Sunday, April 20, 2014

How it was done: 9/11 and the "science" of Building Demolition

Interesting article which offers some of the details of how the WTC Towers could have been brought down by controlled demolition.

Here

I put scare quotes around "science," since all that is presented is a hypothesis with some supporting data.  Before we call it "science" in the usual sense, I think we would want quite a few more experiments and peer-review.  True, most of the physical evidence was destroyed before it could be examined, but we do have some of the dust from the WTC Towers.  One peer-reviewed paper examining the dust has been done, suggesting that thermitic material was present in the buildings. And a second paper hypothesizes the presence of energetic materials in the dust.  Further, Kevin Ryan has indicated that he has done further tests on the dust, which  is awaiting peer-review.

What 9/11 researchers are ignoring is the preliminary work done by FEMA on samples of corroded steel found at both WTC1 or 2 and WTC7.  Civil engineer Jonathan Cole did what I think was an excellent experiment testing the hypothesis that the steel was corroded by gypsum wallboard and fires.  At the macroscopic level, it certainly looks like he falsified that hypothesis.  But what would have made the experiment more convincing would be to do the same metallurgical analysis that FEMA had carried out.  Cole also did some  excellent experiments showing that thermate could have cut steel columnns. At the end of the experiments Cole ended up with a piece of steel that looked very similar to the corroded steel that FEMA found. Unfortunately, once again Cole did not perform a metallurgical analysis to see how closely it resembled the corroded steel at the microscopic level, or what the chemical content was.  So here we have FEMA having done some very important scientific work that 9/11 researchers are largely ignoring.  Why?  And why not try to get the experiments they have done peer-reviewed?



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