something that conspiracy theorists are known for doing, as psychology has shown us. These sites investigates ae911truths claims and takes a closer look… https://sites.google.com/site/911guide/truthmovement http //ae911truth.info/wordpress/
I always like to set so called “truthers” a challenge, and in order for it to meet scientific standard, it has to fit all the following criteria ….
1) Find a single article that challenges the conclusions of the NIST reports on the collapse of the buildings and and offers an alternative hypothesis for any part of the collapse initiation or sequences.
2) It has to be in a well respected scientific journal. That doesn’t mean an isolated “truther” site, like “Journal of 9/11 Studies”, as pseudo-scientific sites aren’t taken seriously within the scientific community and not recognised by any scientific body.
3) It has to be peer reviewed by experts. That means names. Not amateurs. Not the so called truth movement. Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth was founded in 2006, so where’s their peer reviewed alternative hypothesis? They have nothing. As long as people like David Chandler, Steven E. Jones. Richard Gage and co can fool the uninformed, why should they care for science? No peer reviewed work in respected journals? Who cares? Pseudo-scientific nonsense? That’ll do. The uninformed won’t notice after all. It’s all about the money, like most conspiracy theories. It’s a business, after all.
Your ad hominem insults fits the profile of someone unfamiliar and unable to address the science put forward in most of what I’ve written. You and Dave deserve each each other.
“Is there Scientific Proof that 9/11 was an inside job?” The form of this question belies a deep misunderstanding of the questions involved. It would be better asked if the question read, “Is there Scientific Proof sufficient to dispute the official conspiracy theory, and to warrant a complete investigation that includes direct, ubiquitous observations ignored in the NIST investigation?” The answer to that question is a resounding, YES.
The original question presumes an assignment of guilt that those calling for a new, independent investigation do not make. Those calling for a new investigation will let the facts that were ignored in the NIST investigation lead where they will lead once the threads of evidence have been thoroughly explored. Scientific method requires a thorough examination of the observable facts before concluding anything, in this case, about causation.
Such amateurish treatments of these events by articles such as this post on Skeptical Science dishonor the thousands of people who died on that day in 2001, and distort the historical record of all that has followed as a direct result of those events.
// “Is there Scientific Proof that 9/11 was an inside job?” The form of this question belies a deep misunderstanding of the questions involved. //
I’m not the one promoting that claim, I’m simply expressing skepticism when faced with that claim.
// “Is there Scientific Proof sufficient to dispute the official conspiracy theory, and to warrant a complete investigation that includes direct, ubiquitous observations ignored in the NIST investigation?” The answer to that question is a resounding, YES.//
You appear to have a small typo in the above, when you typed the word “NO” you accidentally typed “YES’.
// The original question presumes an assignment of guilt that those calling for a new, independent investigation do not make. //
That is not actually a factual claim. The core assertion is that it was a controlled demolition.
One final observation. Using the death of thousands of innocent people as a tool to spice up a comment with a bit of emotional manipulation is quite frankly truly repugnant.
What many credible independent researchers of the events of 9/11, including the authors of the EuroPhysics News paper, want is an unbiased, honest investigation into the gaping implausibilities commonly believed about the building failures in NYC, such as what is posted above, that fireproofing was knocked off steel floor assemblies leaving the steel vulnerable to deformation and failure implying without evidence the catastrophic failure of those three steel-framed towers. Organic fuels don’t possess the potential energy to cause this phenomenon outside of controlled conditions, and certainly not when the fire burns for less than an hour, as was the case in WTC 2. Popular Mechanics resorts to hand waving distractions claiming NIST reported pockets of fire reached 1832 degrees F. However, NIST also reported unexplained cold spots, less fire spread, and less visible evidence of fires in WTC 2 in the NCSTAR 1 report, but Popular Mechanic’s experts don’t mention that. Nor does the author of this post. The lack of credible evidence to support a lack of fireproofing is sufficient to prove largely low temperature, roving fires belching black smoke for less than an hour, and blanket statements such as “This claim has been easily refuted many many many many (did I mention many) times….” is so much hand waving which proves nothing, rests on nothing, does nothing to address the gaping inconsistencies in the narrative that fire and gravity can account for three completely unprecedented and as yet unexplained catastrophic failures of massive steel buildings, none of the fire chiefs who sent their personnel into the buildings expected to fail.
At what temperature does (a) steel melt and (b) jet fuel burn?
Assuming a jet fuel fire could melt steel, how long would it take to get hot enough?
Would a fire of this type cause the building to collapse at freecall speed from the bottom up?
Just exercising critical thought here (NB: not to be confused with moronic snark).
This claim has been easily refuted many many many many (did I mention many) times. If for example I google “9/11 melting steel” then the top hit is the following article from popular mechanics in 2010 …
http://www.popularmechanics.com/military/a6384/debunking-911-myths-world-trade-center/
There they explain …
Jet fuel burns at 800° to 1500°F, not hot enough to melt steel (2750°F). However, experts agree that for the towers to collapse, their steel frames didn’t need to melt, they just had to lose some of their structural strength—and that required exposure to much less heat. “I have never seen melted steel in a building fire,” says retired New York deputy fire chief Vincent Dunn, author of The Collapse Of Burning Buildings: A Guide To Fireground Safety. “But I’ve seen a lot of twisted, warped, bent and sagging steel. What happens is that the steel tries to expand at both ends, but when it can no longer expand, it sags and the surrounding concrete cracks.”
“Steel loses about 50 percent of its strength at 1100°F,” notes senior engineer Farid Alfawak-hiri of the American Institute of Steel Construction. “And at 1800° it is probably at less than 10 percent.” NIST also believes that a great deal of the spray-on fireproofing insulation was likely knocked off the steel beams that were in the path of the crashing jets, leaving the metal more vulnerable to the heat.
But jet fuel wasn’t the only thing burning, notes Forman Williams, a professor of engineering at the University of California, San Diego, and one of seven structural engineers and fire experts that PM consulted. He says that while the jet fuel was the catalyst for the WTC fires, the resulting inferno was intensified by the combustible material inside the buildings, including rugs, curtains, furniture and paper. NIST reports that pockets of fire hit 1832°F.
Neither you nor Popular Mechanics are refuting anything. The temperatures in the twin towers were not sufficient to cause anything more than temporary heating of the steel infrastructure in localized areas as the fires moved around the floors effected by fire as the existing fuel was consumed. NIST’s analysis of likely fire movements based on photographic evidence do not support even pockets of fire at 1832 degrees F causing structural failure after 56 minutes of fire roving around effected floors consuming organic materials as fuel. Nor does NIST show that a little more than 100 minutes of roving fires were sufficient to cause deformity and failure, failure that would be sufficient to cause catastrophic failure of the remaining intact structure. The estimates of damage to core columns were not sufficient for about 56 minutes or 106 minutes of moving fires to initiate local failure of steel infrastructure that would result in nearly identical catastrophic failure in both buildings.
Farid Alfawak-hiri does not give a time frame for his claim, cited by Popular Mechanics, and Forman Williams supports his claims by “hand waving” when saying “the resulting inferno.” Does steel lose 90% of its strength after 56 minutes of heating by roving pockets of fire migrating from fuel source to fuel source?
While PM reports pockets of fire hitting temperatures that, with time, could diminish the strength of steel columns, NIST also reports, “As will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 9, the observed fire behavior in this area following the fireball and before the collapse of the tower was unusual in that very little fire was observed, and the area was close to the ambient temperature well after the aircraft impact. As a result, this area is referred to as the “cold spot”. NIST NCSTAR 1-5A, WTC Investigation, Chapter 7, pg 115-116. This is said with respect to WTC 2 which came apart after only 56 minutes of fire.
The Introduction to Chapter 9 reads: “This chapter describes the fire behaviors observed in World Trade Center (WTC) 2 during the period following the impact of United Airlines Flight 175 at 9:02:59 a.m. until the tower collapsed at 9:58:59 a.m. The fires had very different behaviors than those observed for WTC 1. In general, there was much less fire spread, and the total area of the outer façade where fires were observed was much smaller. For this reason, the discussion will focus on general characteristics and major changes in fire distribution instead of the details of the fire spread as in Chapter 8 describing the fires in WTC 1.”
This building failed after less than one hour of fire, with less fire spread, and less total area of the outer facade showing fires. Why don’t PM’s experts discuss this extraordinary fact instead of relying on innuendo and hand waving to “prove” fires weakened the steel columns leading to catastrophic failure of the entire structure? I believe they didn’t, nor do you, because you don’t have a leg to stand on.
So, observed fires don’t have to reach temperatures necessary to melt steel, just weaken it (incredibly fast, it appears) to cause catastrophic failure resulting in near free fall acceleration of destruction, not just once, but thrice. What does PM say about the fact that molten iron persisted in the rubble of WTC 1, 2, and 7 for weeks? NIST’s John Gross says it didn’t; dozens of others say it did.
“Peter Tully, president of Tully Construction of Flushing, N.Y told AFP that he saw pools of “literally molten steel” at the World Trade Center.
Abolhassan Astaneh, the first structural engineer given access to the WTC steel, remarked, “I saw melting of girders in [the] World Trade Center.”
Leslie Robertson, the structural engineer responsible for World Trade Centers 1, 2, 4, 5, 6 and all sub-grade levels, stated, “As of 21 days after the attack, the fires were still burning and molten steel was still running.”
A NYC firefighter described steel flowing at ground zero. “You’d get down below and you’d see molten steel — molten steel! — running down the channel rails. Like you’re in a foundry… like lava… from a volcano.”
The owner of Controlled Demolition Inc., Mark Loizeaux stated the molten steel was found “three, four, and five weeks later, when the rubble was being removed,” He said molten steel was also found at 7 WTC, which collapsed mysteriously in the late afternoon.
Fires burned and molten steel flowed in the pile of ruins still settling beneath her feet. -Sarah Atlas of New Jersey’s Task Force One Urban Search and Rescue.
“Fires are still actively burning and the smoke is very intense,” reports Alison Geyh, PhD. “In some pockets now being uncovered, they are finding molten steel.”
“They showed us many fascinating slides” he continued, “ranging from molten metal which was still red hot weeks after the event, to 4-inch thick steel plates sheared and bent in the disaster.” -Dr Keith Eaton
“Smoke constantly poured from the peaks. One fireman told us that there was still molten steel at the heart of the towers’ remains. Firemen sprayed water to cool the debris down but the heat remained intense enough at the surface to melt their boots.” -Guy Lounsbury of New York Air National Guard’s 109th Air Wing
A NY Department of Sanitation spokeswoman said “for about two and a half months after the attacks, in addition to its regular duties, NYDS played a major role in debris removal – everything from molten steel beams to human remains….”
“…the ominous groaning of weakened structures overhead, or, in the early days, the streams of molten metal that leaked from the hot cores and flowed down broken walls inside the foundation hole.” –William Langewiesche
He remembers seeing in the darkness a distant, pinkish glow–molten metal dripping from a beam–but found no signs of life. -Lee Turner of The Boone County Firefighters
“In the first few weeks, sometimes when a worker would pull a steel beam from the wreckage, the end of the beam would be dripping molten steel,” Fuchek said.
As late as five months after the attacks, in February 2002, firefighter Joe O’Toole saw a steel beam being lifted from deep underground at Ground Zero, which, he says, “was dripping from the molten steel.”
“…numerous fires were still burning and smoldering. Underground it was still so hot that molten metal dripped down the sides of the wall from Building 6.” 911 Commission report Ed Pfister, a veteran of three hurricanes and two flood relief efforts, and a member of the elite Disaster Medical Assistance Team, wrote in his diary “deep below ground a portion of the pile was still on fire and boiled with molten material. Sometimes, open flame would erupt as a crane pulled debris out and air rushed in. Fire hoses constantly poured streams of water causing huge billowing steam clouds to rise up over the site into the huge lights above.” NIH
More reports of molten metal in the rubble pile:
http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=a091601hotspots
Molten metal in the quantities suggested by the duration and ubiquitous observations of it are exactly what one would expect from military grade incendiaries such as thermite or a variant known to NIST (by 20 years experience working with contractors developing the material) nano-thermite.
You haven’t proven anything, least of all that the EuroPhysics News article is easily refuted.
Assuming that lower temp fires would greatly weaken the structure, I would think it would need to take some time for the building to fall. Didn’t the building collapse right as the “plane” hit, meaning all beams would have to be severed simultaneously?
It did indeed take time.
– Flight 11 hit the north tower at 08:46 … that collapsed at 10:28
– Flight 175 hit the south tower at 09:03 … that collapsed first about an hour later at 09:59
– Fires raged in WTC 7 for most of the day and that then finally collapsed at 17:21
I can personally confirm this timing, I remember it well.
In all cases the fire department and others reported and recorded symptoms of structural failure underway, for example in the South Tower, people on the 105th floor reported at 09:37 that at roughly the 90th floor there had already been a complete collapse of the floor. At 09:52 a NYPD flight flying over reported that large pieces were already falling, then total structural failure occurred at 09:59
Official investigators have noted that the buildings performed as designed and didn’t collapse as a result of the aircraft strike. The modeling for the damage done by the aircraft on perimeter and core columns show estimates for WTC1 a bit greater given the straight on strike than for WTC2 which was hit at an oblique angle. In both cases only a few of the 47 core columns were estimated completely severed, and a few more damaged. I don’t have the figures in front of me but in neither case as I recall are more than a handful of columns estimated to be completely severed. The aircraft engines are the most damaging element as most of the aircraft is aluminum and itself disintegrates in the simulations.
The remaining columns took up the load from the damaged columns as designed. It is claimed fire then weakened the damaged columns to the point of failure. That is highly, highly speculative but has become the orthodoxy of these collapses. The graphics from the fire simulations in all cases show the temperatures at the core columns low and well within their tolerances to sustain their integrity except for brief periods, 15 to 20 minutes. Heating was short lived and not the “raging inferno” folks like Dave and the government claims.
Steohen. Dude, find a way to let go of this. You’re wrong. Let it go.
That you can’t grasp either the physics or probability isn’t my problem, Jim. What do you care if in thinks as I do?
“A MAN WITH A CONVICTION is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point.” — Stanford University psychologist Leon Festinger
Professor Festinger is absolutely right. I’ve shown you facts and figures, I’ve appealed to your logic… none of it convinces you. To you a wide-body 757 can completely disappear into a twenty foot diameter hole in the side of a building leaving no large aircraft parts outside of the hole. THAT makes perfect sense to you? Never has fire brought to complete ruin steel-framed buildings, and yet three times in one day, with symmetry and near free-fall acceleration it happened three times on 9/11. YOU are that man of conviction that can’t respond to an appeal to reason. You are that man. Why it that, Jim? The rest of the narrative is just too convincing for you, it seems. To tidy…
Try this. No deflecting and avoiding okay? (as “truthers” tend to do that).
Regarding the twin towers….
1) How could explosives or incendiaries cause progressive sagging in the floor trusses within the impact zone?
2) How could explosives survive the impact, jet fuel explosion and subsequent fires within these zones where the collapse was initiated?
3) How could explosives cause inward bowing and eventual buckling of the exterior columns?
A video to remind you of the inward bowing, there’s also photographic evidence of the inward bowing too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMZ-nkYr46w
Point 1. I can take the NIST modeling of damage estimates of perimeter and columns, and floor trusses at face value, and assume sagging trusses seen in photos resulted from aircraft damage. Especially before the fires became re-oxygenated and started to build, consume available fuel before moving on as fuel diminished. That seems to be what the visual evidence suggests.
Point 2. I don’t imagine they would nor would they have to in the immediate strike zone. And if placed in areas out of direct involvment with the strike and subsequent fires they could be considered available. As the NIST simulations estimate there are large areas that are not heated sufficiently to even weaken the remaining, fully functional core and perimeter columns.
Point 3. The animation in that video gives the impression sagging floor trusses were the results of fires, which, of course, is the theory relied upon to support ignoring the other facts that I and many others have pointed out. I think the visual evidence of bowing is interesting but there isn’t anything conclusive showing, first, such bowing would result in completely local failure overcoming the redundancy of the intact perimeter and core columns that had held the structure stable up until the point of failure (by whatever cause.) Second, the upper mass of floors tilted severely at initiation and in the absense of a clear mechanism for failure of the intact structure below the failure zone, one can surmise that mass should have continued rolling off the intact, unheated, fully supporting perimeter and core columns in the building below it and crashed to the ground. Instead what is seen is the upper mass halting its rotation and disintegrating. It doesn’t even remain intact as a singular mass as it descends but disintegrates along with the supposedly intact structure below it. If it is disintegrating as the visuals seem to show, it’s mass would be diminishing and exerting less of a downward momentum on the intact floors below. Dr. Legg describes this “global collapse theory” well by saying it is a name with nothing else suggesting a mechanism. The best mechanism that fits the available evidence is controlled demolition. It offers explanations for all of the visual evidence seen.
The bowing as a phenomena is significant because it was observed. Jumping to conclusions without a workable theory as to what it caused, while ignoring the many people describing at the scene having heard “three large explosions,” and these are direct quotes of people at the scene, and then the building starting to come down is not science, it is hand waving. The animation suggests a theory, and it might even have played a contributing role, but it is not as conclusive as the folks who produced your video would like it to seem.
Let me also say, Tom, the angles at which each building was struck and the estimated damage different in each, to try to apply the same mechanism of both initiation AND global failure to each building, all three really is fantastical and nonsense. The stresses and forces at play in each of the separate conditions would not align so perfectly to give one pat answer for each of the three cases of unprecedented catastrophic failure of these massive steel-framed buildings. That fact alone calls the whole official conspiracy theory into question.
Hey Dave where’s your last name? Too much of a paid troll to let the readers know who you REALLY are?
Stop your fucking lies you moronic sell-out. No mention of building 7 “dropped”(controlled DEMOLITION) just before 5 pm Sept 11 2001, because you are paid to continue the LIES. I hope that those that pay you will be killed and you will be sneaking around trying to disassociate yourself from the scum you have become you filthy LYING bastard!!
Clearly “Barry”, who registered with the email account of [email protected] from IP address 198.91.229.150 that is located in Ontario in Canada, to be able to write that comment feels rather strongly about this.
Its tempting to run a precise trace route on that IP, but I don’t think I actually care that much. I would however love to know who is supposed to have been paying me because I’d like to chase them up and get the cheque that has been lost in the post. I do also wonder if I can get overtime when replying to comments, and what the overtime rates are.
So what is your response to building 7 anyway? Also, what is your point in tracing this guy’s IP? Intimidation?
Regarding the comment and my reply .. the guy is clearly blowing off steam and adds nothing of any substance. When faced with stuff like that I have various choices such as ignore or simply obliterate the comment. I opted for a name and shame option, or to at least to point out to him that it is an option and leave it at that. I have no objection to questions, just his manner of delivery.
His assertion that WTC 7 was a controlled demolition is a very common claim that has quite a few rebuttals. But as one additional thought, I’d be rather curious to understand how the explosives remained intact during the entire day while a fire raged away inside the building. As roughly about 2pm bulges were starting to appear and clearly the structural integrity was already by that time under considerable stress, then finally failed at 5pm.
Great point, Dave. How did explosives remain intact while fire raged?
This argument aligns with simple common sense. Call it “Occam’s Common Sense.”
Add that to these Occam’s Common Sense questions:
1) Why blow up the buildings at all? The planes, alone, would have created an excellent false flag effect.
2) Why blow up a third building, when blowing up simply one or two buildings was sufficient to enhance the false flag effect from the planes?
I like to present these common sense points when engaging conspiracy theorists on the internet. It sidesteps and cuts through their distracting wall of obsessive, hyper-detailed, specious arguing.
I realize I will not persuade them, because they have an emotional need to believe. It is like obsessive hand washing. They cannot step outside of the behavior. Understood. We all have our personal emotional cul-de-sacs.
I do this, instead, to demonstrate to other readers that the commonsense explanation is very justifiable.
Again, thank you for pointing out that the explosives would likely have not remained viable during a prolonged inferno.
(And, add this question: Why was there a delay in detonating the explosives?)
When you comment here, it says that your email address will never be made public.
Your behavior of posting personal information here, Dave, is that of bottom dwelling vermin, the lowest of the low, and I hope someone goes through the trouble of pursuing legal action against you.
// I hope someone goes through the trouble of pursuing legal action against you.//
On what precise legal basis would that be?
You cannot simply published private information like that from other people. Especially when the website states that it won’t.
1. “Skeptical science” is not a peer-reviewed science journal, it is just a blog within billions
2 The article does not contain any valuable information , it’s just another blogger naggering
Did they write this before or after they had lunch with Elvis and Hitler??
Is “skeptical science” peer reviewed? or is it all the things it criticises Europhysics as being?
“Europhysics News is not a peer-reviewed science journal, it is just a magazine”
Same article:
“…and the technology magazine Popular Mechanics have investigated and rejected the claims”
Now THERE’S a peer-reviewed science journal. LOL!
lol. exactly.
“Europhysics News is not a peer-reviewed science journal, it is just a magazine”
Same article:
“and the technology magazine Popular Mechanics have investigated and rejected the claims ”
Now THERE’S a peer-reviewed science journal. LOL!
Stripped fireproofing? Says who? They ASSUME fireproofing was stripped. There is ZERO proof of it
How the towers went down is clear. The Europhysics article on the subject was idiotic, and the main character, a physics professor, believed in cold fusion and that Jesus visited America.
The towers collapsed from poor architecture. As I said, they were steel tents. The steel was not deep within concrete, but just protected by a thick asbestos paste. That paste was stripped on impact at 260 meters per second. So steel was directly exposed to fire around 1,000 Celsius, force fed by self generated wind.
At 500 Celsius, steel loses half its strength.
The WTC’s architecture was unique in the world. It was made to have large floors, clear of any columns. After the impacts, the architect who conceive them, who saw the scene, was aghast: he knew that they were going to collapse.
Architectural stupidities are nothing new. The Millennium Tower in San Francisco was build on top of a sort of raft of concrete and steel, swimming on top of sand, by the old seashore. Guess what? The raft is sinking and tilting, so is the tower (which went up after 9/11). How come? Contrarily to the WTC, actually, in the exact opposite way, the Millennium Tower is entirely built of pure concrete. Thus, whereas the WTC was all too light, the Millennium Tower is all too heavy.
As a Mormon, Steven Jones is obligated to believe that Jesus visited America — just as any Catholic scientist is obligated to believe that a priest muttering a few words over some wafers and wine turns them into actual flesh and blood that just happens to look and taste exactly like wafers and wine. Religion causes otherwise good scientists to have some nutty beliefs; you should look into some of the crazy things Newton believed.
I don’t think it’s so much that he holds this belief, but that he published an article supporting it. That is, it isn’t the first time he’s argued something ridiculous by (mis)using his scientific background to do so.
So you will, by that logic, also criticize Newton and Galileo and their contributions to our understanding of physical phenomena? One’s religious prejudices are not a sound basis for discrediting another’s scientific work. You have to discredit the science on its own merits.
In fairness to the catholic, the Jesuit order has a long history of producing fine scientists , and its those jesuits who are responsible for the fact the catholic church dont subscribe to creationist drivel.
what a breathtakingly ignorant comment. Jones was extremely well funded to investigate (and gate-keep) low energy fusion, and was the leading individual behind the takedown of Fleischmann and Pons. Everything else in your comment is complete nonsense… and you know it. Architects were aghast? really? care to source that?
to the ryan d’ agostino and his magazine. cbs anchor woman cindy hsu recently got involved in dirty coration business with crazy cbs anchor otis livingston to steal money from popular mechanics magazine employees bank accounts. never trust cindy hsu and otis livingston they belong in jail.
WTC towers were not unique. In Chicago here both the Willis Tower (formerly Sears) and the Aon Center are made with the same design. As far as I know, they have not been updated to compensate for the contingency that planes will magically knock them down
How sadly ignorant. How the towers came down is clear. The same way Building 7 came down. Free fall speed doesn’t occur because of “poor construction” ma’am. No one seems to talk simple “physics” and mathematical models are strewn about the internet to show the simple fact that they buildings fell at free speed with NO resistance, meaning the ONLY explanation would be all the “secondary explosions” reported on 9/11 by practically anyone on the scene for an hour prior to the Towers collapse.
You also stated there was no concrete columns? You obviously have never seen a video or explanation in writing in essay form, that explains how masterfully these buildings were made.
Also, an Aluminum alloy plane traveling at 300+mph, hitting a steel structured, solid building, would never penetrate the building.
I would love to see BOEING donate a plane, and let’s find a building that is not half as solid as the TOWERS were, that is prepped for demolition and let’s fly that plane into the building…and you’ll see clearly, and you won’t believe your eyes, but that plane would squash like a pancake on the outside of the building and fall to the ground.
Cognitive Dissonance is the main psychological disorder associated with the truth about 9/11.
Steven Jones has done respected research into muon-catalyzed cold fusion, not the discredited and unreproducible results by Pons and Fleischmann. Jones’ work has been reproduced but the energy signature from muon-catalyzed cold fusion is low and hasn’t gained attention as a viable alternative energy line of research. Your slur is both uninformed and unwarranted on this point.
Your “steel tents” notion is also unsupported. You apparently know very little about the actual architecture and structure of the buildings. You also make unfounded claims about how the fires behaved. Copious amounts of black smoke indicate poor combustion conditions, not super hot conditions.
sdemetri: I have read your writing on this thread. You are, it seems to me, a paradox. On one hand you make meticulous, minutely detailed arguments. Yet at the same time, you don’t acknowledge the ways you might plausibly be wrong. I have no doubt you could conceive of reasonable, fact-supported scenarios where you might possibly be wrong about 9/11 being a controlled demolition, if you chose to do so. Easily, you could do this! — you certainly have the brainpower and education.. It is so dramatically odd that you aren’t doing this, that I am supposing that something else is going on here. My guess: You are emotionally sensitive about something, somewhere, and your implacability hides a vulnerability. I’m betting that you won’t be emotionally strong enough to acknowledge this possibility. I’m guessing that you need to rigidly support the notion that 9/11 was an inside job to hold yourself together emotionally in some way. Certainly you could cogently argue against there being a controlled demolition, if you chose to do so. This is very obvious! Apparently, you don’t have the emotional self control to do this.
I started researching these things around 10 – 11 years ago. While there are definitely large unanswered questions, such as what happened to people supposed to be on the flights, the physical aspects of the building failures simply don’t make sense when applying the official explanations. The physical evidence, in so many aspects of the events of not just the building failures, simply points in very different directions away from the official explanations. In many cases in very obvious ways. Official statements directly contradict unsolicited statements of people on site, deeply involved in the events.
In short, I know with a high degree of certainty the official conspiracy theory can’t be the correct explanation. I honestly don’t expect that official narrative to be challenged officially, and have come to accept that as how these things go. As someone once said in regard to how to prove this was likely an inside job, I paraphrase, “keep digging, keep looking for the documentation… we still don’t know who if anyone in Lincoln’s cabinet was connected to his killing…” I can wait confident in what I am certain of, and may never know for certain everything about it.
The engineering and architectural evidence arguing against the official conspiracy is strong. The eyewitness evidence is broad and correlates well from person to person that much was happening all through the buildings, not simply at the top. We may never know exactly what happened but it certainly was not aircraft crashes, fire and gravity doing their work. My emotional investment in this line of study is fine, thank you.
To clarify something I wrote earlier: there is a question as to what may have happened to the people on flight 77, supposed to have crashed into the Pentagon. There were at least three people who, one on a national news broadcast shortly after the event at the Pentagon, said they saw no large aircraft debris at the sight, and two described a round hole in the facade about 20′ in diameter at ground level. We are given to believe a 757 disappeared into that hole leaving no large fuselage, wing sections, tail section, or engines to be seen.
There is a great deal wrong with this scenario including the difficulty, impossibility really, of a rank amateur manuverimg the aircraft in the descending spiral at speed necessary, the unlikelihood of the aircraft being able to make that maneuver without coming apart as a pilot who had flew that specific plane explains at Patriots
Question 9/11, the lack of turbulance damage to the lawn, and of course the lack of large aircraft parts at the crash site as described by a reporter at the scene to Judy Woodruff on live television and the others at the scene. All of that in itself casts doubts what actually hit the Pentagon was a 757.
Regarding the last three paragraphs: couldn’t that be applied to you as well? 9/11 was a “high-stress event” and, in your attempt to explain it and gain some control of the emotional trauma, you embraced the idea that 19 hijackers stole planes, crashed them into buildings, and those crashes caused the buildings to fall. Any debunking of the idea is ineffective, because your idea was embraced at an emotional level.
Seriously, how do you know that you are not the one doing this? You are part of the human race, so, by your own admission, you are quite capable of doing so.
My guess is that every major detail that you “know” about 9/11 you knew in October of 2001. You believed that story right away because, as you stated, you needed something to gain some control of the emotional trauma. Once this belief — which was embraced long before any thorough investigation was completed, or, honestly, was even begun — you had some semblance of control over your emotional trauma. From then on, any evidence that corroborated this story was accepted at face value, and any evidence that opposed it was immediately dismissed. All because you embraced this at an emotional level.
Now I’m not offering any theories or suggestions. I simply asking you: how do you know that you are not the one doing this? Was your belief carefully formed after evaluation all possible theories? Or did you “know” all that happened by Halloween of 2001?
“The impact of the plane debris stripped away a good deal of the fireproofing.”
Exactly which plane debris are we talking about here? WTC 7 was not hit by a plane, the official report itself states that it collapsed just because of fire alone.
Was going to mention this. I’m no conspiracy theorist, and I’m not an engineer. I have no idea what happened to the Twin Towers, however I believe myself to be a fairly logically thinking person and when I think to much about WTC7, things just don’t add up. The fire would have had to continue burning out the center of the building (unseen) for some time in order to cause a perfect uniform collapse.
If you watch the footage, a lot of the surrounding buildings where seriously damaged by very heavy debris when the two main towers came down.
“The fire would have had to continue burning out the center of the building (unseen) for some time in order to cause a perfect uniform collapse.”
Well.. that’s exactly what happened. It burned out of control on multiple floors for 6 or 7 hours. Also, debris from Tower 1 obliterated 20% of the lower floors. Not surprising at all that it collapsed.
Not even the manipulated NIST model could simulate the freefall and complete collapse of building 7 and they didn’t even attempt to model the towers. Don’t you find that fishy that they omitted trusses for the simulation and it STILL DIDN’T COLLAPSE?
I don’t see how any rational person could accept manipulated science as reality. Perhas a person needing to have an answer to attempt to control their emotions for such a tramatic event.
Sadly Tommy, the only manipulation taking place is within your head, you are being successfully played by misleading conspiracy myths. The precise cause of the collapse is well-studied, quite robust, and well-documented. For a rapid summary, the Wikipedia page covers it well, and is also well cited, so you can follow the links from there to verify it all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_World_Trade_Center#9.2F11_and_collapse
As you can read in the official report, WTC7 sustained no such damage. Only 7 perimeter columns were damaged by debris, and it played no role in the building’s collapse. It was labeled the first purely fire induced collapse in history.
The official report is almost ten years old, yet people are still repeating falsehoods that predate it.
> “the official report itself states that it collapsed just because of fire alone”
No, it does not. It states that it collapsed because of fires and substantial structural damage caused by debris from the falling twin towers.
> «substantial structural damage caused by debris from the falling twin towers.»
This article stated “plane debris”, not “building debris”. Even so, how do we know the debris stripped away the fireproof cover? Do we have any evidence of that, or is it just speculation?
I’m pretty sure the experiments conducted to blow away the asbestos fireproofing failed along with the physical studies attempting to fatigue the structural steel with jet fuel.
Tommy, it is easy to make such suggestions, and it is wise to cite evidence when making such claims. The reason you can’t is because you have been misled, it is just a myth that this is the case.
here for example is an article by a fire inspector who had been examining the buildings between 1990 and 2000 on a regular basis. He also includes lots of pictures …
http://www.fireengineering.com/articles/print/volume-155/issue-10/world-trade-center-disaster/volume-ii-the-ruins-and-the-rebirth/fireproofing-at-the-wtc-towers.html
It is quite a revealing read …
I inspected core columns up to the 78th floor but was unable to access them above that point. These inspections revealed that the bond of fireproofing on core columns had failed in many locations and the fireproofing was falling off the columns in floor-high sheets. Photo 3, taken in 1994, shows a core column from which the fireproofing had fallen off in a sheet that is several stories high. The red circle and date was the Port Authority’s response to the missing fireproofing. This resulted because the steel had not been properly prepared at the time of the initial spray application. Rust scale had not been removed prior to applying the fireproofing. The fireproofing had adhered well to the rust scale, but the rust was coming loose from the steel
This is solid robust empirical evidence from a highly reliable source and pre-dates most of the more modern conspiracy claims.