Steve Jones and his physics analysis of 9/11...

[Chriszuma]

It's like puncturing a screen window with a pencil - it puts a hole in it but it doesn't destroy the entire screen.

I'm with Ken on this one. Whoever says it was like a pencil is blind. A more fitting analogy would be if you hit your screen door with an axe, and then torched it with a flame thrower. There's no telling what might happen.

[thegathering]

A friend of mine posted this in another forum:

A Boeing 767 is quite a bit bigger than a 707

WTC7

Matches up with the professors only quandry over the word implusion. A fire burned in the center of the building for seven uncontrolled.

Jet fuel burns well under the temperature to melt steel, but still hot enough to cause the structural integrity to start to fail. So when you have thousands and thousands of pounds of pressure bearing down on unstable support columns.

I didn't listen to all of it, cause its just rehashing the same theories that have been around for a long time.

I find this humorous. He cities a bunch of experts in the field that says this could never happen. They said the steel couldn't give out, but Farid Alfawakhiri, Ph.D. senior engineer, American Institute of Steel Construction does.

PM debunked a lot of it - http://www.popularmechanics.com/scie...tml?page=1&c=y - but they have this oh so annoying habit of citing their experts in an easy to find fashion - http://www.popularmechanics.com/scie...tml?page=9&c=y

Of all the people they could have sent, they sent a physics professor. What's up with that?

[JoeXIII'007]

Originally Posted by KenWittlief

1. The professor shows bldg 7 falling, and buildings that were intentionally demolished falling, and says something to the effect of "it looks the same"

what does that mean? If someone is poisoned and someone has a brain aneurysm, Im willing to bet they look pretty much the same as they fall to the floor. The fact that they fall the same way doesn't mean the cause of failure is the same. Logical fallacy.


6. Why did bulding 7 fall? Because the towers that fell were right across the street, and tons of debris fell onto bldg 7, and the shock of the towers hitting the bedrock was like a localized earth quake. Again, nothing like this has happened before because nothing like this has ever happened before. There is no historical basis to look back on for similar events.

If this professor had been part of the investigation team, had access to the site, access to the materials, and then decided something else was going on, then I would give him more credibility. But to look at videos, and eyewitness account from people who didnt understand what they were seeing, and who were in shock at the time, and base his conclusions on that data alone,

that is not science. That is armchair speculation.

Well, #1, it was an awfully long delay between the collapse of the towers and bldg 7, and #2, mathematically the building fell too fast for just shock, debris, and what little fire there was to bring it down that quickly. If the building fell a bit more logically, it would fall a lot slower, and over a period of time, due to the resistance from the structure of the building.

2. The professor makes a big point that many sky scrapers have caught fire and burned, and none of them ever collapsed until 9/11. Ok, but how many of those other buildings had a fully fueled jetliner jammed into the center of their frame at the time? Most buildings are not constructed with materials anything like ten thousand gallons of jet fuel. There was nothing in those other buildings that would combine with the updraft rush of air to burn like a kerosene fueled blow torch.

The fuel burned off very quickly after the crashes, thus for it to have any effect on the structure, it would be very minimal. Plus whatever flammable materials in the towers at the time could not have burned hot enough alone to melt the steel.

3. Metal was seen pouring out of one tower? There was a jet aircraft in there, made mostly of aluminum! Aluminum does burn if you get it hot enough, and it would certainly melt in this type of a fire.

OK, three pictures. One of molten aluminum, one of molten steel, and one of the metal flowing from the tower shortly before the collapse. You can also see some comparison photos here, with a thermite demo too.

4. The fact that an engineer was fired from UL, after his computer models could not replicate the fall of the towers, what are we to conclude? That he was fired to cover up his discovery, or that he had no idea what he was doing, or how to model something this complex with the computer SW he was using? Could he have been fired for being incompetent?

I am pretty sure he was doing the right thing: starting with the evidence available from the scene, and ending with an appropiate conclusion, instead of starting with a conclusion and finding evidence to support it.

5. The WTC area was cleaned up quickly because the cause of the fires and collapse was already known - it was captured on cameras, the second impact was seen live by millions of people, there was no mystery. If someone is shot multiple times during a robbery, with 10 million eye witnesses, and dies on the spot, Im pretty sure you dont have a bunch of doctors running tests, thinking "maybe his wife poisioned him? maybe he was hit by lightning?"

Of course the cause of death from a shooting is obvious, but when you have two towers that were built to last collapse due to what the official story claims, and the official story contradicts the laws of physics and whatnot, you have a very obvious problem. Especially when engineers all over the place are befuddled and puzzled as to why they collapsed. Evidence is crucial to figuring out exactly why. Popular conclusion in this case needs to be verified, and there was no time to do it with how quickly the evidence was buried.

Also, in any crime scene, there are investigators who find evidence (bullets, shrapnel, etc.) and will put them in bags to keep them in the condition they were in at the scene. There is almost always an evidence gathering phase, then a clean up, not just a clean up. In the case of 9/11, the evidence at the scene of the crime was immediately destroyed, allowing for little to no scientific analysis of the steel from the towers from private investigators.

The towers were not punctured like a pencil through a window screen. We all saw the plane fly into the second tower. The plane sliced the entire side of the tower open from wing tip to wing tip, destroying the load bearing structure of the entire one side and corner of the building.

What about the central core columns at the center of the buildings??? I am pretty certain that the outer walls were a bit weak to a jet, but the core had to have withstood the impact a lot better.

As this point you gotta ask yourself "what is this person really up to? What are his motives?

His motives are to pressure the government for solid answers as to what exactly happened on the days before and on 9/11. In a follow up video here, he claims that he has been bribed to shut up about this from homeland security. There are a lot of holes in the official story, and it takes the removal of the shock and awe of that day's memories to do some real critical analysis of what really happened, and if you think about it, there was some crazy stuff going on that doesn't happen on any normal disaster.

total: 4 cents... with extreme caution.

-Joe

[KenWittlief]

His motives are to pressure the government for solid answers as to what exactly happened on the days before and on 9/11. In a follow up video here, he claims that he has been bribed to shut up about this from homeland security.

there is no logic to this. If someone is making outrageous claims (the buildings were rigged with explosive/thermite charges set to go off 1 hour after the impacts.... apparently all done with the governments fore-knowledge)

then making more outrageous claims (the government tried to bribe me to shut up) does not further his case

its only more of the same.

If the government wanted to silence him, after killing thousands of people in the WTC, they would not do it with money. He would simply disappear.

Going back to the aircraft. The towers were designed to withstand an impact from a 707? 727? Jet planes normally fly at 200 to 250mph when they are only 1000 feet above the ground. They would have to be on final approach and off course to be that low to the ground over Manhatten, or suffering from engine failure that causes them to fly too slow to maintain altitude.

The planes that hit the towers were not only fully loaded with fuel, they were flying at full speed. They hit the towers going 650mph. You can see this in the video of the first plane that hit, taken by the documenary crew working with new fireman recruits. The plane flew overhead at full throttle, screaming across the Manhatten skyline, only 600 feet off the ground.

No one would ever expect an impact like that. The towers were not designed for that kind of event.

[thegathering]

I guess the biggest problem with his theory is that explosives have to be set before they can be detonated.

There is no evidence that those parts of the tower were deconstructed to have explosive charges layed inside the steel support columns before the towers were hit. A detonation of that scale would take months of careful planning to be executed... and almost as long to prepare the building for detonation, coordinate drilling locations, and set charges.

Explosives could have been a possibility, but research was not conducted on the possibility of explosives in the tower because there was no evidence to support explosives being in the tower (unlike an aircraft and jet fuel).

[Cory]

Originally Posted by JoeXIII'007

The fuel burned off very quickly after the crashes, thus for it to have any effect on the structure, it would be very minimal. Plus whatever flammable materials in the towers at the time could not have burned hot enough alone to melt the steel.

This issue has been cleared up many times. The jet fuel was merely the ignition source. All the flammables inside the towers were what burned long after the fuel was exhausted. In addition, the steel never melted. It merely was severely weakened to the point where it was no longer capable of bearing the load of the building.

[sanddrag]

Originally Posted by JoeXIII'007

What about the central core columns at the center of the buildings??? I am pretty certain that the outer walls were a bit weak to a jet, but the core had to have withstood the impact a lot better.
-Joe

I was in one of the WTC towers about a year before the attack and if I recall correctly, the outer walls carried the majority of the building's load.

And planted explosives? There's no way that much drilling could go unnoticed. A pneumatic hammer drill is one loud beast.

Also, I'm reading that the 767s hit with a kinetic energy 7 times greater than the impact modeled when the building was designed.

[DonRotolo]

Originally Posted by Ryan Dognaux

The towers were by design made to withstand a 707 flying into it, which was the biggest plane at the time.

True, but according to an interview with the original architectural team that I saw on TV, they only considered the impact load (of some tons of aluminim hitting the structure), and had failed to consider the fire effects from the fuel load. The terrorists used planes will relatively high fuel loads, and ~24000 pounds of fuel can make for a big fire.

Don

[Wetzel]

He bills the presentation has a serious scientific lecture, but I never heard any serious science. I did hear a lot of "seems to me..." and far more political reasons to support his conspiracy theory than science.

Wetzel

[JoeXIII'007]

Originally Posted by sanddrag

And planted explosives? There's no way that much drilling could go unnoticed. A pneumatic hammer drill is one loud beast.

Thus could be the reason that there were unannounced evacuations of the building before the attacks according to people that worked there.

[Ryan Dognaux]

Originally Posted by Wetzel

He bills the presentation has a serious scientific lecture, but I never heard any serious science. I did hear a lot of "seems to me..." and far more political reasons to support his conspiracy theory than science.

Wetzel

I heard some science, at least more than is usually presented in any kind of conspiracy theory. Off the top of my head I know he mentioned a lot of physics laws. I didn't get the whole religious tie in at the end though.

Really, I don't think any of this will ever make it very far. There's very little hard evidence to work with and that makes proving something extremely difficult. As was noted, all the evidence was cleaned up and trucked out. It's all interesting nonetheless.

[KenWittlief]

here is another thing that does not add up with the conspiracy theory version

ok, lets say someone mined the towers and building 7, so they could blow them up on queue

Since the government rushed in to destroy the evidence (as this video proposes) they would have to be involved. Therefore they were also responsible for hijacking the 4 airliners with 20 people who what?

who went along with their plans and were willing to die in the process? Who thought they were working for arab extreemists instead of the US government?

why wasnt the Pentagon also mined so it would collapse? what was the fourth building that was being targeted when the passengers tried to take over flight 73 and the plane went down in a field in PA? Was the whitehouse also mined to collapse? If not what was the 4th target, and what did they do with the thermite explosives all through that building, when flight 73 failed to hit its target?

what if the two planes that targeted the WTC towers had failed? What if only one of them made it through? then what? how would they get the explosives back out of the building that was not hit, considering all the attention that would be surrounding it after the other tower fell?

One other thing - when tall buildings are imploded for demolition, they appear to fall into the ground. They fail at the bottom floor, and the upper floors appear to dissolve into the ground.

We have all seen the videos of the towers falling. They were exactly the opposite - they started collasping at the top, and pancaked floor by floor all the way down. At no point did the lower floors give way before the top of the building crashed down into it.

Why? Because there were no explosives on the lower floors taking out the girders. When the upper structure of the towers failed, the lower floors were crushed by the falling mass, one by one.

[JoeXIII'007]

Originally Posted by KenWittlief

here is another thing that does not add up with the conspiracy theory version

ok, lets say someone mined the towers and building 7, so they could blow them up on queue

Since the government rushed in to destroy the evidence (as this video proposes) they would have to be involved. Therefore they were also responsible for hijacking the 4 airliners with 20 people who what?

1. who went along with their plans and were willing to die in the process? Who thought they were working for arab extreemists instead of the US government?

2. why wasnt the Pentagon also mined so it would collapse? what was the fourth building that was being targeted when the passengers tried to take over flight 73 and the plane went down in a field in PA? Was the whitehouse also mined to collapse? If not what was the 4th target, and what did they do with the thermite explosives all through that building, when flight 73 failed to hit its target?

3. what if the two planes that targeted the WTC towers had failed? What if only one of them made it through? then what? how would they get the explosives back out of the building that was not hit, considering all the attention that would be surrounding it after the other tower fell?

4. One other thing - when tall buildings are imploded for demolition, they appear to fall into the ground. They fail at the bottom floor, and the upper floors appear to dissolve into the ground.

We have all seen the videos of the towers falling. They were exactly the opposite - they started collasping at the top, and pancaked floor by floor all the way down. At no point did the lower floors give way before the top of the building crashed down into it.

Why? Because there were no explosives on the lower floors taking out the girders. When the upper structure of the towers failed, the lower floors were crushed by the falling mass, one by one.

Answered by numbers I put in your quotes:

1. Agents. For who, I dunno. But you must remember that the news media can only report the information they can get ahold of and cite. Now figure this ethical standard as a tool for the government to use to create the story.

2. First, I need to correct that it was flight 91 that was taken over. Secondly, no one has done much investigation into the Pentagon attack, because all evidence was either seized or destroyed. Surveillance videos included. The only video from the actual impact is 4 frames, which show nothing and then a great big ball of fire. Witnesses describe hearing missile like noises before the explosion there (loose change documentary). Lastly, I think a government knows that pulling explosives out of any building after a failed attempt would bring a crap load of suspicion, thus they know as long as there are no fires, there won't be any explosions, and the thermite shouldn't be too much of a problem. So they leave it there just to be on the safe side secrecy.(answer to 3)

4. Do you think, if someone actually planned this, that someone be so stupid as to make it obvious that there are explosives in the buildings, and after the planes crash, make these basement explosives ignite, or during the collapse? Come on, if there were any planners, they wouldn't be that stupid. Thus they would engineer a collapse that starts from the top down, which shouldn't be too hard of a problem. However, speaking of the basement, google "WTC basement," you'll get some interesting results.

Lastly, another vid: here.

The sixth cent, in the can.

-Joe

[Ryan Dognaux]

Originally Posted by JoeXIII'007

Secondly, no one has done much investigation into the Pentagon attack, because all evidence was either seized or destroyed. Surveillance videos included.

Apparently there are other surviellance videos taken from other sources, I'm drawing a blank right now so I can't remember exactly where. It's just odd that the only footage that has been released are a few frames from a security camera.

[Cory]

Originally Posted by JoeXIII'007

2. First, I need to correct that it was flight 91 that was taken over.

Actually it was United 93.