I have argued that the 911 Movement is an important and valuable societal movement populated by citizens seeking truth, justice, and democracy: LINK.I have also argued that it is wrong to assume that information and majority public opinion on their own produce societal change. I have argued that without an effective activism column the 911 Movement will simply be a curious cultural phenomenon with no political impact.
Activism cannot be only “getting the message out” and making videos and web sites. It must include direct interactions in the public sphere at political venues (hearings, conferences, government propaganda events, etc.), legal activism, classic political organizing, and anti-establishment activism at work and at school.
In this regard, in my opinion, the 911 Movement division between “researchers” and “activists” is counter productive. “Researchers” who focus their interests on tenuous theories of events rather than supporting the activists harm the movement. To operate a division between inquiry and social reform always serves concentrated and undemocratic power.
This is a fundamental divide and conquer strategy that has lead to our modern concept of “academic freedom”, thereby effectively making virtually all university professors into service intellectuals. (EXAMPLE)
The 911 Movement needs to rout out and isolate this destructive tendency to go off and “research” rather than concentrate one’s energies on effective activist tactics and strategies. Useful research must be part of a praxis of social reform or it is harmful research. There is no lack of historic evidence of research as a neutralizing force.
And the Movement needs to stop spinning its wheels with extreme theories such as: directed energy weapons, all the video is fake and there were no planes, and the two towers necessarily came down in controlled explosives-assisted demolitions with or without the help of tonnes of nanothermite.
None of these theories need to be true or proven for the motives driving an “inside job” to hold. In addition these proposals about the twin tower collapses can easily be contested, displace the debate away from more important issues, and appear to most opponents as ridiculous and therefore non-threatening.
To illustrate how easy it is to contest arguments for the “controlled demolition” of the twin towers, I offer two discussions below; in the hope of drawing the Movement away from severed “research” and towards political activism.
Evidence for nanothermite - Not
As a scientist with relevant expertise, I have reviewed the paper by Harrit et al. reporting to have found synthetic nanothermite in WTC dust samples (Open Chemical Physics Journal, 2, 2009, 7-31).My report is posted HERE.
Harrit et al. did not make conclusions or proposals that followed from their data and made basic errors in data interpretation. Harrit himself admits to never having used the central method of energy dispersive X-ray analysis (EDXA) in his research before his 2009 paper (LINK).
My REPORT explains a natural origin for the grey-red bi-layer flakes found by Harrit et al.
Explosives were required - Not
There is a widespread narrative among Truthers that the nature of the collapses and the degree of destruction imply that large amounts (tonnes) of explosives must have been used.I see no evidence for this.
A standing building is a bomb waiting to be ignited (by an earthquake or anything capable of taking out structural elements). The gravitational potential energy that is released when a tall structure collapses is enormous. The higher and more massive the structure, the greater the energy release.
Indeed, this is the basis of controlled demolition in which gravitational energy not explosives does virtually all the destructive work. The explosives are only used to take out key structural elements and gravity does the rest.
The gravitational energy liberated (and used for destruction) in the collapse of one WTC tower is approximately 100 tonnes of TNT equivalent, a massive amount equal to approximately 1% of the Hiroshima atomic explosion.The US war crime that was the Hiroshima explosion caused total destruction on an area of 12 square kilometres and killed 200,000 people. The US war crime that was the 911 twin tower attack caused destruction that is indeed equivalent to approximately 1% of the Hiroshima blast damage, although more concentrated on the point of the towers.
100 tonnes of TNT equivalent is enough to cause all the destruction seen as the result.
Those who insist that explosives were needed to produce the observed degree of pulverization would have us believe that every piece of office equipment and every human body had been loaded with explosives. That’s not how it works when you liberate 100 tonnes of TNT equivalent in seconds.
The following simple scenario of a twin tower collapse does not violate any physical principle.
I have already reported on the important work of Jim Malott (HERE) who exposed the corrupt politics of how the core-structure steel was allowed to be installed virtually unprotected during construction of the towers.
The core-structure is hit from one side, blowing away some of the fire protection material. The steel in the core-structure first fails on the side it was hit causing the top segment of the tower to start rotating. The heated steel in the rest of the core then also fails under the combination of heat and bending strain. The top segment now crushes against the bottom segment as it also continues to rotate but with lessening angular acceleration under a significant counter torque from the asymmetric crushing.
The top segment crushes itself into the bottom segment as it simultaneously (action-reaction) crushes the bottom segment. A cascade follows in which every newly crushed layer adds to the mass being accelerated downwards to continue the destruction.
In other words, I believe that if the conditions were created for key structural elements to fail at the point of impact then the rest would follow from gravity. Of course in such a NON-CONTROLLED demolition it would be messy and pieces would be flung in all directions, as was observed.
Sorry but I don’t see the need for an explosives assisted collapse.
And it matters because…?
What is most unfortunate is that many Truthers will now spend much energy refuting my proposal rather than moving on to the important task of activism.
We should be figuring out how to make the bastards accountable rather than posturing on questions of high school physics.
33 comments:
Regarding your post at climateguy refuting the article putting forth the hypothesis that WTC was brought down using nanothermite.
Denis, don't forget that your criticisms are against a poorly written scientific article. Just because the article is written poorly and makes some tenuous conclusions, this doesn't mean that nanothermite was not present at WTC.
In my opinion, there still remain two very big obstacles to overcome if a purely non-controlled demolition collapse of WTC is to be accepted:
1) Video footage showing explosions occurring in WTC just before the planes hit, and where these explosions are several floors below the impact sites.
2) "Pulling" of WTC-7.
How about you contact the authors of the paper you critique and analyze the samples yourself. Why don't you attempt to write a proper scientific paper in support of nanothermite?
As to what the 911 movement should do (focus on activism): let people do whatever they want to do ("anarchism"). It took you ~50 years to break free of your chains and advocate for the betterment of society. Not everyone is ready to "act" (as in "activism").
I would like to some of Mr Rancourt's errors.
Rancourt uses a superconductor example to claim saying "something couldn't have happened". This is not correct. He says it is simpler than a collapse scenario. WRONG! Particle behaviours are much less predictable than large scale mechanisms based on known laws of physics. E.g. newtons laws and relativistic laws of gravity agree on large scales but break down on small scales because of the unknown , unpredictable nature of nanoscale behaviours.
Rancourt's gatekeeper status is especially obvious in his key objections to the towers' collapses.
There is no getting past the acceleration through a net upward resistance.
Construction errors would cause the collapses. Wrong. The physics of load bearing is not affected, it's still built to support more than the weight of the load above it. The net positive resistance in the upward direction MUST slow it down. It CANNOT accelerate downwards through the path of greatest resistance...period.
Also any construction failures would leave the solid core standing, i.e. pancaking.
He says there was a jolt but does not back this up. He has not read Gordon Ross's paper proving through measurement of the videos that there was no jolt. When confronted by the physics problem of no deceleration he falls back on the old fallacy of a 'complicated collapse' without explaining.
Top down demolitions are not done. WRONG! His arguments are extremely naive. Once again the interviewer nails him.
UNBELIEVABLE! He commits the fallacy of claiming the building crushing causes the nanothermite!
There is no way random building crushing pulverisation could cause distribution of uniform nano scale aluminium and iron oxide particles intimately mixed and embedded in a silicon matrix!!! Is there a magical elf that moves at the speed of light mixing all the elements uniformly and CREATING LAYERS!? Particles should be of vastly differing sizes. A gravitational collapse cannot turn aluminium to nano scale powder.
Also his analysis of the south tower was completely flawed. He claims the cessation of angular momentum is due to counteractive torque applied by the top section's contact with the lower section's surface.
Firstly, the pressure destroys the surface assymmetrically on the leaning side and according to Newton's laws is itself equally destroyed on that side destroying the torque producing obstruction. Secondly if it arrests the momentum temporarily, it is still an off centre leaning mass which means any destruction caused by further pressure will exponentially create asymmetric damage and accelerate angular momentum.
This is just scratching the surface. Mr Rancourt should know that many are aware of his gatekeeper status.
@Anonymous,
If you identify yourself, make one clear critique at a time, give the source of your claim about my statements, quote my exact statement in context if from radio, and if possible number the stated steps in your argument, then I will respond.
Otherwise, I probably will not respond.
Hi Denis,
I have really appreciated many of the things you have shared on your blog in the past year, but this info on 9/11 isn't quite doing it for me. It's hard to believe two buildings collapsed after having fires for less than two hours, and fires with apparently not much heat, hence the amount of smoke, and people seen waving from windows. On top of that, seeing the buildings collapse without any resistance, in my non-scientific view, as they seemed to have the bottom drop out from underneath them, not from the top crushing what was below.
Can you give me your theory on why building 7 collapsed?
Thank you for your time.
Sincerely,
Treok
Treok, he says WTC 7 was a CD.
HEY. FUCK. YOU. TAKE. MY. ASS. AND. SHOVE. IT. UP. YOUR. FACE.
You agent. Disgusting!
You make a good case arguing that no one should bother with thermite or explosives, since there really is no evidence for either.
Instead, you argue, the "Inside Job" thazt 9/11 was should trigger political activism.
May I point out that there also exists no evidence that 9/11 was an inside job? Or ask how you KNOW it was an inside job? Who did what, from the inside, pray tell?
The 9/11 "scientists" seek to bring on the evidence for "inside job" - and have completely failed for over 9 years now. The null hypothesis therefore should be that there wasn't an inside job, and any activism based on the premise of inside job would be misguided.
I am totally perplexed by the notion that people who try to find out what happened in 911 should not engage in research, but only in activism. How else are they going to find out? What is their activism going to be about?
I am also flabbergasted by this:
"In other words, I believe that if the conditions were created for key structural elements to fail at the point of impact then the rest would follow from gravity. Of course in such a NON-CONTROLLED demolition it would be messy and pieces would be flung in all directions, as was observed."
What? What? Massive lateral and upward ejections follow from gravity? The shredding of all the structural steel follows from gravity? The complete pulverization of all the concrete and furniture into micron-size particles that blanketed Manhattan follows from gravity? The more than 700 human bone fragments, some about half inch in size, found on the roof of another building hundreds of feet away follows from gravity? Molten steel flowing 4 and 5 floors below ground level "like in a foundary" for more than a month after the event follows from gravity? The endless procession of witnesses describing explosion after explosion, detonations of all kinds, accompanied by flashes, long BEFORE the buildings went down follow from gravity?
Have you really looked at any of this at all?? It is painfully obvious there is a huge amount of energy missing to account for what went on.
http://vimeo.com/17994693
Anonymous asks some questions. Here are the answers (it turns out that many of the questions are based on false premises):
"What? What? Massive lateral and upward ejections follow from gravity?"
- There were no upward ejections to speak of - those pointed out in some videos are optic illusions
- Yes, massive lateral ejections are expected when large structures collapse. Build a tower from domino stones, make it collapse, and observe.
"The shredding of all the structural steel follows from gravity?"
- Most of the structural steel wasn't shredded. Most elements separated at the joints.
"The complete pulverization of all the concrete and furniture into micron-size particles that blanketed Manhattan follows from gravity?"
- The concrete was not completely pulverized.
- Yes, it can be calculated that the potential energy of a building more than 400 meters high and about 300,000 metrics tons heavy would suffice to fracture all the concrete as observed, and deform and break structural steel as observed. Each tower released 4.8 * 10^11J of energy from gravity alone, that is equivalent to about 100 tons of TNT.
"The more than 700 human bone fragments, some about half inch in size, found on the roof of another building hundreds of feet away follows from gravity?"
- The energy release of 100 tons of TNT produces a little wind. You can't really be surprised at that.
"Molten steel flowing 4 and 5 floors below ground level "like in a foundary" for more than a month after the event follows from gravity?"
- No evidence exists for such a claim. No eye-witness account that talks of "molten steel" can be corrobotated. You can't identify molten materials by sight.
- Any molten anything observed more than a month after the collapse has nothing to do with the reason for collapse. No truther has yet even proposed a mechanism that would explain both the collapse as some sort of intentional demolition, and observation of high temperatures weeks and months later
- No-one claims gravity was responsible for extreme heat. Did you miss the freaking huge FIRES?
"The endless procession of witnesses describing explosion after explosion, detonations of all kinds, accompanied by flashes, long BEFORE the buildings went down follow from gravity?"
- There's your problem: Lots of things go BOOM in a burning building, however none were observed, or recorded, at the moment of collapse initiation. This is a CRASS difference to all observations of real CDs.
"Have you really looked at any of this at all??"
- Yes. I have, and I am sure that Denis has.
"It is painfully obvious there is a huge amount of energy missing to account for what went on."
- It is easy to compute that there was plenty of energy available:
* potential energy (gravity) was about 1 Terajoule for all three towers
* kinetic energy from planes was about 6 Gigajoules
* Chemical energy from jet fuel inside the twin towers was several 100 Gigajoules
* Chemical energy from office contents was many times more than that of the jet fuels. We are talking about many Terajoules.
In total, we have the energy of a small nuclear bomb available.
All this has been known for 9 years. When will truthers ever learn?
For a while there I thought you may have been lampooning your own views. The lateral ejections were optical illusions?? Is that why large chunks of structural members were stuck in buildings hundreds of feet away.
A more useful approach would be to watch this presentation from beginning to end and offer some coherent answer to its different parts.
http://vimeo.com/17994693
Alternatively, you may begin by devising a way to perform the “Progressive Collapse Challenge” as presented here: http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/analysis/challenge.html or construct any physical model where a gravitational collapse gets going like this: http://vimeo.com/16632460 without the help of explosives and pulverizes the building from the top down before it hits the ground.
There are no witnesses to large amounts of molten steel in the basements weeks after the event, you say? There are actually dozens of such accounts. For example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSXUGR2g9HU
You will see many more of them in Richard Gage presentation mentioned at the beginning. You will also see a FEMA engineer clownishly claiming, like you, there are not such witnesses http://vimeo.com/17994693
Other useful information:
The demolition of the WTC had been previously requested and refused (on account of the asbestos):
http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/silverstein.html
It’s interesting to watch the reaction of this Dutch demolition expert when watching WTC 7 collapse for the first time (like many people, he did not know anything about WTC 7).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3DRhwRN06I
It’s also highly entertaining to see the BBC announcing the collapse of WTC 7 some 20 minutes in advance, when the building can be clearly seen behind the reporter. The BBC has responded to inquiries about this by clearing its throat in various ways, until they admitted they just got the info from Reuters ahead of time because of “confusion”. Confusion creates precise foreknowledge. In the Richard Gage presentation above there are also accounts by witnesses describing the last seconds of the *countdown* to the collapse of building 7, prompting malicious people to ask if fire plies its trade by countdown. The BBC announcement remains a classic of script messup.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNK1V6S2cbo
Jim Hoffman's article on that video and how it was found
http://www.wtc7.net/foreknowledge.html#bbc
I also like to see Larry Silverstein (lease holder of the WTC buildings, who walked away with some 5 billion dollars on a “terrorist insurance” policy he had taken a few months before) casually letting his tongue slip in an interview to explain how he came to the decision to “just pull it!”. The many ways by which his very clear words have been massaged by willfully sleepy baboons is also a source of endless mirth around my house.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WYdAJQV100
More on “pull it”
http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/evidence/pullit.html
MIT engineer Jeff King on the pyroclastic clouds
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qW81Cd7nNH8&feature=related
Some people have done calculations. They are really not needed to understand that the energy from a gravitational collapse cannot pulverize most of the concrete even before it reaches the ground, eject pieces two football fields away, cut all the core steel columns in fairly uniform pieces, and melt vast quantities of steel (and keep it melted for weeks after the event). For whatever they are worth, here is one such calculation that assumes (with absurd generosity) that all the energy of motion of the falling steel is converted to heat to melt the steel, and concludes that even then the required energy is more than two orders of magnitude larger, and more realistically three.
Gravitational energy vs energy needed to melt the steel
http://www.journalof911studies.com/volume/200704/ProfMorroneOnMeltingWTCsteel.pdf
The energy needed to produce the volume and rate of pyroclastic expansion alone has been calculated at some 50 times the total gravitational energy of the buildings.
But again, none of that is really needed to understand immediately by watching the collapses that gravity by itself cannot do all that. The explosive nature of the collapses looks obviously explosive because they were produced by explosives. The demolition of WTC 7 looks exactly like a classic demolition because it is. The hundreds of workers and witnesses who reported hearing many explosions all over the buildings before they collapsed did so because they heard them. Silverstein said they decided to “just pull it” because they did. People new that WTC 7 was going to collapse (to the point of counting down the seconds) because they had been told. The BBC said it had collapsed a few minutes before it did, because it had been told. Fire does not announce its immediate intentions with such precision, and fire does not cause demolition-style collapses.
What causes the willful (or feigned) blindness and circling of wagons around things that are totally obvious is more of a mystery.
"It is easy to compute that there was plenty of energy available"
* potential energy (gravity) was about 1 Terajoule for all three towers
* kinetic energy from planes was about 6 Gigajoules
* Chemical energy from jet fuel inside the twin towers was several 100 Gigajoules
* Chemical energy from office contents was many times more than that of the jet fuels. We are talking about many Terajoules.
You are not computing anything because you are not comparing any of that to what was needed and because most of that "available" energy could not be used to crush the buildings down. When a building, or any structure, collapses by gravity, you don’t obseve that does it from the top down, you don't observe its potential gravitational energy pulverizes all the concrete and creates pools of molten steel and throws things horizontally and even upward in all directions.
The total potential gravitational energy of a building can only be converted to kinetic and thermal energy ONCE the whole building has hit the ground. It cannot be used to crush the building from the top down or do any other such marvels.
The kinetic energy of the planes, whatever it was, was absorbed by the buildings with remarkable aplomb. They swayed for a few seconds, like the were supposed to, and then they just stood there calmly for an hour showing no hint of deformation, tilting etc. Then, *suddenly*, their tops exploded and looked like erupting volcanoes, and the buildings tore themselves apart from the top down in symetrical order at near free fall speed.
Most of the jet fuel consumed itself in the first ballfire, and the remaining fuel could not last long. That kind of fuel cannot in any case bring steel anywhere near to its melting point, especially when burning in oxygen-deprived conditions (as evidenced by the black smoke) ad for a short time.
The chemical energy of the office materials is totally irrelevant because the overwhelming majority of those materials did NOT undergo combustion. The fire was located in a specific area at the impact zone. There were people above that area to the very end. There were firefighters below that area (which was 80 to 90 percent of the buildings) moving around and NOT reporting fires, but reporting explosions all over the place. The fires may have burned at most 2-5 percent of the office materials if that much.
In any case, office materials are even more incapable than airplane fuel to melt steel.
Whatever heat the steel was subjected to from the office fires at the impact zone would dissipate very quickly by conduction through the 100,000 tons of steel in each tower.
Have you ever seen steel crush itself?
Have you ever seen steel crush itself and melt itself in the process?
Regarding the potential for activist action from the 911 truth movement.
The main difficulty for any kind of coherent action comes from the wide array of political persuasion among members. You find every and any thing, from hard core Reagan conservatives, to libertarians, to preppy liberals, to scruffy anarchists – anything. What unites them is the sense of shock and outrage, that tends to sputter out into dismay. The reasons for the outrage vary. The most conservative among them are initially shocked by the cruelty of rulers against their own subjects. They tend to turn a blind eye, or a cynical eye, to the outrages of US foreign policy, sometimes viewing them as a lamentable but inevitable byproduct of a country that is burdened with the responsibility of running an empire etc, but the notion that their own country could act with such calculated cruelty towards its own citizens is of course much harder to digest. Many of them, however, manage to gradually expand the outrage to a more global perspective, which is good. But in general the enormous differences in the personal ideology of people in the movement make it very difficult to form any kind of coherent view beyond trying to bring this topic to more widespread public awareness.
The dismay comes from the gradual realization that even if most of the public became aware of the fact that 911 was a false flag operation, the chances of it producing some radical action to change the system seem scant. The only body capable of ordering some kind of proper investigation into the matter, Congress, is an essential part of the system in place, and very unlikely to rock its own boat. Indefinite stonewalling is guaranteed. Time is also important. A decade has gone by and progress, while measurable, has been slow. The more time goes by, the more it will become a matter of historical curiosity, like all previous false flag operations.
Still, I perfectly understand and admire the zeal with which many people want to bring this to public attention, once they realize the magnitude of the deceit. I’ve watched this short interview with Harrit http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RNyaoYR3y0&feature=fvsr explaining how once he came to understand what was going on, there was no way back for him and he felt compelled to “do something” to rise people’s awareness. Most of us went through something like that. I spent many sleppless nights around the end of 2005 when it finally dawned on me what was going in those “collapses”. The inner resistance to accept it was formidable, becasue the implications seemed so preposterous. And yet in the end there was no denying the overwhelming weight of the evidence.
Then you enter a phase when you feel compelled to help people around you realize what you have realized. It is not a plesant process. People lose jobs, and lose families, because they come to be perceived as obsessed, or as an embarrasment to the institution where they work. Physicist Steven Jones had to quit his position in the Univesity of Utah. Engineer Kevin Ryan was fired from Underwriter Labs when he revealed that the physical tests ordered by NIST on the steel, showed that the steel did not fail when subjected to higher temperatures than were measured in the buildings and under twice their normal load. All they managed to get was a 3-inch sagging in the middle of one truss. NIST threw out the results of the test, and fabricated a 41 inch sagging out of thin air. And all kinds of people have been subjected to all kinds of vilification.
In all this, one of the people more optimistically unfazed by criticism is architect Richard Gage. At the end of his excellent presentation
http://vimeo.com/17994693
he urges people to "do something about it" once they have assimilated the information, something other than sit back and shake their head in dismay for the rest of their lives. He is an inveterate optimist. He wants people to sign a petition for a new investigation. He believes this is going to lead somewhere. I doubt it, but admire his persistence very much.
As for the countless reports of explosions in the buildings.
When a large building is prepared for demolition, you often “prep” it for the grand finale by removing a large part of its *redundant* support. This lowers the likelyhood of timing mistakes for the final stage. You need to understand these are hevily redundant structures. Redundant in the sense of being able to redistribute load if one or several structural members fail, and redundant in the more general sense of being capable of supporting a much heavier load than they normally have to support. It is obvious what those people are describing ARE detonations with flashes, not things falling down. The expansion wave of a detonation is not easily mistaken with the sound wave of an object crashing into another, nor do crashing objects produce flashes.
More on the redundancy topic. In our daily lives, we are surrounded with all kinds of familiar objects which are capable of supporting much more weight than they need to. Just look around at your tables, chairs, bookshelves, bycicles, cars and so on.
When it comes to tall buildings, the redundancy is further enhanced by special requirements that none of these familiar objects need, such as being able to withstand earthquakes, or 100 mph winds, or jet liner impacts. These buildings were designed to withstand all that, and they did. They took the planes impact with very little fuss, other than a few seconds of swaying. There is little doubt the supporting columns of one of those towers (and I mean the core columns alone) had enough strength to hold at the very least twice their normal load, and probably much more.
The redundancy topic makes it easier to see how absurd it is to suppose that the top 10 percent of the mass of one of those buildings could crush all the support in the remaining 90 percent all the way to the ground, and do so at near free fall speed and without ever losing its perfect symetry and verticality. Sometimes scientists are so trained to look for complex hypothesis to explain phenomena, that they fail to recognize something much more simple is available. The climate industry is full of such people.
Sometimes defenders of the official theory contradict themselves without realizing it. Physicist Manuel Garcia came up with an article giving his convoluted explanations for the collapses of the buildings. On the one hand, he states that all that is required to understand the collapses is already in the official reports (!!!). On the other hand he offers a totally fantastic explanation to account for the extraordinay features of those collapses, in terms of some shock waves that enter into violent resonance and keep bouncing back and forth to the ground. In other words, he is aware that the official reports explain nothing, and feels compelled to provide his own fantastic explanation to justify the reports. For WTC 7 he offers an explanation that reminds Jim Hoffman of the game “Mouse Trap”:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouse_Trap_%28board_game%29
“In a proper operation, the player turns the crank, which rotates a vertical gear, connected to a horizontal gear. As that gear turns, it pushes an elastic-loaded lever until it snaps back in place, hitting a swinging boot. This causes the boot to kick over a bucket, sending a marble down a zig-zagging incline which feeds into a chute. This leads the marble to hit a vertical pole, at the top of which is an open hand, palm-up, which is supporting a larger ball (changed later on to a marble just like the starter one). The movement of the pole knocks the ball free to fall through a hole in its platform into a bathtub, and then through a hole in the tub onto one end of a seesaw. This launches a diver on the other end into a tub which is on the same base as the barbed pole supporting the mouse cage. The movement of the tub shakes the cage free from the top of the pole and allows it to fall. There are several points at which the mousetrap can commonly fail.”
Yea, I agre with Denis that physicists can be very silly sometimes.
Dear Anonymous, it would be helpful if you would consider using a name here, so I know I am talking to the same or different persons. Thanks. Now on to the "arguments".
"For a while there I thought you may have been lampooning your own views. The lateral ejections were optical illusions??"
Strawman. I didn't deny lateral ejections.
"Is that why large chunks of structural members were stuck in buildings hundreds of feet away."
This is best explained by gravitational collapse, not by explosives. The ejections were not accompanied by sufficiently loud and brisant explosion sounds. These would have overwhelmed every recording device.
"A more useful approach would be to watch this presentation from beginning to end"
That's a recipe for wasting 2 hours of one's life. I know already that Gage and his business outfit sell lies for a living.
"Alternatively, you may begin by devising a way to perform the “Progressive Collapse Challenge” as presented here:"
The relevancy of those requirements remains obscure.
"or construct any physical model where a gravitational collapse gets going like this"
David Chandler gets credit for observing a brief quirk in the fall of WTC7. He draws conclusions far beyond what is prudent.
"and pulverizes the building from the top down before it hits the ground"
There is no evidence that the building was pulverized to the ground.
"There are no witnesses to large amounts of molten steel in the basements weeks after the event, you say?"
No, I don't say that at all. I said something different: "No eye-witness account that talks of "molten steel" can be corrobotated. You can't identify molten materials by sight." (and several other arguments for why such accounts do nothing to prove any of your ideas). Please refrain from misrepresenting my position in the future. Thanks.
"You will see many more of them in Richard Gage presentation mentioned at the beginning."
No, I will see Gage's quote-mined accounts and misrepresentation, plus a few lies.
"The demolition of the WTC had been previously requested and refused (on account of the asbestos):"
What does that prove? Nothing.
The claim that Silverstein made a "huge profit" is a LIE. Yes, he got (or will get) around $4.6 billion from insurance companies, but he is liable to rebuild out of his own purse (ett. $3.1 billion), he still pays an annual lease in the $100million range to the Port Authority and as WTC1 is not yet rebuilt, he suffers constant loss of business that is higher than his lease payments, and will have been going on until 2013. 12 years times at least $150 million, that's $1.8 billion. Plus cost of rebuilding, minus insurance payments: 1.8+3.1-4.6 = Whoops! Silverstein cuts a LOSS from that incident!
This lie has been debunked years ago. Please stop using it.
"It’s interesting to watch the reaction of this Dutch demolition expert when watching WTC 7 collapse for the first time (like many people, he did not know anything about WTC 7)."
Yes, we can see how he knows NOTHING about WTC7, the fires, the timing collapse, or even the fact that nobody heard FREAKING LOUD EXPLOSIONS when collapse began, as is so typical for CDs. You can get a feel for that from Jowenko's own homepage: http://www.jowenko.com
His reaction? He is struggling to make up an ad-hoc explanation, and basically fails.
However, Jowenko ALSO is sure that the twin towers were NOT CDed! Did you know that? Do you agree with Jowenko on THAT?
"It’s also highly entertaining to see the BBC announcing the collapse of WTC 7 some 20 minutes in advance"
Debunked years ago. Why would the evil conspirators tell the press ahead of time of a huge event that they would report anyway once it happens? Nonsense. It is plain tio see that the BBC (and CNN earlier) made a mistake in the confusion of the day that came from them hearing for hours from the FDNY that WTC7 was in DANGER of collapsing. That's why the New York fire chiefs had hours earlier establiched a COLLAPSE zone around it, and kept reporters away from that COLLAPSE zone. You see, collapse of WTC7 had been nearly EXPECTED for a while before it happened based on fire engineering assessment of the first responders on the ground. Is the FDNY in on it? Did the firefighters conspire to kill hundreds of their own?
"Jim Hoffman's article..."
Jim Hoffman has been a 9/11-liar of the first hour. Few still dare associate themselves with that lunatic.
"Larry Silverstein ... letting his tongue slip in an interview to explain how he came to the decision to “just pull it!”"
Seriously, dude. This is so 2006. It is a matter of mere linguistic interpretation of context. What does the "it" refer to in context? What was Silverstein talking about with Niegro? Did Silverstein give order to the FIRE department to CD a building, and they did it - in 2 hours???
"The many ways by which his very clear words have been massaged"
You and your ilk are the ones massaging his very clear words.
"MIT engineer Jeff King on the pyroclastic clouds"
King is wrong to describe the dust clouds as "pyroclastic".
He vastly misrepresents the proportion of concrete that was reduced to dust, and that was left in the rubble. And he probably never looked at other highrise demolitions where large dust clouds flow into streets. For example http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79sJ1bMR6VQ
"Some people have done calculations. They are really not needed to understand that the energy from a gravitational collapse cannot pulverize most of the concrete even before it reaches the ground"
While I disagree that calculations are not needed (human intuition must fail at magnitudes like the mass and height of the towers), you are arguing from FALSE premises: It is not true that "most" of the concrete was "pulverised" before reaching ground. Lots of the dust we see higher up surely came from drywall, which breaks down much more easily, and the volumes of dust look like much more than the mass they actually contain.
"eject pieces two football fields away"
Push spaghetti at the ends till they break. Observe.
"cut all the core steel columns in fairly uniform pieces"
- They generelly broke where they were bolted/welded together - the places that offered the least resistance.
- In one tower, a good deal of the core was still sanding when all the rest was on the ground for seconds already. That rest just toppled and fell and disintegrated after falling down 50 to 200 meters. Would you expext bolted/welded column joins to survive a fall from 100 meters?
"and melt vast quantities of steel"
Strawman. No-one claims that anything got molten by the gravitational collapse. This apart from the already discussed fact that no evidence exists for significant amounts of molten steel.
"and keep it melted for weeks after the event"
An event that would do such a thing could be a "fire". Were there fires in the towers? In the debris? (And again pointing out that of course there was no molten steel to begin with)
"For whatever they are worth, here is one such calculation that assumes (with absurd generosity) that all the energy of motion of the falling steel is converted to heat to melt the steel"
Since that assumption is silly and not held to be true by anyone at all, the calculation is a pointless waste of time.
Here is a much better paper that starts out with more realistic assumptions:
http://www.911myths.com/WTCONC1.pdf
It actually computes available energy versus energy dissipation by both steel buckling and concrete crumbling, and concludes that energy was availaby in excess (more potential energy cvonverted into kinetic energy than used up by plastic deformation, meaning collapse would continue at an accelerated velocity). In passing, Greening notes that, to get the same effect of pulverization using explosives, 600 tonnes of high explosives would have been necessary, I point that I made similarly earlier. Certainly, we would somehow have observed this if it had happened. 600 tonnes of high explosives = many many many INSANELY explosions. WAY louder than anything heard that day. By orders of magnitude. You would have a million witnesses to these explosions. (By the way: In the whole state of New York, there are several thousand professional (licensed) civil and structural engineers; only ONE of them, a guy well in retirement age, signed Gage's AE911truth Petition. If there had been explosions that massive at the WTC, thousands of engineers would have heard them with their own ears throughout NYC and over in NJ.)
"The energy needed to produce the volume and rate of pyroclastic expansion alone has been calculated at some 50 times the total gravitational energy of the buildings."
This is rather implausible given the fact that many windows, cars and even humans were NOT totally destroyed who were in the path of these flows. But as I have not looked into this claim, I can't refute it at this time.
"to understand immediately by watching the collapses that gravity by itself cannot do all that"
Apparently you are unaware that only a very small fraction of the energy that brings down highrises in real explosive CDs comes from explosives; by far the most energy always comes from gravity.
"The explosive nature of the collapses looks obviously explosive because they were produced by explosives."
The utter lack of the SOUNDS of explosions with the right timing, loudness and brisance totally undermines your claim: No freaking loud explosions (not those little booms heard in the building, but those heard over in Hoboken by EVERYone of the thousands of onlookers there) were heard. None. With no VERY loud explosions, you know there was no explosive demolition. Look at this: http://wn.com/Landmark_Tower_Implosion_Fort_Worth_Texas
Notice how all the people jerked when the first BANG!!! came. Where are these BANG!!!s in New York? Nowehere to be heard!
"The demolition of WTC 7 looks exactly like a classic demolition because it is."
But it doesn't SOUND like one. Jowenko was shown a silent video, that way he was fooled. Had they played the clip with sound, he would have said "hey wait, I hear no explosions".
"The hundreds of workers and witnesses who reported hearing many explosions all over the buildings before they collapsed"
None were consistent in loudness, timing, location and brisance with CD. In every building fire, things go BOOM. Ask any firefighter. What you DO need is a series of VERY, INSANELY loud BANG!!!s right at the moment that collapse starts. Loud enough to be heard from Hoboken, loud enough to be heard from Staten Island, loud enough to be heard by hundreds of thousands throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn. Why do you only have hundreds of witnesses? You definitely need hundreds of thousands! And you ought to hear in on most videos. Why don't you?
"Silverstein said they decided to “just pull it” because they did."
It would be nice if you buried this old lie now and never touch it again. It stinks.
"People new that WTC 7 was going to collapse"
Yes, because that was the assessment of the Fire Fighters best trained in the world to make such an assessment. Every firefighter and structural engineer knows that unfough fire is a great problem for steel frame, and they saw it move long before it fell. It was a good call, and actually good evidence for fire-induced collapse.
"to the point of counting down the seconds"
That is a misrepresentation of someone putting in a lot of speculation into something he barely overheard.
"The BBC said it had collapsed a few minutes before it did, because it had been told."
Why on earth would "they" have to tell the BBC? Do you think the BBC would have missed it? Can you explain that plausibly?
"Fire does not announce its immediate intentions with such precision"
That's why you need well trained specialists. There are several of these at the FDNY. These senior fire officers are often degreed fire engineers. It is their damned job to figure out what a given fire will do! Please call any downtown Manhattan fire house and tell them what you tell me, and please report back what they tell you!
"and fire does not cause demolition-style collapses"
Incorrect. ire DOES cause total collapse sometimes, and these collapses were NOT CD-style.
"You are not computing anything because you are not comparing any of that to what was needed and because most of that "available" energy could not be used to crush the buildings down."
Frank Greening did it, here:
http://www.911myths.com/WTCONC1.pdf
Conclusion: More than enough energy available.
"When a building, or any structure, collapses by gravity, you don’t obseve that does it from the top down"
You don't observe this in CDs, either. But since each natural collapse is individual, you will observe all kinds of things. Basically, you make an argument from incredulity here.
"you don't observe its potential gravitational energy pulverizes all the concrete"
All the concrete wasn't pulverized. Why do you repeat that FALSEHOOD?
"and creates pools of molten steel"
There were no proven pools of molten steels. Why don't you repeat that FALSEHOOD?
"and throws things horizontally and even upward in all directions"
There wasn't much thrown upward to speak of. Why do you repeat that FALSEHOOD?
"The total potential gravitational energy of a building can only be converted to kinetic and thermal energy ONCE the whole building has hit the ground."
Oh now I see the problem. You don't understand the basics of mechanical physics. This sentence makes little sense. read Greening's paper, and you will understand that for every floor, or indeed every foot of collapse, more potential energy was turned into kinetic energy than was subsequently turned into plastic strain.
"It cannot be used to crush the building from the top down or do any other such marvels."
Because you don't understand physics, you make false claims, based on nothing.
"The kinetic energy of the planes, whatever it was, was absorbed by the buildings with remarkable aplomb."
Yes. The mechanism of absorption was mechanical deformation, often in the form of buckling and severing structural steel.
"for an hour showing no hint of deformation, tilting etc."
This is incorrect. Read the fire sequence part of the NIST report to get a better understanding. Floor sagging was observed early, perimeter columns pulled in a short while before collapse initiation. WTC7 started moving visibly at least 100 seconds before it started falling.
"Then, *suddenly*, their tops exploded and looked like erupting volcanoes"
This is incorrect. It didn't start "suddenly", as explained above, it didn't resemble an "eruption" (that is an optic illusion because you are too enthralled with the ensuing dust), and nothing exploded. It was easy to spot how the tops started to tilt and drop when collapse began.
"the buildings tore themselves apart from the top down in symetrical order"
How would this be unexpected when the buildings themselves were symmetrical? However, symmetry wasn't so great, really. It's a truther mantra that means nothing.
"at near free fall speed"
Another truther mantra. HOW near free fall speed? Several models, working with energy considerations, momentum conservation, or other principles, and takiing into account engineering parameters, do indeed predict an acceleration in the vivinity of 2/3 of g. That is 1/3 away from g. Is that "near" for you? By the way: David Chandler, the man who found that one part of WTC7 fell freely for a brief while, also analysed several true CDs and found that freefall is NOT a characteristic of CD.
"Most of the jet fuel consumed itself in the first ballfire, and the remaining fuel could not last long."
Note that no-one claims that burning fuel as such brought anything down! Fuel mainly served as an incendiary that started fires throughout several floors simultaneously, aggravating the situation. Of course, most combustion energy came from office contents.
"That kind of fuel cannot in any case bring steel anywhere near to its melting point"
Strawman. No-one claims this. There was no molten steel, and nobody theorizes anymore that melting of steel played a role in the collapse. This is 2003 stuff, or older. Why are you rehashing stupidity that is 8 years old?
"burning in oxygen-deprived conditions (as evidenced by the black smoke)"
You are mistaken. Black smoke is not usually indicative of a particularly oxygen-deprived fire. Plastics often burn black even when well-ventilated. As office fires go, the twin-towers had very well ventilated ones, as many windows had been blown out with the crashes, and a brisk blew that day, unobstructed at that height. Fire scientists know very well how high temps can get in such conditions, regardless of smoke colour: Enough to defeat structural steel.
"The chemical energy of the office materials is totally irrelevant because the overwhelming majority of those materials did NOT undergo combustion"
Did you see the fires after most of the jet fuels had burned? They were freaking HUGE and unfought. People above the fire floors could not evacuate because conditions were hellish and several floors fully involved. I find this particular statement of yours bordering on despicable. Certainly, the dozends who jumped to their deaths would not have agreed that "The chemical energy of the office materials is totally irrelevant". It is what made them chose suicide.
"The fire was located in a specific area at the impact zone."
Incorrect. In fact, in one tower we saw people looking out the impact hole because fires were more severe elsewhere. Read the NIST report, along with all the video and photo material.
"There were firefighters below that area (which was 80 to 90 percent of the buildings) moving around and NOT reporting fires"
Correct. So? Fires caused collapse on the fire floor, gravity did the rest. That's the story. Pretty easy.
"reporting explosions all over the place"
Yes, but not explosives, and no structural damage from explosives. Transformers were known to go BOOM. Fuel that fell down elevator shafts went "boom". High explosive charges are a hole different thing.
"The fires may have burned at most 2-5 percent of the office materials if that much."
More on the fire floors. Percentage isn't relevant here. Total amount is. It was massive. Just watch the videos again.
"In any case, office materials are even more incapable than airplane fuel to melt steel."
No steel was melted, and nobody claims it was during the office fires. Why do you hang on to this stupid strawman?
Office fires are more than capable of destroying structural steel's capacity. That's why they put fire proofing on structural steel: to guard against office fires.
The kind of fireproofing that was stripped off of many structural steel members by the enormous forces of the plane crashes (the WTC steel proofing was so flimsy, you could knock it off with your fist).
"Whatever heat the steel was subjected to from the office fires at the impact zone would dissipate very quickly by conduction through the 100,000 tons of steel in each tower."
Luckily, you are not in charge of devising building codes or planning high rise buildings with a view to guard against fire hazards.
Fire scientists and structural engineers disagree with you.
"Have you ever seen steel crush itself?"
Yes.
"Have you ever seen steel crush itself and melt itself in the process?"
No. Bury that weird strawman. It is not in anybody's theory.
"I’ve watched this short interview with Harrit http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RNyaoYR3y0&feature=fvsr explaining how once he came to understand what was going on, there was no way back for him and he felt compelled to “do something” to rise people’s awareness."
Dear Anonymous,
Activist teacher (Denis) links in the post that you are commenting to a sound refutatuion of Harrit's alleged findings.
http://climateguy.blogspot.com/2010/11/peer-review-of-harrit-et-al-on-911-cant.html
(I could give you more refutations; we all know already that Harrit simply found two kinds of paint/primer on steel/rust flakes; see, he didn't even figure out that his samples weren't all the same! Steven Jones has in the meantime, unwittingly, presented data that makes it almost inevitable to conclude that one of their red chips was indeed red WTC primer, while the othere samples were some other, yet unidentified paint).
Harrit is wrong.
He did NOT find thermitic material.
I don't know what is driving him - as a chemist, he should easily see why his Bentham paper is crap. He certainly has been pointed to its many many weaknesses and misrepresentations. Is he a liar? A lunatic? Was he fooled by his partners and is now covering his ass? Trying to become a con-man like Richard Gage (who earned $75K in 2009 from AE911truth selling lies)? I don't know.
Just pointing out that you are hanging your faith on false prophets.
"architect Richard Gage. At the end of his excellent presentation he urges people to "do something about it""
Have you noticed that his "petition" has been sitting there for almost 4 years now? 4 years during which signers die, retire, change their minds...
This list is grwoing outdated.
Have you wondered if, and when, Gage will submit the "petition" to Congress?
I suspect he is merely fooling people into signing that list because it is dishonstely addressed at "Congress", when in fact Gage never plans to DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. There never will be a new investigation, because it would be against Gage's personal interest: He received an income of more than $75,000 from that "non-profit" operation (havent's seen the 2010 form 990 yet). Then he goes on an dishonestky calls the signers "members". Members? Is there an organization? No. Annual fees? No. Conferences? No. Any other activities that would make a signer a "member"? Not at all! For all we know, the 1488 "professionals" don't even remember they ever signed up.
Where are the engineering paper written by Gage's civil engineers, or architects? Those published in their professional, peer-reviewed journals instead of scams like Bentham?
Why aren't they collecting money for a new investigation, and instead give the money to Gage's personal income, and travel expenses?
Oh, and why does ae911truth maintain so many false claims on the very homepage?
Gage isn't "doing something about it". He made selling lies a live for himself.
No time or desire here to reply to your comments about the absence of explosions because you did not hear them but thousands of people did, and CAN be heard if you dedicate some time to watching the available footage. Or any other of the empty statements to the effect that things are not so because you say so.
I just quickly scrolled to the last paragraph of your endless nonsense to highlight this pearl.
When I mentioned that the collapse of WTC 7 was announced by workers right before it started, and one rescuer from some Air Force unit even describes a countdown, you comment:
"That's why you need well trained specialists. There are several of these at the FDNY. These senior fire officers are often degreed fire engineers. It is their damned job to figure out what a given fire will do! Please call any downtown Manhattan fire house and tell them what you tell me, and please report back what they tell you!"
I see. The sudden demolition style collapse of a building that is standing perfectly still, to the *countdown* of workers, is due to the superior expertise of the New York City fire department and their prescient ability to read the intentions of fires down to the second. They are also the ones who must have sent the BBC the script to annonce its collapse in the past tense 20 minutes before it happened.
"and fire does not cause demolition-style collapses"
Incorrect. ire DOES cause total collapse sometimes, and these collapses were NOT CD-style."
WTC 7 looked exactly like a classic controlled demolition. Even defenders of the official fairy tale agree. An absolutely perfect job that can be seen from at least 10 different angles. The towers were not "classic style", far from it, but you can start a demolition wherever you want in a building, and the extra energy needed for that awesome show is even much more obvious. There is rich footage of it.
Please send examples of demolition style collapses (or WTC style collapses) caused by fire in steel framed buildings.
"thousands of people did [hear explosions]"
Earlier, it was only hundreds. Oh well.
None of these explosions were consistent in loudness, timing, location and brisance with high explosive CD. Almost all of these observations have at least one plausible explanation other than high-explosives. Things that go "boom" in a distressed and burning buildings are many, and every experiencerd fire fighter has heard and reported "eyplosions" in many fires.
"CAN be heard if you dedicate some time to watching the available footage"
No. It takes a lot of imagination to make oneselve believe there are sounds of high explosives. Go to you tube and search for videos of highrise demolitions. Any video will do, really, as long as it has sound. Doesn't matter if camera is miles away: You will always, invariably find that the detonations are MUCH louder than the collapse itself. People standing at a safe distance aways are frequently in AWE, STUNNED by the INSANELY loud BANG!!!s. All of the implosion you will find are for much smaller buildings. For the WTC, you'd need more and biger charges.
NONE of that is heard on even a single video footage.
"The sudden demolition style collapse of a building that is standing perfectly still, to the *countdown* of workers, is due to the superior expertise of the New York City fire department and their prescient ability to read the intentions of fires down to the second. They are also the ones who must have sent the BBC the script to annonce its collapse in the past tense 20 minutes before it happened."
If this is your interpretation of what I wrote, your reading skills are dismal.
Slowly for you:
- There was no countdown. You have to stretch your belief muscle a long way to fall for this idiocy.
- Nobody foresaw the collapse down to the second. Silliness.
- It wasn't workers, but senior officers of the FDNY who assessed the integrity of the towers and found WTC7 to be in danger of collapse hours before it did
- The news media certainly became aware of this at some point before the collapse. A momentary confusion probably lead to a false report.
"WTC 7 looked exactly like a classic controlled demolition"
But it didn't sound like one. And it didn't have the flashes and the squibs like you see on every video of true explosive CDs. So no, it didn't even sound like one.
"An absolutely perfect job"
Perfect in which way??
"the extra energy needed for that awesome show is even much more obvious"
Saying something is "obvious" is often shorthand for "I can't prove it, please believe me". Greening proved that no extra energy was needed, as an excess of potential energy was already stored in the mass of the standing towers. You need to argue that proof, not make unsubstantiated claims. (Greening is of course not the only one with a proof of that kind. You find others in respected peer-reviewed journals).
"Please send examples of demolition style collapses (or WTC style collapses) caused by fire in steel framed buildings."
Kader toy factory building one, Thailand.
Wikipedia: "the building was reinforced with un-insulated steel girders which quickly weakened and collapsed when heated by the flames."
(Even if there was no prior collapse of that kind doesn't mean it doesn't happen; the "never before in history" argument is fallacious, or else you are still a virgin)
The Thai toy factory fire and collapse show how one can scrape the bottom of a barrel.
I was clearly asking for examples of demolition-style collapses. The Thai toy factory collapse proceeded over at least 35 minutes from the moment the firefighters arrived, at 4:40 pm, when it was already "beginning to collapse" (i.e. visibly sagging and deforming irregularly as it was engulfed in flames) to the gradual messy end at 5:15
That's what you might expect from a fire induced collapse when it ocurs: A messy slow thing that begins by progressive sagging and deformations.
The buildings are also incomparable. The Thai sweatshop had been built with minimal or no code, with scant steel of unknown quality and completely uninsulated.
There have been many many big fires (incomparably bigger than at any WTC building) in steel-framed high rises all over the world, that burned much longer and gutted the buildings - but the steel structure remained standing.
Bottom line, as Griffin put it: No building collapse showing all the characteristics of a controlled demolition has ever NOT been a controlled demolition.
Ther is a Russian saying to cast mockery on implausible appeals to chance: "By chance, there was a piano in the bushes"
By chance, fire learned how to keep universal time to sever columns simultaneously and then sequentially up a building.
Below is a quick timeline of things covered in the Gage presentation. The evidence for what is denied and was carefully kept out of the official reports is overwhelming, particularly the pre-collapse explosions, the long-lingering molten metal, the complete pulverization, the tests for the steel etc.
http://vimeo.com/17994693
Fires and fire tests starting at 11:51
Tests by British Steel at 12:50
Demolitions and fires 15:40
WTC 7 collapse onset (explosions etc), starting at 19:47
Dan Rather describing collapse and comparing it with controlled demolition starting at 19:43
Comparison with controlled demolition side by side: 21:45
Free fall acceleration: 23:40
EXPLOSIONS (WTC7) starting at 25:16
Countdown to WTC 7 described at 25: 58
(described by Kevin McPadden from an Air Force special operation unit for search and rescue)
Pools of molten metal starting at 27:25
several references to molten steel by witnesses, images of red hot steel being lifted from the rubble.
This goes on for several minutes, dozens of testimony
33: 45 firefighters describing: “down below you see molten steel running down the channels, like you are in a foundry, like lava”
34:36, the boots melt. Down below temps are 1100 to 1500 degrees, 6 weeks after the event
Flame-engulfed steel-frame highrise buildings, examples of: 47:01
Official reports startingat: 48:10
FEMA’s report conclusion on WTC7: “the specifics of the fires and how they caused the building to collapse remain unknown”[…] “the best hypothesis (fire + damage) has only a low probability of occurrence” 51:42
Almost all evidence destroyed 52:33
911 Commission Report – WTC 7 collapse is absent from the report: 54:02
Foreknowledge of WTC 7 collapse, starting at: 55:40
“we’re gonna have to bring it down" [...] "keep an eye on that building, it's about to come down" "the building is about to blow up", countdown etc.
Core structure of towers: 1: 01: 30
Analysis of collapses: 1: 06
Testimony of detonations and red flashes before collapse starts at 1: 07 (goes on for several minutes); explosions, explosions and more explosions.
None of that testimony and footage made it to any of the official reports.
Comparison of explosive events with towers: 1: 13:07
Regular explosives are much louder than thermite: 1: 16
Large structural pieces weighing several tons found 600 feet from the tower, needing large initial horizontal speeds of at least 50 mph, incomprehensible in a gravitational collapse. 1: 28
Pulverization 1: 31
Virtually all the concrete and office equipment was pulverized to talcom-powder size particles.
1:32: 35 Firefighter Joe Casaliggi: “you have two 110 floor office buildings. You don’t find a desk, you don’t find a chair, you don’t find a telephone or a computer. The biggest piece of a telephone I found was half of a key pad. The building collapsed to dust”
Gravitational potential and what is being required to do: 1:33:35
700 very small bone fragments on roof across the street found years later: 1: 35
(1,151 victims completely unaccounted for)
1:37:52 Fire Engineering Magazine on the FEMA report: “A half-baked farce”
1:38:20 NIST report: Ten thousand pages. Of which one half page is dedicated to the collapse itself. “We are unable to provide a full explanation of the collapse of the Twin Towers.”
1:41:51 Physical tests and computer simulations. No visualizations shown.
1: 43 Physical tests performed by Udewriters Labs at the request of NIST.
1:47 FEMA arrived the previous night, ready for action. Giuliani says he was told the towers were going to collapse.
More Anonymouses - are you all the same? Or different posters? Why don't you do anything to identify yourself? Not nice to talk to you :(
The first Anonymous after my last post mostly presents, in lieu of arguments, a number of youtube videos (John Gross, David Chandler, Kevin Ryan, Ryan and Steven Jones), without summarizung what their point is. I will not debate youtube videos. Please make arguments in written form. You may then reference videos.
Whatever Kevin Ryan says: He is wrong. Talking out of his area of expertise (he is a water tester for crying out loud), he got rightfully fired for shitting on his company.
Is UL in on the inside job?
@ 2nd Anonymous:
"I was clearly asking for examples of demolition-style collapses. The Thai toy factory collapse proceeded over at least 35 minutes"
Okay, fair point, if true (I frankly dodn't know that detail).
At least it is an example of total collapse of steel frame structure due to fire only. Obviously, it didn't have the 100 tons of TNT equivalent potential energy to punch down catastrophically.
By the way: Why do you want to see precedent again?
"That's what you might expect from a fire induced collapse when it ocurs: A messy slow thing that begins by progressive sagging and deformations."
What happens if you have 15 or 30 stories pushing down on these deformations? Will they settle down gently?
"The buildings are also incomparable. The Thai sweatshop had been built with minimal or no code, with scant steel of unknown quality and completely uninsulated."
They are of course not very comparable, but not for that reason: The Twin Towers did not conform to building codes anymore after planes crashed into them. For example, insulation was stripped, steel quality vastly lowered due to severing and buckling during impact.
"There have been many many big fires (incomparably bigger than at any WTC building)..."
For example? I expect you to quote measurements of "fire size" from expert sources (fire-scientific assessment).
"...in steel-framed high rises all over the world, that burned much longer and gutted the buildings - but the steel structure remained standing."
And that did not suffer plane crashes which severed many columns outright, and spilled incendiaries into several floors at once. Also, please limit your examples to fires that were unfought at all times, as was the case with all 3 WTC towers.
"Bottom line, as Griffin put it: No building collapse showing all the characteristics of a controlled demolition has ever NOT been a controlled demolition."
Griffin is a theologian and out of his depth. Besides, he is doing fallacious philosophy. "Never happened before" <> "can't happen".
"By chance, fire learned how to keep universal time to sever columns simultaneously and then sequentially up a building."
Strawman. No-one claims fire severed columns simultaneously. Obviously you don't know the theory you are arguing against.
"Below is a quick timeline of things covered in the Gage presentation."
You forgot to list the timestamps where Gage tells lies, distortions, false analogies, appeals to false authority, quote-mined statements and statements out of comtext, and other fallacies. Gage maintains outright lies on the homepage of his business outfit, why do you trust his presentations?
Mot of your timestamps are labled with key words only, but once you elaborate a little, it becomes clear you fall for rubbish. For example:
"Dan Rather describing collapse and comparing it with controlled demolition"
Yes, so it LOOKS superficially, to a layman like yourself, me, or Dan Rather, like a CD. So what? Doesn't mean it IS one! Is Dan Rather an authority on this? No! ->Argument from False Authority
"several references to molten steel by witnesses, images of red hot steel being lifted from the rubble"
Hahaha. "red hot steel being lifted from the rubble" means SOLID steel, not molten steel! Red-hot means it was well below 1000°C.
"This goes on for several minutes, dozens of testimony"
Problem with video is, they don't give you references, so you can't check the context. If you did that, ou would find that every single of these statements must be rejected on one or several of reasons such as
- Didn't report "molten"
- Didn't report "steel"
- Hearsay
- Conclusion formed does not follow from observation reported
- Witness does not indicate how "steel" could be told from other possible materials
- Etc.
Basically, no-one can tell from a glowing liquid what material it is. I can show you pictures or videos of glowing metals and ask you what it was: You would have not the slightest clue. And neither would most, if not all, of the witnesses.
Eye witness testimony is NEVER strong unless corroborated. There is no corroboration for "pools of molten steel". They did not exist.
“down below you see molten steel running down the channels, like you are in a foundry, like lava”
Yeah, I wish I could find the entire video, with context: Where was this spoken, and when? What material were the "channels" made of? How could the firefighters tell molten steel from molten copper, molten aluminium, molten zinc? Molten mix of things? Like Lava? Lava rarely appears more than red hot. Molten steel is not red hot, it's white hot and very bright. "like lava" is indicative of NOT steel.
"the boots melt"
What temp do you need fir that?
"Down below temps are 1100 to 1500 degrees,"
degrees F or C?
"6 weeks after the event"
Has Gage an explanation why the demolition procedure of 9/11 would still melt steel 6 weeks later? No he doesn't. He won't touch that. It's silliness. He hopes that the gullible will fill in the blanks and believe that this super-duper stuff called "nanothermite" has the magic property of producing hellish temps for weeks on end. Nonsense.
(ctd.)
"FEMA’s report conclusion"
Many years have passed since. Science has progressed, FEMA has been bettered and corrected. Trutherdom has stagnated.
"911 Commission Report – WTC 7 collapse is absent from the report"
Why should it be in there? Was it targeted by terrorists? Did any government agency fail to protect it? Boogeyman.
""keep an eye on that building, it's about to come down""
Yes, obviously because the experts knew buildings can come down due to fires.
"the building is about to blow up"
Buy yourself a bag of grammar, and a good vocabulary, and analyse that one. It does not mean what you think it means.
"explosions, explosions and more explosions"
Not a single one of them consistent in timing, location, loudness and brisance with CD.
"None of that testimony and footage made it to any of the official reports."
Most of it doesn't belong in them.
"Regular explosives are much louder than thermite"
Thermite is not an explosive. If it were, it would be just as loud.
"Large structural pieces weighing several tons found 600 feet from the tower, needing large initial horizontal speeds of at least 50 mph, incomprehensible in a gravitational collapse. 1: 28"
The opposite is true: ONLY comprehensible in a gravitational collapse.
How big an explosive charge (pounds of TNT for example) would you need to pull that feat off? How loud would it be? (Remember, thermite doesn't help you here, it's not an explosive)
"Virtually all the concrete and office equipment was pulverized to talcom-powder size particles."
Not true.
"Firefighter Joe Casaliggi: ... The building collapsed to dust"
Really? Can't corroborate that:
https://publicintelligence.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/FF_Debris7.jpg
I see debris of all sizes: Large slabs, man-sized, fist-sized, coarse dirt, dust.
I guess Casaliggi misremembers.
"“We are unable to provide a full explanation of the collapse of the Twin Towers.”"
Correct assessment. Too huge a FEA model would be required, and little would be gained from this for code recommendations.
Okay I'll leave it at that. Gage is throwing tons of dirt at the viewer of the video, and the gullible never stop to check his sources, and think hard about what it actually means. That's why the video format of presenting science is great for charlatans. Scientists and engineers publish in scientific and professional journals, and present at scientific and professional conferences.
Gage presents at "press conferences" and the like and never faces his peers. He knows why.
The official testimony of hundreds of firefighters, workers and witnesses that were at the scene and inside the buildings carries a lot more weight than the casual dismissal of their statements by people who were not there.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZ4dVo5QgYg
In the only physical tests known to have been performed by NIST for their study, the steel trusses were heated for far longer times, under heavier loads and at higher temperatures than the maximum times, loads and temperatures known to have existed in the WTC steel from their own analysis. No failure ocurred. The tests were dismissed. Computer models were brought to the rescue.
The gravitational potential energy of a given mass can be described as the amount of energy required to keep that mass moving at free-fall acceleration in a vacuum. The energy that is used for that, is not available to do any other work. WTC 7 fell at virtual free fall speed and the towers fell at 75% free fall speed in a vacuum. That energy cannot be used both to maintain free fall acceleration and do all the other amazing *extra* work it is being required to do, like grinding the buildings to dust on their way down, crushing or cutting their support columns all the way to the ground, ejecting large heavy chunks of structural steel at high horizontal speeds, and producing large quantities of heat capable of melting metal underground for weeks. This kind of performance is known in the Christian scriptures as “Feeding the Multitude” (and various other titles) where fish and loaves of bread are multiplied by Jesus on the spot to feed the hungry. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feeding_the_multitude
Scientists and engineers use visual aids to their presentations every day. Charlatanism, empty dismissals and appeal to authority are features generally seen in the defenders of the official theory.
The NIST account of the collapses has been aptly described as so vague that it barely qualifies as a hypothesis. In fact the actual collapses are not even analyzed in the report. Vagueness is essential to that hypothesis because any attempt at concreteness quickly dissolves it. There must be hundreds of ways to show in detailed fashion that a purely gravitational collapse is impossible.
These are some:
http://www.journalof911studies.com/volume/2010/Falsifiability.pdf
http://www.journalof911studies.com/volume/2010/ChandlerDownwardAccelerationOfWTC1.pdf
http://www.journalof911studies.com/volume/2008/TheMissingJolt7.pdf
and many more to be found here:http://www.journalof911studies.com/
Comparing probabilities.
In testimony given by Susan Ginsberg, a staff member of the National Commission on Terrorist attacks upon the United States, in the January 26, 2004 Public Hearing, we learn how the passports were found. Perhaps the most remarkable was the passport of Satam al Suqami, which was found by a “passerby” in a nearby street less than an hour after the planes crashed into the buildings. The finding of this passport was reported by the main media the following day. The testimony by Ginsberg reads as follows:
"Four of the hijackers passports have survived in whole or in part. Two were recovered from the crash site of United Airlines flight 93 in Pennsylvania. These are the passports of Ziad Jarrah and Saeed al Ghamdi. One belonged to a hijacker on American Airlines flight 11. This is the passport of Satam al Suqami. A passerby picked it up and gave it to a NYPD detective shortly before the World Trade Center towers collapsed. A fourth passport was recovered from luggage that did not make it from a Portland flight to Boston on to the connecting flight which was American Airlines flight 11. This is the passport of Abdul Aziz al Omari."
"In addition to these four, some digital copies of the hijackers passports were recovered in post-9/11 operations. Two of the passports that have survived, those of Satam al Suqami and Abdul Aziz al Omari, were clearly doctored. To avoid getting into classified detail, we will just state that these were manipulated in a fraudulent manner in ways that have been associated with al Qaeda."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PENTTBOM#Passports_recovered
The vision of Satam Suqami's passport getting out of his pocket, or his carry-on luggage, and flying unscathed trough the fire ball, then getting out of the building and landing on the street to be promply picked up by a passerby inspires undescribable feelings.
I would submit, however, that the probability of this happening, no matter how infinitesimal, is still much higher than the probability of the buildings *spontaneously* performing the show they performed one hour later.
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