The Physics of WTC 7

About a month ago I had a debate with several debunkers at once about the collapse of WTC 7. In particular, we debated about the period of free fall that occured during the collapse. Here are some of the more memorable responses I got from them:

"I'm still gonna say wiping out 30 meters of supports is too fucking obvious for a secret op." -Weirdo10o4
(Apparently it wasn't that obvious, as NIST needed a high school teacher to point it out to them.)

"consider that I can roll a bowling ball down a long flight of stairs. As it rolls down the stairs, it spends time in free fall--between each stair" -EdgemanLL2
(The very obvious difference of course is that when a ball rolls down the stairs, nothing is removed and the ball only free falls for a few inches. Building 7 was in free fall for about 100 feet, or 1/6 of its height.)

"It wouldn't need to give up any of its energy to buckle or crush anything." -CaptMandrake360
(I almost didn't even know how to respond to that.)

The main person I was really debating with was the infamous RKOwens4, who apparently thinks that NIST actually predicted the period of free fall.

"The only point I'm trying to make is that NIST DID predict it and DOES have an explanation for the 2.25 seconds of free-fall. So don't go around saying, 'The 2.25 second free-fall came as a total surprise to NIST' or 'NIST can't explain why the building fell at free-fall for 2.25 seconds.'
As I said, the NIST report on WTC7 actually PREDICTED a 2.25 second free-fall of WTC7, due to the buckling of 8 floors near the base of the building." -RKOwens4

I wasn't entirely sure how Mr. Owens came to this conclusion, as there was nothing about the building entering into free fall in NIST's draft report and, as mentioned above, David Chandler was the one who had to point it out to them. But perhaps he believes NIST's calculations did predict the free fall and NIST was just simply unaware of it. This seems unlikely though, when one looks at the differences between the Draft Report and the Final Report:

The Draft Report stated:
"The collapse time of the upper 18 floors of the north face of WTC 7... was 40 percent greater than the computed free fall time. This is consistent with physical principals." -NIST NCSTAR 1-9, Draft for Public Comment, 610

However, the Final Report states:
"The observed descent time of the upper 18 stories of the north face of WTC 7... was 40 percent greater than the computed free fall time. A more detailed analysis of the descent of the north face found three stages: (1) a slow descent with acceleration less than that of gravity that corrosponded to the buckling of the exterior columns at the lower floors, (2) a freefall descent over approximately eight stories at gravitational acceleration for approximately 2.25 seconds, and (3) a decreasing acceleration as the north face encountered resistance from the structure below." -NIST NCSTAR 1-9 (Final Report): 607

Note that the phrase "consistent with physical principals" is completely absent from NIST's newer passage. In fact, "consistent with physical principals" appears nowhere in NIST's final report. There is a "consistent with" statement in the final report, but it says nothing about physical principals. After giving its three stage analysis, NIST states: "The three stages of collapse progression described above are consistent with the results of the global collapse analyses discussed earlier in this chapter." -NCSTAR 1-9 (Final Report): 603
Basically, what NIST is saying is that its three stage analysis on this page is consistent with its three stage analyses on earlier pages! How nice of NIST to assure everyone that a later part of their report agrees with an earlier part of their report. It's apparently not consistent with physical principals, but it's consistent with their report! In any case, these facts show that there was absolutely no indication prior to publishing their final report that they had predicted free fall at all. It was one thing they said was impossible. However, this too was a detail Mr. Owens disagreed with:

"Can you provide me with a link to where they ever said that any period of free-fall would have been impossible from a fire-induced collapse?" -RKOwens4

I do wonder if Mr. Owens has actually watched NIST's technical briefing.



I also briefly discussed how the fires could not have been hot enough to cause the collapse in the first place. Mr. Owens was (not surprisingly) unconvinced.

"Now, go read the report and explain to me WHY expanding floor beams pushing the core columns out of alignment was not enough to cause the building to collapse. Tell me why, specifically." -RKOwens4

Specifically, because the fires could not possibly have been as hot as NIST stated to do that.

"raising those five floor beams to a temperature of 600°C would require an enormous amount of energy, far more than was available from the burning of the office furnishings underneath the floor beams." -Kevin Ryan

Debunkers can easily hand wave away Kevin Ryan's statement, as he is a "truther" and therefore has no credibility. But unfortunately for them, even Dr. Frank Greening, a long time debunker, agrees that the fires could not have been as hot as NIST says.

"NIST's collapse initiation hypothesis requires that structural steel temperatures on floors 12/13 significantly exceeded 300°C [570°F]--a condition that could never have been realized with NIST's postulated 32 kg/m2 fuel loading." -Dr. Frank Greening

While Dr. Greening does not believe the building was demolished, he does agree that NIST's report is false.

The above three videos are basically my response to these debunkers who feel there was nothing strange about the free fall of WTC 7.

Far from solving the mystery of WTC 7's collapse, NIST has done nothing but created more mysteries. And debunkers have certainly not solved them.

Put up or Shut up: A Year in Review

Update September 17, 2011:

So it's been a little bit over a year since physicist Steven Jones told us "what we need to know about peer-review" while also essentially telling 9/11 "debunkers" to put up or shut up. Let's see if they have stopped just being loud and have gotten loud and clear...

In October 2008, long time 9/11 "debunker" Dr. Frank Greening and three of his colleagues were published in the American Society of Civil Engineers' peer reviewed Journal of Engineering Mechanics (JEM). Their paper "What Did and Did Not Cause Collapse of WTC Twin Towers in New York" promoted the pile-driver or crush-down theory in which the tops of the Towers act as giant sledgehammers. Greening was the third author of the paper, the first being engineer Zdenek Bazant who wrote another paper also published by the JEM on 9/13/01 essentially promoting the theory.

As the website 911research.wtc7.net pointed out, "Bazant must be a super-genius to understand how two skyscrapers could crush themselves to rubble, a newly observed behaviour for steel structures, and write a paper about it in just two days."

The problem for Greening and company is that JEM published a peer-reviewed refutation of his hypothesis by chemical engineer James R. Gourley and are now set to publish another such peer-reviewed refutation by Anders Björkman, M.Sc. in July of this year, making it the 6th mainstream peer-reviewed paper published by members of the 9/11 truth movement.

Björkman's paper can currently be read at his personal website. It closes with the following statement, "Simple observations of any video of the WTC1 destruction prove the Bazant, Le, Greening and Benson model wrong."

Indeed.



Dr. Greening, why don't you do as James Gourley has done with your work and write a peer-reviewed refutation of the latest paper he was involved in regarding 9/11?
You know, the one in the peer-reviewed Open Chemical Physics Journal, published by Bentham.org, that reports to have found remains of nano-thermite, a high-tech military explosive, in dust recovered from the WTC.



The one that you have only attempted to refute on an internet forum where you presented disputed calculations regarding how energetic the material was, but no argument that the material was anything but nano-thermite.
As Steven Jones said:

Debunkers may raise all sorts of objections on forums, such as "Oh, it's just paint" or "the aluminum is bound up in kaolin." We have answered those questions in the paper, and shown them to be nonsense, but you have to read to find the answers...

Here's what you need to know (especially if you are not a scientist): UNLESS AN OBJECTOR ACTUALLY PUBLISHES HIS OR HER OBJECTION IN A PEER-REVIEWED ESTABLISHED JOURNAL (yes that would include Bentham Scientific journals), THEN THE OBJECTION IS NOT CONSIDERED SERIOUS IN THE SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY. YOU SHOULD NOT WORRY ABOUT NON-PUBLISHED OBJECTIONS EITHER...

IF it is so easy to publish in Bentham Scientific journals, or if these are "vanity publications" (note: there is no factual basis for these charges) -- then why don't the objectors write up their objections and get them peer-reviewed and published?? The fact is, it is not easy, as serious objectors will find out.

Being a chemist this is right up your alley and you don't need his samples to refute his work. So what are you waiting on Dr. Greening? Related Info:

Debunking Dave Thomas, Ryan Mackey, and Zdenek Bazant et al.

Super Duper Thermite: A Year in Review

Thermite Denial - A Year in Review

9/11 Truth Movement: Year in Review

Who Needs Debunking When Insults Are So Easy

Scootle's post thanking the Screw Loose Change blog for their lack of debunking and promotion of 9/11 truth has inspired me to expand on his thoughts and answer a question for my rebunking ally.

First off Scootle, one of their commenters recently stated, "We're at the mocking stage now, well past any debunking."

I have seen comments from Pat Curley before that basically state the same thing, so yes, as you thought might be the case, they are getting lazy. Dr. Frank Greening, while sometimes doing good work, can be just as lazy, as was recently demonstrated when he did some calculations regarding the recent paper on the nano-thermite discovery, Pat reprinted the following "key points.":

I've already done a calculation of how much heat energy a layer of nano-thermite (such as the one allegedly found by Jones et al) could generate. My conclusion was that Jones' chips would do no more than slightly warm a WTC column!

So when I bounced my calculations and conclusions off Jones et al, all he could come up with was the suggestion that there were probably other explosives used in the WTC and the nanothermite chips were maybe just fuses! Thus, after all the fuss about high-tech nano-thermites, we are back to good-old 'bombs in the buildings' as the answer to how the buildings were destroyed."

First off, that wasn't all Jones could come up with. In a recent post regarding this debate on 911blogger.com Jones highlighted how he informed Greening that during the ignition of the material iron-rich spheres were formed, such as would be expected during a thermite reaction. He pointed out that the device the chips were heated to only reaches 700°C, but that "the melting points of iron and of iron oxide are both above 1200 C." This is evidence of a high temperature chemical reaction and was basically already addressed in the paper, which notes that the samples ignited at about 430ºC.

Greening also argued that, "The microspheres reported in the Harrit paper could at best be described as 'iron-rich', with Al, Si and O always present. But let me remind you, this is also true for the magnetically separated microspheres found in incinerator ashes – they contain mostly Fe, Al, Si, and O."

Jones replied with more information from the paper, "Dr. Farrer and Danny and I have looked at many of these post-DSC spheres, many do NOT contain Al. See for example Fig 21 in our paper."

Greening then admitted to some error on that point. He also seemed to agree that the materials could not be primer paint used on the WTC.

Jones next pointed out that he never stated thermate alone could bring down the Towers, he states:

During the discussion, I briefly expressed my hypothesis that nanothermite served as an igniting agent, as in the "super-thermite matches" described in our paper, to ignite more conventional explosives such as C4 or HMX, in the destruction of the WTC buildings. Thermate (sulfur plus thermite and possibly the form thermate-TH-3) was ALSO in evidence and probably intended to weaken critical steel members (e.g., residue/ material flowing with orange glow from the So. Tower just minutes before its collapse and the sulfidation of WTC steel reported in the FEMA report but ignored by NIST). Thermite incendiary without sulfur is not in evidence at the WTC to date.

But sulfur is NOT needed for the function of explosive nanothermite and would not be expected to appear in the red/gray chips. Reliable and robust super- or nano-thermite ignitors would each be ignited by an electrical pulse generated by a radio-receiver, in turn igniting shaped charges to cut steel, the sequence beginning near where the planes went in for the Towers and computer-controlled, so that the destruction wave would proceed via explosives in top-down sequence. Thus, this was no conventional (bottom first) controlled demolition, agreeing on this with B. Blanchard, but I never claimed it was! (For the Towers; the demolition of WTC7 appears to be bottom-first and more conventional.) The top-down destruction of the Towers in this model would doubtless require more explosives than would a conventional controlled demolition. Thermate (an incendiary, not an explosive) is not the 'be all and end all' explanation (FG’s terminology), nor did I ever claim it was – I have consistently pointed to evidence that explosives were used in bringing down the Towers.

The "working hypothesis" above is a scientific hypothesis, that is, subject to change as further research data emerge. It is also possible (for example) that explosive nanothermite (not an incendiary) could have been used in SHAPED CHARGES, to cut through steel explosively (a use suggested in Fig. 1 of Miziolek AW, "Nanoenergetics: an emerging technology area of national importance." Amptiac Spring 2002; 6(1): 43-48. Available from: http://www.p2pays.org/ref/34/33115.pdf ."

As the Rock Creek Free Press pointed out in their bombshell article Scientists Find Explosives in World Trade Center Dust:

The authors avoided describing the material as 'explosive' because the flakes studied are too small to assess the bulk properties of the material.

To test the power of this thermitic material, small samples were heated in a Differential Scanning Calorimeter, a very sensitive device for detecting the heat generated by a chemical reaction. The samples ignited at about 430ºC and generated as much or more heat than an equal mass of high explosive such as TNT.

When Kevin Ryan was asked if the materials were explosive, he stated, "They can be made quite explosive, in fact they have been referred to as high explosives."

This is a fact...

Aluminothermic Technology - Existence of High-Tech Metal-Based Explosives

Dr. Greening also tried to argue that the materials didn't have the correct physical structure for nano-thermite, but Steven Jones corrected him, "The iron-oxide grains are approximately 100 nm across, which fits the requirement for nano-thermite as defined in the literature, despite Greening's obfuscation of this point."

The literature that Jones refers to is once again something that can be found in the paper itself, at footnote 19 the authors quote a report by Gash et al. dated April 2000 which states, "Nanostructured composites are multicomponent materials in which at least one of the component phases has one or more dimensions (length, width, or thickness) in the nanometer size range, defined as 1 to 100 nm."

The chips also have the correct chemical composition. As Jim Hoffman recently pointed out regarding the structure and composition of the chips:

The particles are very small: the plates being only about 40 nanometers thick, and the grains are only about 100 nanometers in diameter. The particles are highly uniform in size and shape. The particles are intimately mixed in a highly consistent composition throughout the material.

These are all features of a nano-engineered material. It is not possible that such a material was formed as a by-product of the destruction of the Twin Towers.

Although these elements -- aluminum, iron, oxygen, and silicon -- were all abundant in building materials used in the Twin Towers, it is not possible that such materials milled themselves into fine powder and assembled themselves into a chemically optimized aluminothermic composite as a by-product of the destruction of the Twin Towers.

Dr. Greening has in fact used ridiculous explanations akin to this in the past when he claimed that there could have been natural thermite reactions within the tower fires!

Dr. Jones brings us the bottom line:

So how do you, as a non-scientist, discern whether the arguments are valid or not? You should first ask, 'is the objection PUBLISHED in an ESTABLISHED PEER-REVIEWED JOURNAL?' If not, you can and should say -- "I will wait to see this formally published in a refereed scientific journal. Until then, the published peer-reviewed work by Harrit et al. stands."

Might I add, if this happens, then wait for the response!

So yes Scootle, the debunking is quite lax these days, but our foes claim it's because there's "not much out there," except Dr. Greening kicking so much butt in his exchange with Jones, that "Jones shouldn't be sitting down anytime soon." Did I mention this guy hypothesized that there could have been natural thermite reactions within the tower fires?!

Related info and some of the stuff that is going on out there:

Frank Greening versus Isaac Newton

NYC CAN Update: Now 40,000 signatures

9/11 Survivor Janette MacKinlay Makes an Appeal for a New Investigation Into 9/11

41 U.S. Counter-Terrorism and Intelligence Agency Veterans Challenge the Official Account of 9/11

General Richard Myers Asked About Nanothermite Explosives Found in WTC Dust