Truth Like The Dark

As opposed to reading, science, and mathematics…

Originally uploaded by re6smith.

I saw this sign at a community project building site on Marleybone High Street here in London.

I find it offensive.

Boingboing just posted a story about stories that were overlooked in the media over the last year. Original source here, with details.

It’s shocking that most of these stories are virtually unknown. But number 18 is entitled “Physicist Challenges Official 9-11 Story“. The story is from minor newspapers, and the BYU website, and I can see why. The physicist involved hasn’t done his homework in a rather shocking way. Let me address the points quoted in the story, as an engineer, based on what I’ve heard and read about the WTC’s design and collapse:

No steel-frame building, before or after the WTC buildings, has ever collapsed due to fire. But explosives can effectively sever steel columns.

That’s simply because the WTC buildings were of a very unconventional, cylinder-in-cylinder design. It did not have the massive steel columns in most steel frame buildings. It derived light-weight strength from the cylinders themselves.

WTC 7, which was not hit by hijacked planes, collapsed in 6.6 seconds, just .6 of a second longer than it would take an object dropped from the roof to hit the ground. “Where is the delay that must be expected due to conservation of momentum, one of the foundational laws of physics?” Jones asks. “That is, as upper-falling floors strike lower floors—and intact steel support columns—the fall must be significantly impeded by the impacted mass.

This doesn’t makes sense. Conservation of momentum simply does not insist on the delay suggested here. Note that the specific amount of delay required by “physics” is not suggested.

But more importantly, conventional ways of destroying buildings via explosives rely on falling mass as a part of the destructive process, so that wouldn’t make the difference suggested here.

How do the upper floors fall so quickly, then, and still conserve momentum in the collapsing buildings?” The paradox, he says, “is easily resolved by the explosive demolition hypothesis, whereby explosives quickly removed lower-floor material, including steel support columns, and allow near free-fall-speed collapses.” These observations were not analyzed by FEMA, NIST, or the 9/11 Commission.

This conveys a rather severe lack of understanding of how buildings are demolished. It’s suggested that explosions “remove” steel support columns and lower floor material? Not on your life. The amount of explosives required to “remove” significant material would be enormous, and completely unconventional for demolition. In demolition, you “cut” the columns with well selected explosions (removing very little material) and the weight of the building falls onto itself, leading to the building’s destruction. If someone was trying to destroy the buildings as a part of the obviously implied conspiracy, they would certainly use such conventional techniques, as they are simpler, more stealthy, and require less explosives.

With non-explosive-caused collapse there would typically be a piling up of shattered concrete. But most of the material in the towers was converted to flour-like powder while the buildings were falling. “How can we understand this strange behavior, without explosives? Remarkable, amazing—and demanding scrutiny since the U.S. government-funded reports failed to analyze this phenomenon.”

See above, regarding both the construction of the WTC (which involved relatively small amounts of concrete) and how one demolishes a building. Are we to believe that a demolition engineer, operating as a part of one of the most clever and massive conspiracies of all time, would use so much explosive that he’d “powder” massive amounts of concrete?!?

Steel supports were “partly evaporated,” but it would require temperatures near 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit to evaporate steel—and neither office materials nor diesel fuel can generate temperatures that hot. Fires caused by jet fuel from the hijacked planes lasted at most a few minutes, and office material fires would burn out within about twenty minutes in any given location.

I don’t know what context the words “partly evaporated” came from, but the conclusion about office material fires makes absolutely no sense, given the commonly known history of the event. The fires inside the rubble were finally put out in December, 4 months after the explosions. Oven-like effects can definitely be achieved inside the confined space of a burning building. It’s commonplace.

Just for clarification, the prevailing theory of WTC collapse is as follows. The WTC design had relatively light trusses between its inner and outer cylinders, which supported the floors. Firemen hate trusses, because heat makes them bend and collapse. Since this is a well-known phenomena, building codes require insulation on the trusses. But it’s well established that the application to the WTC trusses was inadequate (due to bad contractors), which also caused it to decay as the building aged.

So the heat bent the trusses, the floors fell one on the other, leading to the symmetrical collapse (clearly beginning at the impact floors, and proceeding down) that we all saw on TV. I can’t see how you could have achieved this with explosives, unless they were conveniently located on the impact floors.

Molten metal found in the debris of the WTC may have been the result of a high-temperature reaction of a commonly used explosive such as thermite. Buildings not felled by explosives “have insufficient directed energy to result in melting of large quantities of metal,” Jones says.

See above. 4 months of fire in confined spaces. Metal melting common in building fires. What is this guy thinking?

Multiple loud explosions in rapid sequence were reported by numerous observers in and near the towers, and these explosions occurred far below the region where the planes struck.

I’d sort of expect multiple explosion sounds, given the prevailing theory the WTC collapse, wouldn’t you?

Moreover, thousands of people saw the collapse start on the impact floors. You can see it again by going to CNN.com

It’s great that people are trying to get little-covered stories out there. But please, don’t believe everything you read, and believe the evidence of your eyes, rather than wacky conspiracy theories like this one.