To make sure there’s no confusion among the CTers: there’s also nothing remarkable that weakening steel beams supporting 96,000,000 pounds of WTC would collapse under the weight.
They used the specially-trained dogs, the ones trained not to bark at the smell of explosives. 
Oh,* please!!!* There simply is no way that steel or any other metal could remain orange-hot for days without being continually heated. You might as well claim you had photographic evidence of flying saucers destroying the WTC with their disintegrator rays.
I didn’t realize that Steven Jones was the one promoting this. He’s one of the guys from BYU that announced discovery of Cold Fusion.
He’s not associated with Pons and Fleischmann of the University of Utah, ehose spectacular claioms of Cold Fusion were soon debunked. Jones and hos co-workers at BYU discovered low-energy muon-moderated Cold Fusion that worked by a different mechanism, and which has been vindicated (although it’s low-energy and not a potential source of power). But since they came out with this at the same time as Pons and Fleschman, an in the same state, their names were often associated. Link:
That said, I respect his earlier work, and don’t think it points to any tendency of flawed research. but i still don’t buy this theory of planned demolition, for a host of reasons.
What about installation after it is built?
One of the most interesting things about this that I’ve heard is that Marvin Bush had a stake in the security firm of the World Trade Center. I am not implying that this means anything, only that it’s an interesting anecdote. Anyone know if there is any truth to this?
I’m confused. The thread title identifies it as a ‘REALLY crazy conspiracy theory’, and yet the OP seems to be arguing quite tenaciously in defence of it. What gives?
The problem with that is that the demolition charges generally need to be attached directly to key structural beams throughout the building. These structural members are usually covered by insulation, fireproofing, and wallboard. When a building is demolished the crew installing the charges spend weeks or months cutting away walls and stripping insulation to gain access to the beams to be cut. This would, of course, be quite impossible to do in an active office building without being noticed. It would also be unwise and probably impossible to do on a building that was on fire, structurally compromised, and already threatening to collapse.
I want to know why, please. Is that too much to ask? Why did the government put all of these explosives in?
If you’re arguing it’s for the purposes of attacking Iraq…erm, the planes were coming anyway. I don’t think we needed the buildings to actually fall to raise our ire. And from Afghanistan to Iraw - well, I’m still not sure exactly how that happened, but right there is the real miracle.
People constantly ignore experts and give their own advice. Now I know all about the Appeal to Authority argument but let’s face it - sometimes Authority is right, especially when it comes to something so factual as this.
Trust the mathemeticians and the physicists!
“Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”
“To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”
“The dog did nothing in the night-time.”
“That was the curious incident,” remarked Sherlock Holmes.
The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1893)
Also, you’ve got to acknowledge that these arguments are always really reaching when it comes to interpretation of the evidence. It’s bleeding obvious to anyone that they didn’t just happen to be watching the video one day and think “Hey! that looks odd - those little puffs of smoke look a bit like explosive charges going off”.
No. They started out with the notion that something is very wrong, the government engineered this and won’t admit it, and we just don’t know how they did it, then scoured the video footage for anything that can be interpreted as supporting that general concept. That’s why it’s such a bullshit mishmash of conflicting assertions.
It’s like those nutcases that look for weird things in the photographs of rocks on the surface of Mars; they start out with the unshakeable conviction that there must be something odd there, then, after monumental exertion, self-delusion and distortion of the evidence, manage to convince themselves they found it.
Thank you Mr. Miskatonic, your name is well earned.
In addition to 9/11 Conspiracy Theories!, other threads include Loose Change video: 9/11 conspiracy, Is someone else responsible for 9/11?, Debunk this 9/11 conspiracy theory, Missile hitting the Pentagon, WTC Conspiracy Theory and Bush 9/11 movie, must read/see.
As for substance, the theory has been around for years and (IMHO) has been thoroughly debunked. Among the sites worth looking at: David Corn; Snopes; 911 Myths; rotten.com; Boutin & Di Justo; Shalom & Albert; Mark Roberts’ Loose Change Viewer’s Guide; debunking 9/11; and Michael Griffith. On the WTC collapse, 911 Myths and Mark Roberts are particularly good.
You’re misremembering the details in a way that (inadvertently) distorts Jones’s role in the whole fiasco - the Wikipedia link is better.
Muon-catalysed fusion was not discovered at BYU, though Jones was undoubtedly one of the higher profile researchers in the field through the 80s and the person most visibly pushing the idea that it would be a viable power source. That line of research essentially ran into the ground when the JASON review of it in the summer of 1988 was strongly negative about it ever breaking even.
Jones and his colleagues were already kicking about a quite separate and far more speculative idea, which he called piezonuclear fusion, whereby the high pressures at the centre of planets could produce fusion. That led them to investigate hydrogen loaded into palladium in a system very similar to what Pons and Fleischmann were also to look at, with Jones believing that he could then detect a (tiny) neutron flux. It’s this research and claim, not his muon-catalysed fusion work, that is important in the scientific and media firestorm in 1989.
That erupted after the messy sequence of events whereby the BYU and University of Utah teams learn of each other work, agree to collaborate and coordinate publication, only for Utah to then jump the gun by secretly arranging a unilateral press conference. The extent to which Jones was convinced by Pons and Fleischmann’s apparently much more dramatic results at this stage is very, very unclear, but he was certainly part of the bandwagon in the weeks before they went public and he was central to the subsequent controversy. His particular claims were relatively less extraordinary and his conduct was never questioned in the way that Pons and Fleischmann’s (amongst others) was, but as physics his paper was, at best, exceptionally speculative and the data terribly thin. Not necessarily “bad science”, but certainly unimpressive.
There is thus the counterfactual argument that had Pons and Fleischmann not come along he’d have submitted the piezonuclear paper to Nature, had it rejected - in the event, this was one of those cases where John Maddox, as editor, only published it because the contents were already the subject of widespread controversy - and then had it sink without trace in some minor journal as an unconfirmed spurious claim. But, conversely, it’s unlikely that the University of Utah would have gone public when and in the manner they did, with all the consequences that followed, without the fear that Jones and BYU would pre-empt them.
To indulge in a bit of armchair psychology, Jones’s career has been marked by big public claims that never quite panned out and he may see this as his last big throw of the dice.
None of which has, of course, any bearing on how we should judge the merits of his argument now. [sub](It’s just obviously crap.)[/sub]
Is anyone familiar with the background of the NIST report? They set up models of the towers and tried all they could to get them to collapse and couldn’t. They then fed all the information into a computer and tweaked it to their liking until they got it to collapse. Sorry, physically impossible for a building to fall and turn to dust from a few small fires. I’m surprised the number of people still believe that. An engineer for the Port Authority is even on video (prior to 9/11) stating that each building could take MULTIPLE plane impacts and stay standing.
As already explained in this thread (you might want to read all the previous messages first) this is a lie.
Nobody claims the buildings turned to “dust”. There were enormous piles of quite solid debris left. Most of the airborne dust created was pulverized sheetrock, which turns to dust quite easily and which there was quite a bit of in the towers.
As for a few small fires … does this look like a small fire?
If you’ll notice, the towers survived the impacts and stayed standing. It was the fires that felled them.
Although anyone who said the towers could survive multiple impacts was saying so without justification. The engineers who designed the towers claimed that the towers would survive the hit of a single plane, traveling at low speed while lost and looking for a runway. Even this wasn’t based on anything more than a guess as the computer models to properly analyze the impact of a jumbo jet into the towers simply didn’t exist when they were designed.
Your “few small fires” comment is silly. The planes carried enough fuel, each, to burn in the neighborhood of 1000° F for fifteen to twenty minutes–more than hot enough and long enough to wipe out most of the fire retardent sprayed (possibly too thinly) over some of the structural members and much more than adequate to turn all the wood, plastic, and paper on multiple floors into an inferno that began to eat its way through all the floors above while heating (not burning or melting, just heating) the structural supports to the point of load bearing failure at around 800° F.
You quote “an engineer” (without citation) making a claim about the building surviving multiple airplane crashes. However, lacking that citation, we do not know whether he had the training to actually make the claim with authority or whether he was quoted in 1969 or 1999. There is a difference. The architects are on record as having stated that the building was designed to withstand an aircraft crashing into it. (In fact, the buildings DID withstand the crashes, as promised). However, the planes for which the buildings were designed to resist were the DC-8s and 707s of the mid 1960s, not the DC-10s, 747s, 757s, and 767s that were significantly larger. There is also no record that I have seen that indicates that the designers envisioned planes loaded with fuel. (This might have been a tragic lack of foresight, but there is nothing suspicious about it. Manhattan is not in line with any direct flight path from JFK, LaGuardia, or other large airports and it makes sense that the designers would have considered a fuel-filled plane less likely than a plane that was off course at the end of a longer trip.)
Falling? Turning to dust? The non-conspiracy theory actually makes the most sense. The buildings each began their collapse exactly where enormous fires had been burning, weakening the structural members. WTC-2, hit lower, with more weight above the impact point, fell earlier, just as one would expect as fires weakened the structural members. For floors above the initial collapse point, we have large pancakes of concrete falling hundreds of feet. What else would it do but hit the ground and be pulverized. For the floors below the collapse point, you have millions of tons of concrete and steel falling on top of it. What would you expect it to do besides be pulverized?
Hmm, I’m still not convinced…
Tom I remember hearing something about the steel frame being designed to implode, that they knew this would happen in the event that they should collapse.