If this guy wanted to be taken seriously? He already is being taken seriously by his target audience.
Refuting would probably require use of some rather expensive engineering software that only large firms could afford and don’t appreciate being used for stunts.
Honestly, you can refute this by pointing out the magically disappearing columns and the fact that their demo is just a (poorly)animated CAD program.
Structural engineers, depending on location and experience, probably make six figures. $25k is not negligible.
The software you would use to run this sort of analysis is probably a couple thousand a year for a continuing commercial license. I’m not sure how standard it is, but my company owns anything I use company resources for. So if I stay late and run FEA models for a side project, they own that regardless if I’m charging that time. Defeats the purpose of the prize.
In any case, they could just say your model differs from what the original paper did. Is their complete model available to look at? I’d guess not.
There’s a thread on the website metabunk.org that goes over what has been released by Hulsey, et al. It does not inspire fear for the NIST analysis or confidence for the 9/11 truther crowd.
Perhaps Mick West or someone else from that site could debate Professor Soudy or Hulsey? Or perhaps a representative from NIST? The material is far too complex for a layman to understand.
The money shouldn’t be the issue. Putting to rest this conspiracy should be their prime motivation. Don’t people still enjoy intellectual debate?
Perhaps you could read through the link that was provided and discuss where you find fault with it?
If you understand the side you support, you should be able to understand the response that decimated the side you support. Of course if you are claiming that both sides are too difficult for you to understand, I have to question why you support one side over the other.
Intellectual debate? Yes. Repeatedly debunking conspiracy theories that aren’t remotely based on evidence, science or basic logic? No.
CTs don’t get “put to rest” by debating them; engaging them only gives them life (as this thread demonstrates). Another thing this thread demonstrates is any rebuttal of the CT points, no matter how robust, will simply be handwaved away. As has been frequently said, you cannot reason someone out of a position they did not reason themselves into. 9/11 truthers, moon landing deniers, Flat Earthers - all have had their ludicrous arguments knocked down again and again and their response is simply to set them back up as if nothing has happened. You yourself have repeatedly ignored the various points debunking your particular CT.
Be honest - is there any point at which you will ever abandon your theory? Any evidence that could actually assuage your doubts? Because if the answer is “no”, then there’s no point in any of us trying. At best, we can hope to enlighten the unseen lurkers who may be more receptive to an actual evidence-based approach to the matter. You’ll just have to choose for yourself what you want to accept as the truth.
There’s a lot of technical info in there to be sure, but what part of “why do 3 columns just disappear in the Hulsey model” do you not get? Or, “why do the lower columns stretch like taffy in the Hulsey model?”.
Hulsey or someone equally qualified like Soudy needs to respond to these criticisms. I do not know if they are legitimate or not. It is possible both the NIST and UAF studies are flawed. Or that structural engineering or the prediction of how a structure will react to adverse circumstances is not an exact science and require a certain amount of guess work?
Been there, done that, and further free press is not deserved. If they want to advertise, they can pay for it.
You don’t know if objecting to columns simply vanishing in the Hulsey model is a legitimate criticism?
It’s also “possible” aliens beamed the buildings away and altered all our memories of the event. The problem, as Richard Feynman once said (about extraterrestrials, appropriately enough) isn’t to determine what is “possible” but to assess what actually happened or is happening. If the NIST study is flawed, that is demonstrable. Saying it might be flawed is meaningless.
It’s a pretty rigorous science. There are margins of error and material resilience factors and probabilistic analysis of resistance to various stresses. What there isn’t, in any meaningful sense, is “guess work”. Any “guesses” about anything important are heavily backed up with numbers.
I read a novel with that premise. The WTC collapses occurred in 2017 - we just think they happened in 2001 due to altered memories.
I have only ever seen two “explanations”. Either it was because some evidence of the conspiracy was being stored in there and/or because Larry Silverstein is Jewish (insert conspiracy theory and/or stereotypes about Jews).
… because it makes SO much sense to get rid of evidence by having the contents of the building be strewn all over lower Manhattan. Have they never heard of a paper shredder?
I have yet to see a 9-11 conspiracy theory that didn’t sound like came from the writers over at “The Onion”.
Are you saying that if we were to repeat the fires in the WTC7 that we would get the exact same outcome every time?
I’m certain that assumptions are made in both models especially the NIST model to explain what they think happened rather than predict what might happen if burning debris from the Twin Towers struck WTC7 . That’s a big difference.
NIST was charged with finding an explanation for the main stream narrative. Hulsey was trying to find out if fire could cause WTC7 to collapse in the way it did and found it was not possible.
You can repeat this 'til the cows come home-it still doesn’t make it true.
Well, you’d have to repeat the fires AND the fact that there were no fire fighters available AND the fact that there was no water for the fire suppression system AND that it was left to burn for an entire day AND that a large part of the building too sever structural damage from falling debris and…
But, yeah…if you replicated all of that, you’d pretty much get the same result. Hell, if you just replicated some of that you’d probably still get a building collapse at some point. Just letting the building burn all day would almost certainly do it. And we’ve actually seen buildings under similar circumstances to that (i.e. burning out of control for many hours) collapse. It’s just very unusual for such a thing to happen, so it’s pretty rare that one of these buildings has basically no mitigation at all (normally, at a minimum, the fire suppression system is at least partially functional and fire fighters are at least nominally available…and, of course, normally large parts of other buildings aren’t falling on the burning building in question).
As I said earlier, this one is the least mysterious wrt why or how it collapsed. I have no idea why the loopy 9/11 CT crowd has latched onto it, as it really shows their vast ignorance…or their vast powers of deception and the ignorance of their target audience. Or both, really.
Even Windsor Tower in Spain, which gets trotted out every so often as evidence against fire-induced collapse, lost the top third of its structural steel.