Friday, January 05, 2007

“Hand Waving” the Physics of 9/11

Beginning of the destruction of World Trade Center 2: The upper block lists about 20 degrees just before disintegrating. Photo taken from Saint Paul's Chapel. Millennium Hotel is in the foreground.

Manuel Garcia, who has his Ph.D. in Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering from Princeton and works as a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has written a recent series of articles for CounterPunch, which is described by the editors as a “widely applauded primer on the laws of physics and the myths of conspiracists (sic)” concerning the collapses of World Trade Center towers 1, 2, and 7.

Below, I will take issue with Dr. Garcia’s primer. He doesn’t get MY applause.

I too hold a Ph.D. (in Physics) from an Ivy League university (Brown) and have worked as a physicist at a national laboratory (33 years at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC).

Physicists with international reputations hate to be caught making mistakes. Even Albert Einstein was chagrined by what he regarded as his “biggest blunder,” that is, adding a “cosmological constant” to his general theory of relativity in order to stabilize the universe against gravitational collapse. Einstein threw in the towel after the astronomers determined that the more distant galaxies have greater “red shifts,” thus proving that the universe is actually expanding. Only after his death was it found out from studies of the cosmic microwave background radiation that, “yes, Virginia,” there really is a cosmological constant!

But there was only one Einstein. The rest of us have little hope that history will look kindly on our blunders.

Mercifully, we normally publish in refereed journals, where some of our inevitable mistakes are caught by anonymous peer reviewers prior to publication. Nevertheless, referees tend to be too busy to catch every error, so mistakes can still leak into print. I have made a horrendous number of mistakes in the process of publishing the 108 papers that I wrote fully myself. I know this because I’ve caught virtually all of them myself by double-, triple-, and quadruple-checking my data, logic, and mathematics before allowing my manuscripts to go to press. My published works are highly respected by my peers according to my score (h=43) on the recently devised Hirsch index [J.E. Hirsch, Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. 0507655102 (2005)]. This means that 43 of the 190 total papers of which I am the principal author or a coauthor have each been cited at least 43 times in refereed publications.

By contrast, informal publications on the internet are not subject to such checks and balances, and no one’s reputation is likely to be badly tarnished if mistakes are made here. So even physicists may be tempted to “shoot from the hip” in a blog. This situation reminds me of my undergraduate and grad-school days when everyone made mistakes – harmlessly.

There were times when a physics professor would forget important steps in deriving a theorem on the blackboard and get away with not admitting it. Thanks to one of my physics instructors with a sense of humor, I learned a term for a credentialed person’s bamboozling of the uninitiated. It’s called “proof by intimidation.”

There is another amusing term that is almost universally used by physicists. Picture a graduate student eager to explain to his mentor a hypothesis he has just hatched to explain some odd data. Almost immediately he experiences difficulty finding the “right” words (generally because his hypothesis is half baked or flat wrong) and so begins to substitute gesticulations. Thus, physicists have come to refer to simplistic use of words in lame attempts to explain complex physical phenomena as “hand waving.”

Part One of Dr. Garcia’s three-part series in CounterPunch is entitled “We See Conspiracies That Don't Exist – The Physics of 9/11” ( He begins with a short history of the mass psychoses of the past half century and shows by example how many of these have resulted from people’s ignorance of science. He further asserts that such ignorance often causes people to construct myths that help to soothe their fears of forces beyond their control – and that many such myths take the form of “conspiracy theories.”

This may well be true, but what does it have to do with physics?

Deeper into his introductory paragraphs, Dr. Garcia still hasn’t quite reached the realm of physics when he introduces the reader to the concept of “Occam's Razor” in these words: “Experience has shown that if the evidence allows for several explanations to a given problem then the hypothesis with the fewest assumptions is most probably correct.”

Hold on! Dr. Garcia grossly overrates Occam’s Razor in the matter of what experience actually shows. In my 40 years of doing experimental physics I’ve found that the phenomena I studied in the greatest depth usually turned out to be vastly more complex than my initial hypotheses anticipated. Indeed, the one time I can remember actually using Occam’s Razor to justify a hypothesis in a published paper, I lived to see it disproved 19 years later by a research group in Palermo, Italy.

Score: Physics 1, William of Occam 0.

What I love about doing physics of the material world is that the correct explanation of each and every physical phenomenon eventually emerges, even if it takes many years. Physicists worldwide read each other’s work, gather more and more evidence, and commonly falsify one another’s earlier hypotheses in the process of getting to the core truth.

But leaving behind the physical world for the world of human conniving, all bets are off.

Human conspirators may well choose to deliberately violate Occam’s Razor simply to throw off forensic investigators sophisticated enough to be aware of the concept. In fact, I gave an example of this in the talk “Forensic Statistical Mechanics Applied to Public Documents Prove Poll-Worker Fraud” that I presented in the symposium “Are We a Democracy? Vote Counting in the United States” at the 2007 Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Francisco.

Dr. Garcia next describes the multi-volume Final Report by the National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST), issued in September 2005, as the "official word" on the events of 9/11, particularly regarding the collapse the World Trade Center (WTC) towers. He tells us that NIST “did not proceed to a detailed simulation of the collapses to the ground” and that “NIST justified this on the grounds that there was sufficient energy in the descending blocks to crush the lower structures, once failures had occurred.”

In other words, Dr. Garcia is telling us that NIST hand waved the physics of 9/11!

In my opinion, this is unforgivable! Americans have a right to know exactly what happened on 9/11, and this right justifies a major effort to simulate every millisecond of the collapses by means of supercomputers and perhaps mechanical scale models. For $20 million taxpayer dollars, NIST should already have delivered such. That they did not is inexcusable.

But let’s return to Dr. Garcia’s physics tutorial.

In the section called “Problem 1 Force Balance” he considers the force due to the “upper block” of a WTC tower (defined as the part of the building above where the airplane struck) pushing downward on the rest of the building. He uses Newton’s 2nd Law of motion (F = ma, where “F” is force, “m” is mass, and “a” is acceleration) to set up equations for the dynamic force that would be imparted to the lower part of the building in the event that all vertical support members between two of the floors (nominally at the airplane-strike level) should instantaneously lose all of their strength. He concludes this section with this tautology: “Clearly, the lower structure will crumble when F is greater than the maximum force it can support...”

Clearly. But what IS the maximum force the lower structure can support? Dr. Garcia never tells us. Indeed, it sounds rather like he is setting us up for a "proof by intimidation"...

In fact, things really ARE known about “maximum force the lower structure can support.” For example, in the April 2, 1964 issue of Engineering News Record, we read about the “tremendous reserve strength” designed into the exterior columns of the WTC towers: “Live loads on these columns can be increased more than 2,000% before failure occurs.”

But let’s hear Dr. Garcia out.

In “Problem 1, Numerical Example of Progressive Collapse,” he sets up equations for free-fall times and speeds as functions of drop distance without air resistance. Specifically, he calculates the free-fall speed after the “upper block” has dropped 3 meters (the approximate height between floor slabs in a WTC tower) assuming no air resistance – AND assuming absolutely zero resistance by the 47 massive central steel columns or the approximately 200 intact exterior support members. Possible fire weakening notwithstanding, this final assumption is totally unjustified, and I shall have more to say about it below.

But first we’ll see where his calculation leads.

He calculates the total (static plus dynamic) force exerted by the “upper block” upon striking the lower structure after this 3-meter free-fall as being 6.1 times the weight of the upper block. The number “6.1,” as given, has two significant figures (the 6 and the 1), normally implying that any error in this calculation should be no larger in magnitude than plus-or-minus 0.9. So is the number 6.1 really so accurate? Well, it’s accurate if you accept Dr. Garcia’s OTHER assumptions to be accurate.

What other assumptions?

Well, he picks out of thin air a value for the change in speed (dv) that the “upper block” experiences when it hits the floor below it. And the value for the time interval (dt) during which this speed is lost is also arbitrarily chosen by him. Hidden a couple paragraphs before his actual calculation is Dr. Garcia’s assertion without proof or argument that “Impact is a very brief process whose duration is dt = 1/100 [second].”

Whoa, Nellie! It turns out that this value, dt = 1/100 second, is critical to his thesis but he doesn’t tell us where it came from!

So how accurate is this number anyway?

Well, to have such a small value of dt would require that the bottom of the falling “upper block” meet the floor below without the slightest tilt. For example, accepting Dr. Garcia’s free-fall speed calculation of 7.7 meters/second, tilting of a 63.4-meters-on-an-edge WTC floor by mere 1 degree would increase dt from his guesstimate of dt = 0.01 second all the way to dt = 0.14 second, giving the instantaneous total force of the falling “upper block” on the lower structure of just 1.3 times the static weight of the “upper block” instead of the 6.1 times as estimated in his “example.”

So did the “upper blocks” of WTC1&2 fall without tilting?

Well, according to NIST’s final report (Section 6.14.4, p. 146): “Failure of the south wall in WTC 1 and east wall in WTC2 caused the portion of the building above to tilt in the direction of the failed wall.” And in films (and the photo above!), the "upper block" of WTC2 is seen to tilt as much as 23 degrees!

Therefore, if we accept NIST’s last word on the subject, Dr. Garcia’s guesstimated dt parameter is egregiously wrong, and his calculations prove nothing – not even “by intimidation.”

Moreover, if for the sake of argument we were to accept Dr. Garcia’s calculation of a static-plus-dynamic force of 6.1 times the weight of the “upper block,” this number is still far less than the “2000%” live loads (20 times the weight of the block) that the exterior columns alone were designed to withstand for brief moments (see above).

And yet the real elephant in the room still remains Dr. Garcia’s tacit assumption that the intact core columns (most of the original 47) and the about 200 visibly intact perimeter columns between the two adjacent floors in question SIMULTANEOUSLY lost 100% of their strength at the precise moment of collapse initiation.

Why simultaneously?

Well, Dr. Garcia’s dynamic-force calculation assumes the “upper block” to have been in unimpeded free-fall for the full 3 meter drop, whereas if some steel columns simply refused to bend or break at the same time, the “upper block” would have descended those 3 meters without picking up nearly as much speed.

In fact, Dr. Garcia’s concealed assumption that all support columns lost ALL of their strength – from floor to ceiling – during a single very short time interval (much shorter than the 0.78-second 3-meter free-fall time) is unsupported by any evidence, or even by any claim made by NIST.

Moreover, even neglecting the different strengths of steel at different temperatures, it is astronomically improbable that approximately 250 steel columns would fail due to “natural causes” within the same very short time interval. In more popular language, this hidden assumption underlying Dr. Garcia's calculation is "statistically impossible."

But there IS one way that all 250 some columns could have lost all strength simultaneously. It's called CONTROLLED DEMOLITION.

David Ray Griffin has web-published a splendid, highly footnoted account of “The Destruction of the World Trade Center: Why the Official Account Cannot Be True”:
This scholarly work, rich in eyewitness accounts, includes 11 separate pieces of evidence that the World Trade Center towers 1, 2, and 7 were brought down by explosives.

Thus, with his hidden assumptions exposed, Dr. Garcia's analysis does NOT support the official hypothesis that fires initiated the collapse of the World Trade Center towers on 9/11/01 and does NOT contradict Dr. Griffin's compilation of evidence that they were brought down by controlled demolition.

I have a feeling that most physicists never completely outgrow their propensity for "hand waving" and that in moments of hubris some may even resort to "proofs by intimidation." But in the end what keeps us honest is our need to publish in peer-reviewed journals.

Therefore, I implore my fellow physicists and engineers who may have the time, expertise, and (ideally) supercomputer access to get to work on the physics of the World Trade Center collapses and publish their findings in refereed journals like, say, the Journal of Applied Physics.

The issue of knowing who was really behind the 9/11 attacks is of paramount importance to the future of our country, because the “official” assumption that it was the work of 19 Arab amateurs (1) does not match the available facts and (2) has led directly to the deplorable Patriot Act, the illegal Iraq war, NSA spying on ordinary Americans, repudiation of the Geneva Conventions, and the repeal of habeas corpus (a fundamental point of law that has been with us since the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215).

Surely these Orwellian consequences of public ignorance constitute more than sufficient motivation for any patriotic American physicist or engineer to join the search for 9/11 Truth!

Version 2.02 September 10, 2010


gph said...

Dear Dr. Griscom,

Thank you for your lovely, elegant demolition of Garcia's pathological science. I intend to send your article around to everyone I know. I'm so pleased other scientists and scholars are stepping forward to support Dr Griffin and Dr. Jones. We really have a chance to root out this imperialistic and authoritarian trend as more people of intelligence and conscience acknowledge the 911 elephant in the room. Thank you.

Greg Henricks
Oakland CA

gph said...
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pravda said...

Hello David,
Just as I was beginning to believe that the truth of 9/11 was buried forever under the managed fear and manipulated ignorance that is gripping our country, and much of the world, I ran across your paper. There is still hope.
Would like to hear from you.
Mike Hawryluk, MAT, (EPR) Physics, Brown

pravda said...
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Mac said...

Thank you.Such papers as yours really refuel the movement. Now, it is hard science contribution needed and I'm sure that many smart people will more likely to contribute some time to this matter.

This is very important to make everyone acknowledge that 9/11 questions are very very serious.
Thank you

wraft said...

Yes, the initiation of the collapse is the key. However, I would like to see a finite element analysis of the structure with assumptions most favorable to the official theory.

Bazant's paper starts with the assumption that the upper block has reached a certain velocity. Perhaps with that assumption, a gravitational collapse could have occurred, but it is not a simple matter to gain that much momentum.

Erasmo said...

Dear Dr. Griscom,

There appears to be two lines of possible investigation into this problem. What could have happened and what couldnot have happened.

My question is: Can it be shown that it is a physical impossibility for fire and gravitational forces alone to bring down skycrapers at controlled demolition speeds?


THE ALL-SEEING i said...

A wonderful, persuasive analysis.

edward said...

i'm not a physicist, however it also strikes me that not only does it sound implausible that one tower could have had its collapse initiated in the way Garcia supposes, but that BOTH towers could have collapsed totally.

everyone who has watched the videos knows that there are very significant differences in the damage to each of the two towers, and visible differences in how the very beginning of the collapses started (i.e. the very large "block" tilting sideways then disintegrating on one but not the other).

then of course we have building number 7.... three completely novel events on a single day: steel-framed skyscrapers collapsing perfectly into their own footprints as a result of fire.

thanks for your enlightening article.

Darla said...

Thank you for putting the link on the NY Times Lede blog.

Jeffrey said...

One small typo near the middle:
"But leaving behind the physical world for the world [of] human conniving, all bets are off."

But indeed this is a very important point - "Occam's Razor" is at best a rule of thumb, not a law of nature, and when you move from studying nature to the world of forensic investigation, it becomes totally irrelevant. The perps, especially in any large, high-stakes crime, will deliberately create false leads and otherwise deliberately muddy the evidence trail. A relatively small investment in obfuscation can buy a significant amount of security.

One other thought about energy constraints: If all the stored gravitational energy was applied to accelerating the mass of the building earthward, with no losses, we should see a collapse at free-fall speed. If any energy has to be used to crush the structure and pulverize the concrete and drywall, the collapse must slow down correspondingly.

Even a rough calculation for the concrete alone indicates that the energy needed it to pulverize it is several times the total gravitational potential.

Emuman said...

I don't know if you have read the report on the simulations produced by Purdue University, but as a mechanical/aerospace engineer I had many questions about how the simulation was conducted.
Upon reading their report the physics aspects (solids and material engineering principles) of their model seems to be irrelevant to the project, as they do not offer any validation of their FEA data. One example of this is their modeling of the aircraft which was based on photographs and published literature. I'm not quite sure how this method could possibly simulate the way aircraft structures would actually behave and frankly the simplifications to the aircraft structure insults me as an aerospace engineer. I would hope such things could be done using design drawings or at the very least pieced together with repair and maintenance manuals for the aircraft in question.
The amount of time they spent on perfecting how pretty things appeared seemed to be of the utmost importance to them rather then the raw physics of the event.
These simulations seem to have been swallowed hook line and sinker by the masses when very little critical thought has gone into producing these simulations.
Are there any other independent studies of the event being conducted? The legitimacy of the Purdue project is in question if for only the fact that they reference a FEMA report for their data.

TheDman said...

"publishing the 108 papers that I wrote fully myself. I know this because I’ve caught virtually all of them myself by double-, triple-, and quadruple-checking my data, logic, and mathematics before allowing my manuscripts to go to press. My published works are highly respected by my peers according to my score (h=39) on the recently devised Hirsch index [J.E. Hirsch, Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. 0507655102 (2005)]. This means that 39 of the 185 total papers of which I am the principal author or a coauthor have each been cited at least 39 times in other refereed publications."

Looks like you're doing a lot of hand waving yourself in this paragraph!

Certainly a man who's written 108 articles himself can write one more refuting the NIST report and publish it in a scientific journal, right?

TheDman said...


Really? Can we see those rough calculations?

Matthew said...
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Matthew said...

Some discussion here, if anybody is interested:

(this time with a working hyperlink, I hope)

MINDoverFAITH said...

The fact that the world trade center towers were at a crossroad, renovation or demolition, is rarely mentioned. They were aged and out of date for business and a toxic hazard. They made estimates on fixing the buildings or taking them down a couple years prior to 9/11. Port Authority was given until 2007 to get it done. The towers had become a huge financial problem, many empty offices, more leaving. The cost to fix the towers way more than the value of the property at the time. But demo would never be allowed by the american people, no way. But either or had to be done. thats only one reason of multiple reasons those towers are gone. Mutliple motives is too much detail, so easy to manipulate and twist into no motive or a single motive lacking any cred of reason. Its amazing how easy people can be talked into loving what they once hated, believe what they could never before, and staying forever loyal no matter the size of the bruises nor seen before their eyes. we love playing fetch and a pat on the head.

Matthew said...


Because it's not a fact.

It's a lie.

Ron said...

Dr. Griscom, You're right to call attention to the fact that the vertical supports of the buildings didn't fail simultaneously. We've all seen evidence of this, particularly the photographs and video of WTC2 and it's severe tilt of 23 degrees. As the upper block falls into the building at such an angle, it's impacting the vertical supports at that angle. So, it's not just a matter of questioning if the vertical loads on the core columns and perimeter support exceeded the buckling point, but also if the horizontal component of that angled force could cause catastrophic failure by pushing over the supports or bending them.
Also, thanks for pointing out that "there IS one way that all 250 some columns could have lost all strength simultaneously. It's called CONTROLLED DEMOLITION." Since it's obvious that the columns DIDN'T lose strength simultaneously, then that indicates it WASN'T controlled demolition, right?

éminence grise said...

To all of you who have posted kind and insightful remarks, I want to say thank you! I do apologize for not doing so sooner, but I seem to have a congenital aversion to blogging in it's traditional sense. I spend a huge amount of time putting together my essays and then just walk away after I post them.

Otherwise, you may be interested in my personal 911 research regarding how it was possible for insiders to pull off all those aviation stunts without the help of a bunch of incompetent Arabs. This oeuvre can be downloaded from my web site:

Best wishes, Dave

éminence grise said...

O.K. I'm going to violate my own rule and answer a few of you.

Edward: You admit not to being a physicist, but you think like one. Good going!

TheDman: You're perfectly right that I'm capable of writing an article on 9/11 that would be accepted for publication in a refereed journal, but there are not enough hours in the day for me to do that because of my involvement with other things like exposing election fraud.
Regarding your second comment: The quote you make isn't mine. So, while I believe it likely to be true, I have no obligation to do any calculations.

Matthew: You owe MindOverFaith either evidence that he has told a lie, or more likely an apology. According to things I've heard MindOverFaith is spot on.

éminence grise said...

Oh, I forgot Ron.

No, your comment is a non sequitur.

Rotation of the upper block is what you would expect if all columns fail simultaneously EXCEPT those on the wall acting as the fulcrum.

The explanation for that is still CONTROLLED DEMOLITION. The "CONTROL" part means the perps can achieve any effect they wish.

Ross said...

Please explain why a one degree tilt means that the time to shatter the floor below goes from .01 seconds to .14 seconds? Also, doesn't the video evidence show the upper floors take less than a second to hit the floors below once they start down?

éminence grise said...

Good question, Ross. The force that the falling block instantaneously delivers to the floor below depends on how fast the impulse is delivered. If the upper block has rotated only one degree, it delivers an instantaneous force only to the line of contact, which at a rotation angle of 1 degree would take 0.14 seconds to march from the initially contacted side of the lower floor all the way across to the far side. Tell the truth, I don't know if the videos show the upper block contacting the lower one in less than a second. If they DO show that, it can only have happened if all the columns were cut simultaneously...

vic-one said...

Looking at ground zero I have wondered where are the thousands of floor joists and particularly where are all 110 floors worth of steel flooring pans upon the light-weight concrete rested? Matter cannot disappear into thin air unless it was vaporized. Could gravitation alone provide sufficient energy to not only vaporize the flooring system but the very contents of the offices resting on the floors? My common sense rejects that notion. If the floors falling caused the towers to collapse where is the flooring? JMHO.


ross said...

The pile of steel and concrete was 13 stories high. They hauled away around 1.5 million tons of debris. I can't work out why you wouldn't know that.
Some of it was "joists" "floorpans" etc but of course the enormous energy from the collapse jumbled everything.

website design New York City said...

nice post

Ktesibios said...

You state that "2000% of live load" means that the structure could support 20 times the weight of the upper block.

The term "live load" means loads that change during the life of a structure- IOW cubicles, furnishings, interior partitions, office machinery, filing cabinets, people, snow/ice or accumulated rain on the roof and so on. The weight of the structure itself is called "dead load". The reserve capacity for dead load was on the order of 200-300% maximum. Steel construction typically uses a "factor of safety" of around 160-200 %.

Consequently the claim that the tower structure could have held up 20 times its own weight is an error based on incorrect understanding of a technical term.

Don't feel bad- you're definitely not the first troofer to make the same mistake.

Anonymous said...

the key is in the lean angle the building develops, when it goes over to the 23 degree lean angle it tells us that the very first stage of collapse has created an uneven load on the base of the building, there are two possible stages of collapse after we observe this it either peels like a banana away from the base or the pivot gives way and the top floors drive themselves through and down one side of the building- the load being unevenly spread and the collapse uneven, we observe that at some point one side of the building has more integrity than the other by some degree- (23 to be exact!) this imbalance can only become more pronounced as the collapse continues as the lateral trajectory places more mass over the side of the building that is already collapsing fastest and creates a specific impact area on the lower tower, law of entropy anybody?
are you telling me that after one area of the building resisting more than the other this imbalance and asymmetry would magically correct itself without explosive assistance?
A cola can with the tiniest dent in one side will fold in half if trodden on, however if i dent all the sides it collapses neatly into a compressed cylinder.
A bomb is a bomb is a bomb is a bomb.
the most obvious thing in this debate is the anger and insultory nature of the comments made by those who like the official story best- you dont need to know physics to see who needs to back up their arguments with patronising and dismissive name calling and deliberate discussion destroying partisanship.
Im glad i dont live in a country where the term truthseeker can be bastardised and turned into an insult. i dont give a hoot, americans killing each other for a change aint such a bad thing to be honest saves the rest of the world the trouble it seems,
but the stupidity of the self denial is unreal- our georgie bush wouldnt do such a thing cos he like apple pie etc. lol.

Ross said...

If there was a bomb why was there no noise? Once you answer this we can move on to your other points.


Anonymous said...

there were numerous reports of multiple explosions from the janitor in the basement to the firefighters who saw the lobby blasted to pieces.
just reviewing the news footage from that day there are hundreds of eyewitness reports claiming as much- who are "we" anyway
may i also draw your attention to the video taken from a tripod that registers a shockwave (Wobble) just before the visual collapse from a mile away proving explosion.
as for the law of entropy that if the official story is correct would have twisted the building through trhe path of least resistance- the tolerances of the supports lower down the tower would have had to be as close to identical in strentgh as is physically possible- go look up emergent chaotic behaviour and lorenz attractors before you even bother cherry picking my post to prove a theory that in your mind is already a conclusion, idiot.
in science what you never do is set out deliberately to prove a hypothesis you attempt to disprove it at every turn in order that it be "troo" as you so eloquently put it, you are seeking to discredit theory with conjecture.

Anonymous said...

as for the tripe spouted by the garcia chap and i quote "the steel shattered" -says it all really!
and why do i need to back up that there were explosions before you go and concoct some rubbish about the rest of my post. why cant you scientifically refute the whole post immediately with physical argument- fact is you cant, the thing is with a bomb however well placed or constructed is that it looks like a bomb, sounds like a bomb and leaves massive destruction relative to the energy it contained- a five year old can see it goes bang why cant you?

Ross said...

The "janitor" reported hearing explosions when the planes first hit. There are no believable reports or any seismic evidence of an explosion large enough to rip the towers apart. In addition we have videos taken which don't have any explosive noises like a bomb going off.

I like to argue single points at a time because then we both stay on point. I'll get to the rest of your post once we've finished with this part.

So, I challenge you again to find audio or seismic evidence at the time of the collapses consistent with your theory of a bomb at work. My position is that any bomb big enough would have made an enormous noise which would have been heard by everyone (not just by a few people who heard loud noises).


Anonymous said...

"i like to argue"
ok ross now thats established,
"an explosion large enough to rip the towers apart"????
have you heard yourself?
know what a cutter charge is?
know what molten iron looks like when its pouring out of a building?
are you blind or just stupid?
are you aware that once weakened with thermite (chemical evidence of iron spheres throughout the dust consistent with the true accounts sorry "troofer tinfoli hatter etc etc conspiracy theory nutjobs)-according to the most credible theories -it was then blown which would not require too large an explosion seeing as the infastructure was severely compromised, the janitor reported that the blasts came from BELOW him BEFORE the planes hit, no believable reports? there were hundreds of people saying "explosion!" on every news channel throughout the entire sorry episode and they all seem to be consistent with each other as for timing. instead of challenging a laypersons perspective have a go at the architects and engineers lecture, youll have to dream up a whole new level of pseudoscientific bunkum to refute their claims.
there was an "enormous noise" you can see a guy jump out of his skin facing away from one tower as it blew -a collapse would not have caused such a kneejerk cos it wouldnt have been loud enough.

you are, thankfully, giving yourself the answer you self deluded pedant, you say and i quote
"My position is that any bomb big enough......"
ok - an open admission that it would require a very, very large explosive to damage the integrity of the towers "big enough" to put it exactly-
the fire however, mmmmmm was really "big enough" was it?
and hot enough?
and sustained enough?
The reality is this -if the official story held any water at all, i mean any at all
a very teeny explosion or a well placed ,planned series of them would have been enough across one floor to initiate the "pancake collapse"? wouldnt it?
go ahead dispute your own drivel i dare you.
tis bunkum and the sooner you realise it the better.
thousands of tons of steel and
half a freeway of concrete vaporised and melted in a moment of time by a kerosene and carpet fire?
oh and an aeroplane that conveniently dislodged all the fireproofing.
i give up -refute it all you like, but you use a word that says youll be back with more nay saying, and thats "believable"
what does the fireman say?
"boom boom boom boom like they waz plannin to bring em down, like a controlled explowsion"
"now get me some cawfee"
"aw i fawgot im nat believable am i?"
is believable your own personal criteria or what fox news told you.
you know what i find unbelievable- the amazing foreknowledge of the bbc running the script/ sorry "reporting" the collapse of no 7 before it came down, now thats unbelievable.
man from delmonte he say yes
man form NYFD he say "explowsion"

psikeyhackr said...

Let’s just face a few simple facts.








How much does one complete floor assembly weigh?





ross said...


> No, this is incorrect reasoning. The blow which struck the lower floor was equal to many tons of TNT exploding.

go ahead dispute your own drivel i dare you.
tis bunkum and the sooner you realise it the better.
thousands of tons of steel and

> There was NO melted steel visible in the pile. Not one column was pictures melted in one photograph. Maybe the temps in the pile got hot enough, I don't know but not one picture I can find show melted steel.

oh and an aeroplane that conveniently dislodged all the fireproofing.

>By definition this would happen given the nature of the insulation and an airplane crash. Incidentally, if steel buildings cannot be brought down by fire, then why bother insulating the steel at all? (Must be a conspiracy between structural engineers and the insulation manufacturers.) No, insulation is called for by the code precisely because it's needed to prevent collapses.

Anonymous said...


yes there was- typing NO in caps is your best refutation you are either wilfully stupid or a collusive idiot -everyone seen it molten steel in thejaws of a jcb claw -bright red and visdbly dripping.
i aint coming back at your other points as you are at playing strawman- and obviously know very little about physics.
i dont know who is responsible and to be honest it doesnt really matter. its not about nitpicking even whether these towers were brought down by towelheaded knifewielders or large amounts of industrial thermite- what matters is american foreign policy - no more- no less, oh and any chance we had of proving it wasnt mohammed et al is diminishing by the day along with all the ground zero witnesses- thats maybe the question americamns should be asking. but riddle me this one you dumbass- why is it when there is so much as a train crash that kills say one person - we know more about the physics, properly conducted investigations and a crime scene environment is declared- whole building comes down and we get a load of hokey nonsense, no proper investigation and not even a structural engineers report using words like "moment" "force" "pivot" or "GREAT BIG FUCKING BOMB!" that is why all these questions remain unanswered by those who dont want or have to answer them.

Anonymous said...

the strawman- an arguing technique employed by a party often when losing a debate- in which the debater takes the weakest points in his opponents argument and attacks them one by one -carefully ignoring or breezing over pertinent or irrefutable evidence in order to ridicule his opponent and knock him down- like the eponymous straw man.
ross' post does this beautifully taking my original point- refuting only the points he can have a hope of "knocking down". he is a shill without doubt- ive argued with a few real debaters/doubters of the official story and they all have something you dont- shock awe and fear at the very concepts this brings up- to you it sounds like you are debating the science of tea drinking- that dispassion shows you for what you are. a shill-0 or possibly but unlikely- just a cunt.

ross said...

I'm sorry if I missed out on refuting some of your points. However, if you point them out, I'll do my best to respond to you with facts and not speculation and distortions of what's been said.

When you construct a theory and one of the cornerstones of that theory is refuted then the theory is refuted and you have to try again. So, explain how cutter charges were used in the buildings. How big would they have had to be using whatever material you care to postulate. If you do that you will learn that thermite/thermate doesn't cut horizontally and you'd need a huge amount to cut even one of the core columns which means that's completely ruled out.

The key point of melt in the pile is that the pile was hot enough to melt some metals but not steel, sorry. I can't find anyone who actually claims that they assayed a piece of "melt" and found it to be steel. However, that's beside the point since no amount of explosives of the elusive "nano thermite" could have KEPT temperatures hot in that pile under any circumstances. There are pictures of ordinary buldozers handling glowing metal pieces but if they were steel, the hydraulics in the bulldozers would have been rendered useless in a matter of minutes if not seconds. So, again, the evidence is that some less hot metal is involved.

The straw man technique is something different and involves knocking down a point that someone actually hasn't made. I didn't do that. You said explosions, not cutter charges - "a bomb is a bomb is a bomb...." was what you said. You've lost this discussion.

Anonymous said...

Hi David or anyone who might understand what David is talking about in his Handwaving article,

Thank you for your excellent analysis. I would like to understand a little about the basic math involved here as I am not a well educated person. May I ask how increasing dt from 0.01s to 0.14s would reduce total force against the lower block at time of impact? What does the amount of tilt have to do with it? I took a full year community college course in calculus many years ago, but my recollection of basic physics and math is rusty to say the least. Be gentle if you will. Thanks and looking forward to anyone's reply really.

Anonymous said...

Whoops! Okay, it's a simple right angle triangle calculation. Doh!