Why does BYU disparage this guy? If I recall, didn’t BYU distance themselves from his views?
Actually most collapsing highrise steel-frame buidings fall over, it seems. Something about the internal steel frame, I believe. It seems that excepting the WTC buildings, no steel-frame building has ever collapsed due to fire.
Also the WTC7 footage (which building was, it should be noted, not hit by a plane and had no jet fuel) does indeed look like a standard demolition. The only damage to the building was one of its bottom corners was tagged by falling rubble from one of the main towers, and some internal fires. Bhe building does not collapse in the direction of the damaged corner; it goes straight down, onto its foundation.
In the WTC7 building, the puffs of smoke start on a lower floor and proceed upward, rather in defiance to the normal direction of collapsing rubble.
The question is not of whether the jet set the building on fire, or at least, whether it set fires in the building. (None of WTC bildings ever became towering infernos.) The question is whether the fire would become hot enough to melt steel and collapse the floors. The answer would seem to be a resounding no.
It seems that the US goverment tried running simulations of the effect of fire on recreations of WTC floors, in an attempt to make them collapse. They were unable to do so, even if they bult the models without any fireproofing and turned the heat up. So they turned to computer simulations, which apparently still didn’t collapse, until they tweaked the settings a little.
I will look into the other threads for a debunking, though if this tread is any indication, I’m not so far impressed.
I always find it odd how “pools of molten metal” are used as evidence that the buildings were brought down by controlled demolition. Controlled demolitions never leave pools of molten metal. The cutting charges used to bring down buildings sever structural beams by force, not heat. Even if as sometimes claimed thermite was somehow used in the demolition, it would have been done burning in seconds and any molten metal created would have long cooled off by the time it was uncovered. The only thing that could have created conditions capable of keeping metal molten weeks after the collapses would have been a slow smouldering fire of burning fuel and office contents under the rubble. Pools of molten metal would actually back up the official story, not the controlled demolition theories.
Of course, this is moot as the pools of molten metal don’t seem to have existed in the first place. There are photos of red-hot (but not molten) pieces of debris being removed from the pile, but the claims of actual pools of molten metal haven’t been backed up by either hard evidence or first-hand witness accounts. It’s all second-hand word-of-mouth of something that someone heard someone say.
The OP may find it informative to follow the following link and read:
I am making the assumption the professor is a Mormon. The OP said he is “religious”, so I assume that means he believes in the tenets of his faith. That means he thinks that stone tablets were discovered in a road cut in upstate New York written in “New Egyptian” and that Joseph Smith was able to read them by using a transparent stone.
Also, from here
“A Jewish Prophet by the name of Lehi was commanded of God to lead his family out of Jerusalem in 600 BC. It tells of this people living in Central and North America , of their cities, and of their temples. Knowledge of such a people was never known in America until the work Antiquarians, in Central America by Stephens and Catherwood published in 1843.”
How could they do this without somebody noticing them?
It’s a lie that buildings topple over. Have you ever watched a building topple over? They don’t topple over. Whoever told you that steel buildings topple over was a lying liar. Why do they collapse and not topple over?
Gravity. The forces pulling down on a building are what we scientists like to call very large. The forces holding them together are pretty puny.
It’s called the laws of physics.
How is that especially convenient? What part of the plot would have had to be altered if there had been a fighter escort?
That would have made 1, 2, and 3 easier to pull off, but does not eliminate the additional risk of installing them at all.
No, but the number of people necessary to implement, and then cover up, such a plot is much greater than the number of people necessary to simply install the explosives. Again, not an insurmountable object, but why take the extra risk?
But the real problem here is, if they had time to wire all of the buildings with explosives, why not just trigger the explosives, and then blame it on Al Qaeda? Why bother with the planes at all?
Once the planes started hitting, Bush had all the pretext he needed. Taking down the building with additional explosives is an unnecessary additional risk, and makes no operational sense. If he knew Al Qaeda was going to attack, why not just sit back and let it happen? Why take the additional risk of wiring the buildings ahead of time?
“The professors” is rather misleading, as the overwhelming majority of professional and academic experts who have examined the attack and the resulting debris agree that the destruction was caused solely by the planes hitting the two towers, and by falling debris from those two attacks.
What photographic evidence? And how does the conventional explanation for the attacks violate the law of gravity?
All of them. Plus common sense and basic logic.
The most clever part of the 9/11 conspiracy to justify invading Iraq was using 17 Saudis and no Iraqis as hijackers. Actually using citizens of the country you wanted to invade would have been too obvious.
Steel steadily loses strength as it is heated. There’s no need for it to actually reach its melting point to cause a collapse. You also must take into account the physical trauma of a jetliner ramming into the center of the building at some 500 mph or so.
Cite? I never heard of this, sounds fun.
Good post by AndrewL.
They wouldn’t match the Saudi’s bid, and we were already way, way overbudget.
False.
Other steel-framed buildings have collapsed due to fire.
WTC7 may not have been struck directly by the airplane, but it was hit by a massive amount of debris as the towers collapsed. This debris caused significant structural damage, and also severed pressurised diesel fuel lines feeding fuel from tanks in the basement to multiple generators throughout the building.
WTC7 suffered massive damage which included a gouge from the roof extending at least 20 stories down, possibly all the way to the ground floor. The resulting rubble pile spilled across adjacent streets and caused severe damage to 30 West Broadway, which later had to be demolished as a result.
These puffs of smoke began after the building had already begun collapsing. The mechanical penthouses on the roof collapsed into the building about 7 seconds before the outer facade begins to fall. Note that the puffs of smoke begin after the outer facade is already falling, which is consistent with compressed air blowing out windows, but not with cutting charges.
This looks a hell of a lot like a towering inferno to me.
Strawman. The beams did not have to melt. Steel weakens significantly at temperatures far below what is required to melt it. An ordinary office fire is capable of reaching temperatures capable of significantly weakening steel beams.
This is a lie. NIST performed a range of tests with different fire intensities and different levels of damage to the insulation. This was not done in an attempt to make them collapse. It was done in an attempt to learn what degree of damage was required to cause a collapse. The simulations which resulted in a collapse matched the observed damage reasonably well.
We had an illustration of a steel structure collapsing in a fire here in California recently.
The thing about simulations is that they’re imperfect models of reality. Most computer simulations and models require some tweaking to get them to work the way the full-scale process works.
The key to all of this is WTC 7. Crashing two planes full of people into WTC 1 and 2, another into the Pentagon, and the aborted effort to crash a fourth into the White House or US Capitol would not have been enough in itself to bring the US population to a fever. WTC 7 was the straw that broke the camel’s back. “No, not WTC 7!” cried America as their beloved structure crashed to the ground. So many memories were associated with WTC 7; that proud little structure, the “little building that could”, whose proud facade belied it’s short stature in the shadow of WTC 1 and 2’s bullying presence.
No, they don’t. Collapsing buildings collapse straight down, not over. There’s no special trick to a controlled demolition that makes a building fall like that. They just sever the major structural supports, and let gravity do the rest.
Nor would it. Once the supports have been taken out, whatever they’re supporting will collapse straight down. The stress of all that weight landing on the next floor from a height of fifteen or twenty feet is more than the supports for that floor can handle, and that floor drops, too. Repeat until you hit basement.
If the explosives were placed in an elevator shaft, how are the puffs even visible from the outside of the building?
The other question is, is there any evidence of melted steel at any of the WTC cites? Interestingly enough, the answer is the same.
Which indicates to me that the modelling was flawed, and not the theory of the attack. Unless they built a 1:1 scale replica of the WTC and flew an actual passenger jet into it, the model and the actual event are going to react in significantly different ways, apparently significant enough to make it impossible to recreate the attack in model form.
This is simply hilarious to anyone who has ever worked in any field related to software development. Of course they had to tweak the program! No piece of software ever works right on the first pass! I mean, have you ever even used a Microsoft product? They can’t get a word processor to work right reliably, you expect someone to be able to model the millions of different factors and forces working on something as complex as a burning skyscraper falling apart, and get it right on the first go?
What would impress you?
Forget the physical evidence or the opinions of engineers, chemists, etc. That’s important, obviously, but just think for a moment.
The part I’d be focused on is the lack of insider testimony. We know all about the run up to the Iraq war, the background discussion behind dozens of coups, the details of CIA led death squads and terrorists, COINTELPRO, U.S. support for ruthless dictators the world over and all sorts of other acts which the government would really rather us not know…and why? Besides declassified documents, it’s because people speak out. We have former CIA directors saying “Yeah, we did that, it was pretty awful.” We have people who hear things in their departments, if nothing else, and after they retire they talk about it to people who write books and reports, which causes more people to speak out, and there’s a snowball effect.
And yet, if we’re to believe the 9/11 conspiracy hypothesis, they finally succeeded in silencing everyone in the know. Well, that’s a hard lump to swallow. Or is it their contention that in 10 years Louis Freeh, Thomas Pickard, and George Tenet will be singing like canaries about how they set up John O’Neill?
You win the thread. I’m going to memorize this post and repeat it whenever I meet 9/11 conspiracy theorists IRL.
Some drilling into the link by AndrewL has been very interesting; it would seem at the very least possible that Jones got some partial information, drew some possibly reasonable conclusions, and then dug in in the face of further information.
Excepting the various ad-hominems by various persons I appreciate the contribution of everyone to this thread, and shall chew on this on my own time.
I think the most damning evidence of all is the fact that, after the buildings collapsed, the only people allowed on the property to clean up and look for bodies were un-named government workers, so that none of the evidence that would be left behind of such a massive demolition project would be discovered…
No, wait. That didn’t happen, did it?
Ok, so that eliminates the vast majority of people on this planet from having any credibility. Imagine if you made a similar comment about Jews.
In this case you are correct, although there are non-LDS faculty at Brigham Young University’s three campuses.
Fair enough. However, that has exactly nothing to do with validity of scientific experiments and conclusions.
Nope. It means that he probably believes that the Angel Moroni directed Joseph Smith Jr. to gold plates, not stone tables, in the Hill Cumorah, and that Smith translated them by divine help using what he termed Urim and Thumim.
Big whoop. As the poster above mentioned, imagine what you would have encountered had you accused him of being incompetent because he’s Jewish. After all, isn’t one of the tenets of Judaism that the Lord delivered stone tablets to Moses on a mountain-top when nobody else whas there?
mswas: Not only did they distance themselves from that prof, they essentially fired him. IIRC, he resigned before the administration could take him through the entire dismissal process.