Physics-Based Truth

The picture is Caravaggio's Beheading of John the Baptist, which in the Eastern tradition is associated with September 11. It was painted in Malta, and presumably the Knights of that island looked on it in the midst of their struggles to defend the Mediterranean from the piratical confederacies that Jefferson eventually ordered the USS Enterprise, amongst others, to control. That was after, of course, the Emperor had eliminated the Knights as part of his drive to ultimate power. Who needs science fiction when you have history?

Almost as quickly as the events of 11th September, 2001, a meme developed that the towers were brought down artificially, and that this was obvious. In fact, that much is true; Islamist terrorists flying aeroplanes into the buildings did destroy the towers in an unnatural manner. However, I have always been intrigued by the physics of the event, and of the contemporaneous attack on the Pentagon.

One doesn't have to be a devotee of biographies of Robert Moses to suspect that the construction and steel of the towers wasn't of the highest quality. They were, after all, mired in controversy before they were built. Still, as anyone who has ever used a pressure cooker knows, in contained environments, relatively low heats can do strange things. Since no one has ever demolished buildings built over tunnels and around complex frames interspersed with lift shafts with aeroplanes and jet fuel before, the strangeness of what happened is potentially cubed.

I was intrigued, therefore, to find this physics based refutation of the 9-11 truthers, which is as useful as those sites that showed how one bullet in the Kennedy assassination was not only probable but necessary, which I blogged about before.

I think that there are mysteries about 9/11, which the Commission didn't pursue, and which time will reveal. Those include how the terrorists managed to gain control, which aeroplanes were scrambled over Pennsylvania, and what 'chatter', precisely, Condi Rice and George Bush ignored. I also await the revelations of time, which I hope to live to see, about the full role of Vice-President Cheney in the debacle. I am also still amazed that there were no ballistic ground defences or aircraft tasked with the protection of the Pentagon, since I would in the past have assumed that there were.

But, really, obsessing about the destruction itself is pseudoscience, and a useful waste of time for those who want want happened to be the untouchable, sacrificial truth at the centre of the rampage of the last decade that has brought America to the brink of bankruptcy.

As I write, a massive invasion has begun of Taliban areas in Afghanistan. Both sides claim God; may he bring peace to those who fall today. I pray that the good men come home safe.


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