No you're not. The correct term is you're *believing*.

Says the guy who's "Known" something was up from day one?

I did a simple test.  

1. I went and read this paper: http://www.journalof911studies.com/volume/2008/TheMissingJolt7.pdf 

2. Then I typed in "The Missing Jolt" into Google.

I get tons of websites, this one: http://the911forum.freeforums.org/new-jones-paper-by-szamboti-and-chandler-t119.html is an example picked at random that says the report is incorrect, also based on math.

So have I been edified by this process?  No.  I found a large paper with lots of math that sums up as, "We watched the building collapse, and we think there should have been a jolt when the large mass of steel beams hit the other large mass of steel beams but it doesn't look like that in the grainy TV video.  How shocking, that a non-rigid mass doesn't show visible impacts at non-impacting side.

Now I've learned that engineers aren't special, and there is a minority that disagrees with the majority.  In this particular case it appears that the minority is wrong.

So, is it my duty to go through every paper and give it this same treatment, or can I get on with my life?

http://heiwaco.tripod.com/nist3.htm

This must be a full time hobby for some people!

The truther debate involves groups of experts using facts on both sides.  If you think this debate is analogous to the theism debate I'm not sure what to tell you.  The professional community isn't even on 'your' side.

I don't feel the need to investigate technical issues that have already been investigated in a manner that most engineers in the field have accepted.  I'm not going to get a masters degree in every field that would help me personally debunk a conspiracy theory.

My problem with this is there was a massive investigation that created a huge paper by a large number of professionals.  Now there are websites where people point to 'smoking guns' that refute that paper.  The paper I listed is a good example.  Then if anyone disputes the 'smoking gun' they are mocked for being sheep or something.

Engineers can't agree on this 100%, but more of them seem to agree with NIST than with 9/11 truthers.  So again, I'm not quite sure what you and Marquis are after here, unless you expected there to be some sort of thing where atheists at this particular forum would also statistically support a minority view of a structural engineers over an argument about a conspiracy that collapsed the towers on 9/11.

The simple fact that you both seem so convinced you are right makes me shy away.  Like I said to Marquis, he "knew" there was a problem from day one.  That sets off my alarm bells.

And *my* problem is that there wasn't any "massive investigation". (Where did you get this strange idea from?) There was a political exploitation of tragedy and general confusion, which lead to a very questionable invation of a 3rd world country, then another convenient war - based in blatant lies, followed by a whimsical parody of an investigation which started out with making claims that had already proven to be factually wrong (the identity of the hijackers).

And, as I have already repeated over and over again, I *knew* something wasn't right because I know about construction and demolition. But I'm not a scientist by profession, so I can't write any *paper* as such, nor do I have a lot of lifetime to invest into this matter. But I must say that I find it mind boggling how many otherwise presumptously intelligent people who buy the crap wholesale.

It makes me, again, praise the Lord for not being an American. (OBS! Irony!)

Again, I can but state what I have done all along: This is a *faith-based* matter.

The people who react very emotionally have bought the official cock-and-bull story, wholesale.

It is, for some reason that I fail to understand, *necessary* for them to be believers, and they fight tooth and claw, against hard evidence to the contrary, to defend the *official* story of Ali Baba and the 19 hijackers. This would be howlingly hilarious if the circumstances were less serious. If nothing else, this whole complex will go down in history as a classical example of how to create and exploit a political spin.

I don't recall being emotional -

I recall saying I have no informed opinion.  Period.  And I'm not about to get emotional.  The hormones are in tune today and I have a new haircut that is really cute.  All is right with my world.

Frivolous, but you guys aren't responding to my posts so why not.

Mr. Spence, I am assuming that you don't have any experience with demolition work. Am I correct?

In principle, one would think that the giant mass (in total about 500,000 tonnes) of those buildings (WTC 1 and 2) could wreak quite the havoc, top down, but this still doesn't explain the near free-fall speed (I think they were clocked in at respectively 8.4 and 9.2 seconds), which would require zero resistance in the building materials. If we postulate that the top 10 stories "hammered" down onto the lower construction, it would still need to use some of its kinetic energy in order to crush that part of the building, something which would have slowed it down. But instead we see each floor collapse, on average, at only about 0.08 seconds. It equals a 10 storey building completely falling down in less than a second. Or a 3 storey building in the blink of an eye.

In reality, it is a real bitch to tear down steel-and-concrete constructions. Reinforced concrete combines two seemingly opposite material qualities, which is that of hardness/durability and elasticity. In practical terms this means that steel-and-concrete building do not "want" to fall. They have considerable inertia and considerable resistance in the materials.

However that may be, if this was the only problem with the 9/11 complex, I would probably have grudgingly accepted it - after making a for-the-record note of feeling very uneasy about the unnatural appearance of the building collapses. But there is more. Bulding 7. The Pentagon. Flight 93. The sum total of it all is quite simply too much.

But I think I will leave this subject alone now. I have made my point, right? I see no point in carrying on a discussion which essentially is going nowhere. The only thing that I will do, here, now, at the end, is to link to a site where army seniors, law enforcers, government officials and intelligence operatives are having their say - which is more or less the same as I have been saying all along: This is just *wrong* and a new investigation is needed. And, mind you, these are not lightweighters and wild-eyed conspiracy kooks, but real life professionals with extensive experience and qualifications.

http://www.patriotsquestion911.com/#Articles

One of the links I posted was in direct confrontation to your claim about free fall.  It even had math, and charts and graphs!

Edit:  Also, I fail to see how you can trust your intuition on an event that has literally never happened before.  If you had seen a bunch of 100 story steel skyscrapers collapse fine.  But no-one has.  How can you trust intuition for an event your brain has no prior experience with?  There isn't even an institutional knowledge of peacefully demolishing skyscrapers of that type and size.  No-one in the world has any idea what a 'normal' skyscraper collapse looks like for a 100 story building because before September 11th *it had never happened in the history of the world*.

This is like me saying my intuition says there is something wrong with the moon landings because the flag doesn't look right, therefore the landings were a hoax.

This thread is still going huh?

Did I mention that I was *THERE*?... and that as a foreman in those buildings I never noticed any explosives?... Nor did anyone else who worked in those buildings?

It's amazing how many experts on 110 story building demolition there are... since that happens every day...

I'll tell ya what... You can build a couple of skyscrapers... fly passenger jets into them, and see what happens.... until then this conspirasy theory should be re-named "made-up bullshit because I want to appear to be both intelligent and important"

You have not provided anything to contradict what I said.

Of course it talks a lot of work to pull such structures down. You have not provided any calculations to show that the loss of momentum involved in shattering/crushing/buckling the lower structure would have to have slowed the falling part of the building more than was observed.

The distance through which they fell as far as relevance to 'free fall' is concerned would be the distance from the upper part of the impacted area to ground level. 

For the lower impact point, the damaged area was below the 85th floor. This gives an estimate of height of something over 1000 feet.

Free fall time from a height of 1000 feet is 7.9 sec. This would be the time for the lower part of the falling section to hit the ground if there had been nothing in between.

8.4 sec implies an average acceleration of 28 ft/sec² . This is 12.5% less than g, implying an average opposing force of 12.5% of the total falling weight.

Now would this be enough, or not? Note that small errors in the assumed free-fall height and time estimates would make a big difference, since we are trying to estimate the difference between two quantities, namely the average acceleration observed, and g (32 ft/sec² ).

And how do you compare the work required to pull such a structure down by normal demolition techniques, to the effect of dropping the top section of the building on it? Note that up to 7 floors were damaged by the fire/explosion, giving the falling mass time to build up a significant speed before hitting full resistance.

Also note that calculation of the average observed acceleration is a function of the square of the estimated fall time -  accel = 2 X distance / t² , which would magnify the effect of any error.

This amount of actual math would be the minimum required to properly argue the issue. Informal, subjective observations and 'gut' feelings are no way an adequate substitute.

Please feel free to correct any errors in the math or the data.

Taken a deep breath. 

And spent some time looking through some engineering sites talking about how the whole thing could have happened without any explosives. 

I still haven't found a reasonable explanation for the nano-thermite residue, which was the story that got me very curious about all of this stuff.

It's still baffling to me.  But I've read quite a bit that suggests that some of the 'truther' groups of individuals may have some real political motives for fudging some stuff.  And making shit up.

So in order to balance some of my regurgitating things that I took to be 'authoritative', here is some information from NIST (which may not be so refuted as it sounded like) as frequently asked questions.  It addresses a lot of the concerns brought up by the 'truther' groups.

wtc.nist.gov/pubs/factsheets/faqs_8_2006.htm

wtc.nist.gov/pubs/factsheets/faqs_12_2007.htm

www.nist.gov/public_affairs/factsheet/wtc_qa_082108.html

And addresses a lot of the questions I had. 

Mr. Woods, I understand your need to believe in the story about Ali Baba and the Nineteen Hijackers. It comforts you.

However, that's no reason to be rude towards people who ask additional questions than those The Great Leader Bush and his utterly trustworthy panel of experts say it is unnecessary to question any further. Since it seems that, for the most, nobody is reading anybody else's links in this thread I will not hold my hopes up, but I will still encourage you to click on the link I will now provide, then scroll down the page a little, look at the people there and their credentials, then perhaps reconsider the "made-up bullshit because I want to appear to be both intelligent and important" bit.

http://www.patriotsquestion911.com/#Articles

I would also like to say that a lot of people were *THERE* and not all of them made it out. Not even the security people, or the janitors (who usually know the most about what's going on in a building), noticed any explosives beforehand - and I am prone to believe that this is probably because the explosives were hidden from plain view by people who knew well what they were doing. I have heard the argument about how this necessitates miles of wiring, but I seem to have heard that *remote detonators* is a possibility, and has been for quite some time now, especially if the operation is not a matter of fiscal prudence (since they are a bit costly).

But there is no lack of eyewitnesses who saw and/or heard explosions. Lots of them.

Lastly I will say that I don't care whether a structure is one, ten, hondred or thousand storeys high; it is still a physical object in the physical world, behaving, as physical objects do, in a manner which is dictated by *the laws of physics*. I am taking a note of what Mr. Spence is saying though; that I cannot possibly know anything about building demolition because I can't provide the *numbers*, so this invalidates the experience I have - which I admit gives me only a gut feeling for materials and material behaviour - so, even if I will argue that this gives me a gut feeling which is qualitatively different from the vague intuition of a civilian who knows neither theory nor practice, I will not argue the point any further.

As for Miss CJ, I am not commenting to your cocaine allusion out of politeness. WTF has that got to do with anything? It is also a little sad that you will rather take the words of some blogger calling himself "Ron Mossad" (BTW your link doesn't work) than the peer-reviewed study, by spectral-electron-microscope-whatever-anaysis, carried out by a physics professor, under appropriate laboratory conditions. Again, I can only think that this is based in a need to beleieve in the story about Ali Baba and the Nineteen Hijackers. Again, I will say that I *understand*. You simply aren't able to face the grave implications of a model which demands complicity at high levels of the US society. Even if and when you are being lied to and pissed on by these people.

OK, you're right. I am sorry. It's a little frustrating that I can't do the numbers, but I really suck at maths.

Anyway, my answer is "no". It is not sufficient.

When doing explosive demolition, you will usually blow out the bottom bearings first, in order to start a downward motion of the entire building's mass, which will help in the demolition process, but you will still, delayed by only tenths of a second, blow away the bearings, usually on every second floor, throughout the entire structure, in a sequence which follows the free-fall speed quite accurately. The idea is to make the building fall in on itself, minimising the possible damage to any surrounding structures (which is often the case). If you have a case where, say, you *only* blow up the bearings on the 80th floor of a 100 storey building, you will - likely - observe that the mass of the top will "crunch" down on the lower structure, creating severe damage, but at some point it will tip sideways (or find a stable resting point on top of the rest of the structure) after just a few floors, simply because the structure, no matter how meticulously calculated to be even all throughout, *will* have local weak spots that will make the collapse asymmetric, while at the same time, the elasticity of the reinforced concrete and steel will absorb all the kinetic energy of the falling mass.There are many cases where they have fucked up and the structure has only partially fallen. This is not a precise science. When you do demolition you are much better off with a team of experienced people who have a *feel* for it than even the most accredited theoretical engineering expert.

You can of course overdo the explosives, but the reasons why this is usually not done are economical. This is a costly procedure which takes a long time to rig, and all the stuff is expensive too, so you want it to be fiscally effective, doing no more than what is strictly necessary to achieve the desired result. This cost/effect balance is of course invalidated if the *demolition* of the building is not the ultimate objective of the operation. Some demolition guy somewhere online described the WTC demolition operation as "The Mona Lisa of demolition", i.e. a work of art which makes you just marvel at the scope of mastery involved.

The question whether a little top part of a building, let's call it C, or structure can destroy the remaning bottom part of the same building or structure, lets call it A, when dropped on it, i.e. C is dropped on A, has been analyzed by religious fundamentalists (read criminals) like prof. Bazant & sect members several times. They suggest it possible, at least if you look at it in one dimension, 1-D, and treat the building as a line (!). They have published their nonsense in ASCE's Journal of Engineering Mechanics several times.

Then line C drops on line A due gravity and line A is compressed into a line B that is 1/4 of original line A! That is called "crush down"! Top part/line C remains intact. Then line B attacks line C in a "crush up" and line C is compressed 4 times and is added to line B. Bazant & Co have made up differential equations to explain the crushes ups and downs. However, and it is serious, they cannot produce a real 3-D structure or building that behaves accordingly.

Reason is that no such structure/building exists in the real world. A little top part C of a structure A cannot apply sufficient force/pressure/energy on A without destroying itself first! No structure can go POUFF, POUFF, POUFF and destroy itself! http://heiwaco.tripod.com/pouf.htm

I have managed to convince ASCE/Journal of Engineering Mechanics to publish a paper of mine to this effect. You can read it at http://heiwaco.tripod.com/blgb.htm . Comments are always welcome.

What?

The cocaine analogy i find problematic.  Here's a couple of reasons.

When you are trying to find instruments that will detect the presence or absence of a particular substance in a rapid and cost-effective way, there will be big problems with 'background levels' and contamination.  However, when you're dealing with a test that can quantify the percentage of a certain substance in a sample, then it is much less likely that you will get inundated with false positives.  We get this problem in agriculture science when testing for pathogens in seed.  The paper did specify the percentage in the dust sample of 0.1%. 

Also, cocaine is a very commonly used substance compared with the 'nano-therrmite' proposed substance.  And money changes hands so fast with an expectation that it could pass through a drug-user's hands quite easily at some point in its travels.

I find the 'background contamination' thing to be weak when there were four samples from four different sites.  I would prefer that there was published analysis confirming or denying the presence of these particles in much more than four samples though.  And i would prefer that these had a great sampling procedure without potential for contamination.  I don't know whether such samples exist, but I would hope they would be tested if they do.

They still test for some kind of trace substances at airports by swabbing insides of bags.  They did it the last time I was through.  But I'm guessing there are good reasons for not swabbing peoples money.

I have heard the theory that the nano-thermite is paint.  This was addressed on some sites I've seen by saying that the paint and primer that was in the building was tested for the 'exothermic reaction' that was seen with the 'nano-thermite' chips and wasn't the same.  It didn't chemcially react when ignited, basically.

Maybe these guys made it all up.  Maybe they are crackpots.  Maybe they are just being made to seem like crackpots.  I really don't know.  But since I'm in Canada, I'm content to watch and see what happens and whether these guys gain in credibility or not.

Here is the abstract from their paper, for convenient perusal.

"Abstract: We have discovered distinctive red/gray chips in all the samples we have studied of the dust produced by the destruction of the World Trade Center. Examination of four of these samples, collected from separate sites, is reported in this paper. These red/gray chips show marked similarities in all four samples. One sample was collected by a Manhattan resident about ten minutes after the collapse of the second WTC Tower, two the next day, and a fourth about a week later.  The properties of these chips were analyzed using optical microscopy, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray energy dispersive spectroscopy (XEDS), and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). The red material contains grains approximately 100 nm across which are largely iron oxide, while aluminum is contained in tiny plate-like structures. Separation of components using methyl ethyl ketone demonstrated that elemental aluminum is present. The iron oxide and aluminum are intimately mixed in the red material. When ignited in a DSC device the chips exhibit large but narrow exotherms occurring at approximately 430 °C, far below the normal ignition temperature for conventional thermite. Numerous iron-rich spheres are clearly observed in the residue following the ignition of these peculiar red/gray chips. The red portion of these chips is found to be an unreacted thermitic material and highly energetic."

It just struck me that there is a glaring omission in the 'nano-thermite' story. Were there any 'control' samples collected in the same way, at around the same period, from sites otherwise similar but progressively further away from ground zero, or at least a few from somewhere unlikely to have been contaminated by material from the collapse, but otherwise as similar as possible?

Without such control samples, there is a serious question-mark over the significance of the study to 9/11. It should have occurred to any serious investigator.

Maybe they did and it was omitted from the account?

Fortitude, you only mention four samples from four sites, which all showed contamination. That totally fails to address the possibility of background contamination. The case would in fact be stronger if at least one sample showed none, especially if it was from an area possibly further from likely explosive sites.

Bobspence raises a good point.

I had thought something along those lines earlier. I wondered what results would be found if samples were taken from different cities around the US. Is this a uniquely New York thing? When they say "nano-thermite" does that mean "tiny particles of alumina and rust that you are likely to find literally anywhere on the surface of the earth"? Without a comparison between New York and other similar urban locations in the U.S., I don't see how that is meaningful.

And an analogy between that scenario and the one in which cocaine on money is not uncommon is valid. Sure, the DEA might be able to find trace amounts of drugs on something you own. No, that doesn't mean that you are a drug dealer. That's the problem with using hair samples for drug tests. They get a lot of false positives since trace amounts of chemicals characteristic to drugs do find their way into the hair of non-drug users. So pointing out that those chemicals are in your hair doesn't mean a whole lot. I suspect that such a situation is happening with these nano-particles that were found.

Okie Dokie.

I am getting fed up of trying to convince the *believers* in the fairy tale about Ali Baba and the Nineteen Hijackers that the collapse of all three WTC buildings 1, 2 and 7 were VERY questionable incidents, and that multiple in situ eyewitnesses observed explosions - which supports what (in my opinion) any person of common sense should immideately understand: The buildings were blown up. Debating whether or not dust samples are containing nano-thermite materials isn't going anywhere. We're just fidgeting around details. We're missing the larger picture.

Let's instead turn to the Pentagon and the Pennsylvania crash. The obvious question must be: Where are the fucking planes? Both Flight 77 and Flight 93 should have left in excess of 60 tons of wreckage - but there's *nothing* there. Instead we are being told that Flight 77 not only vapourised on impact, but it also carried on to punch holes through six reinforced concrete walls. And Flight 93 simply vanished, leaving only a hole in the ground, a partly burnt up Arab passport and a red bandana. P.T. Barnum couldn't have pulled off a better trick, but he would have known what to say about anyone who *believes* in that bullshit.

Never mind that four allegedly hijacked aircrafts were flown around for an hour without any interceptors being scrambled, as protocol demands when *any* plane, of *any* kind, private or commercial, at *any* time, and for *any* reason, deviates from their flight path and/or shuts down their communication with ground control. Never mind that all such big commercial planes since the late 70's have had ground control remote override systems installed (in case of *hijackings* and/or pilots for any other reason becoming incapacitated). Never mind that Flight 77 were performing arcane air acrobatics over the tightest controlled airspace in the world for several minutes before - allegedly - slamming into the tightest controlled building in the world, then promptly "vapourising", all 60 tons of it; shoes, hats an all. I mean... come on!

Something stinks to high heaven here.

Lastly: Why am I interested in this shit at all???

Because political propaganda surrounding these events have changed the entire world, including (but not limited to) my personal freedom to move around at will without subjecting myself to the humiliation of being treated as a potential criminal, to the point of well-nigh giving blood samples and having my body cavities searched by prying fingers. Police with machine guns are prancing around in broad daylight as if there was nothing strange about this. My home country has been dragged into a suspect war over oil and pipelines in Afghanistan, leving multiple soldiers dead. My children are going to have to grow up in an Orwellian fascist world of police and passport laws. Yeah damn right I'm bloody well pissed off!

And all the while, there are smug motherfuckers and corporate criminals spouting *bullshit* while trying to pretend as if there's nothing wrong with the whole oil-and-money trace, that all I have to do is learn how to hate Arabs and I'll be just fine. Well fuck that shit! As far as Nazi regimes go, once in this world ought to be enough.

Dude, honestly... that was more than a little bit tongue-in-cheek.

The real question is: Why was red hot steel beams being pulled out of the sites 3 months later?

OK, I can play that game.

Here is the wreckage of flight 93:

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=flight+93+crash+site+images

Here is the wreckage of flight 77:

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=flight+77+crash+site+images

Seriously dude, that is called not even trying to understand what happened. All that you are doing is repeating long debunked crap from the truther movement.

Hmm, we have scientifically verified red hot aluminum. We have a suggestion of red hot steel. And you don't see any connection here?

As far as the whole how much later deal, I have no experience with how insulation might be engineered. However, the fact that we know that red hot metal existed long after it would have been cooled in open air should indicate that such insulation is possible in the real world.

Well, you asked for an explanation as to why there were no little bits of aircraft spread all over the place. So you get pictures of little bits of aircraft at the crash sites.

You find the lmgtfy site to be patronizing? Well, I will observe that since seeing that you are continuing to claim that you have looked at too many photographs to be worth counting and yet you still seem to hold the idea that there were no aircraft. Nine years after the fact and you could have found those pics on your own just by googling the matter. Umm, yah.

Still, if it had been the case that there were no aircraft involved, the matter would still require an explanation.

There is a fact that there was a great gaping hole in the side of the pentagon. If it was not a jet then what did hit the pentagon? Some say it must have been a missile. If the be the case, then where are the little bits of missile scattered around? Perhaps this was a special secret military missile that evaporates on contact? Umm, just why would a company such as Lockheed Martin spend millions of dollars to develop that? I guess that the government must have paid for this amazing lack of tactical value.

What accounts for the lack of bits of flight 93 (if it had indeed ever been lacking)? Well, I have only heard one really good explanation for that and it is a hoot! Apparently, in the seconds after Todd Beamer screamed “Let's Roll!”, five guys armed only with box cutters managed to off dozens of pissed off air travelers who were committed to taking the flight back. Then after that, the terrorists dropped down to a tree clipping altitude to evade radar and somehow managed to get the plane from the middle of Pennsylvania out of the country with nobody on the ground noticing such an aircraft. Then it was flown to some place that has runways that can handle a 767 and facilities to cut it down to scrap and sell it off on the open market with nobody the wiser.

Umm, yah... That sounds about right for a bunch of guys who want to make a huge public splash.

I think that it is rather more probable that two or three of the hijackers were in fact subdued and the one actually flying the plane said “screw this” and went nose to the ground.

OK, as improbable as that idea is, there is one somewhat serious point that I really must disclose here. I got that amazing bit of bullshit from a professional 767 pilot. When you fly pretty much anywhere, you may be trusting your life to this guy (long odds given the total number of commercial pilots but since we are discussing the wildly improbable, I don't see how we can discount that). He is a really responsible guy. And when it comes to what happened on 9/11, he makes some of the most “out there” truthers come off as fairly sane.

If, further down this thread, you want to link to some BS outfit like professionalpilotsfortruth.org or some such, you can do so with the certain knowledge that I will link you back to this post.