Steven Jones published in a peer-reviewed journal.

A paper written by Steven Jones and others has finally been published in a peer-reviewed journal. It has been a long time coming, but it was something that was bound to happen eventually. This publication seems to have sent some in the debunking community into an apoplectic rage. This is understandable because their strongest argument against us was the argument from authority. Once this argument is lost the best they can do is engage in ad hominem attacks.

The paper contains 14 points in which the 9/11 Truth Community, FEMA and NIST(National Institute of Standards and Technology) find agreement. This seems like a good starting point. The differences emerge when we get into a discussion over the causes of the collapse of WTC 1,2 and 7. These are the 14 point of agreement:

1) WTC 7 Collapse Issue. FEMA: “The specifics of the fires in WTC 7 and how they caused the building to collapse remain unknown at this time. Although the total diesel fuel on the premises contained massive potential energy, the best hypothesis has only a low probability of occurrence. Further research, investigation, and analyses are needed to resolve this issue”

2) Withstanding Jet Impact. NIST: “Both WTC 1 and WTC 2 were stable after the aircraft impact, standing for 102 min and 56 min, respectively. The global analyses with structural impact damage showed that both towers had considerable reserve capacity”

3) Pancake Theory Not Supported. NIST: “NIST’s findings do not support the “pancake theory” of collapse, which is premised on a progressive failure of the floor systems in the WTC towers… Thus, the floors did not fail progressively to cause a pancaking phenomenon”

4) Massive Core Columns. NIST: “As stated above, the core columns were designed to support approximately 50% of the gravity loads” “The hat-truss tied the core to the perimeter walls of the towers, and thus allowed the building to withstand the effects of the aircraft impact and subsequent fires for a much longer time—enabling large numbers of building occupants to evacuate safely”

5) Essentially in Free Fall. NIST: [Question:] “How could the WTC towers collapse in only 11 seconds (WTC 1) and 9 seconds (WTC 2) — speeds that approximate that of a ball dropped from similar height in a vacuum (with no air resistance)?” [Answer:] …As documented in Section 6.14.4 of NIST NCSTAR 1, these collapse times show that: “… the structure below the level of collapse initiation offered minimal resistance to the falling building mass at and above the impact zone. The potential energy released by the downward movement of the large building mass far exceeded the capacity of the intact structure below to absorb that energy through energy of deformation. Since the stories below the level of collapse initiation provided little resistance to the tremendous energy released by the falling building mass, the building section above came down essentially in free fall, as seen in videos”.

6) Fire Endurance Tests, No Failure. NIST: “NIST contracted with Underwriters Laboratories, Inc. to conduct tests to obtain information on the fire endurance of trusses like those in the WTC towers…. All four test specimens sustained the maximum design load for approximately 2 hours without collapsing

7) Fires of Short Duration. NIST: “The initial jet fuel fires themselves lasted at most a few minutes.” “At any given location, the duration of [air, not steel] temperatures near 1,000 °C was about 15 min to 20 min. The rest of the time, the calculated temperatures were near 500 °C or below”

8) WTC Fires Did Not Melt Steel. NIST: “In no instance did NIST report that steel in the WTC towers melted due to the fires. The melting point of steel is about 1,500 degrees Celsius (2,800 degrees Fahrenheit). Normal building fires and hydrocarbon (e.g., jet fuel) fires generate temperatures up to about 1,100 degrees Celsius (2,000 degrees Fahrenheit). NIST reported maximum upper layer air temperatures of about 1,000 degrees Celsius (1,800 degrees Fahrenheit) in the WTC towers (for example, see NCSTAR 1, figure 6-36)”

9) Destruction of WTC Steel Evidence. NIST: “NIST possesses 236 structural steel elements from the World Trade Center (WTC) buildings. These pieces represent a small fraction of the enormous amount of steel examined at the various recovery yards where the debris was sent as the WTC site was cleared. It is estimated that roughly 0.25 percent to 0.5 percent of the 200,000 tons of steel used in the construction of the two towers was recovered.” “The lack of WTC 7 steel precludes tests on actual material from the structure…”.

10) Unusual Bright Flame and Glowing Liquid (WTC 2). NIST: “An unusual flame is visible within this fire. In the upper photograph {Fig 9-44} a very bright flame, as opposed to the typical yellow or orange surrounding flames, which is generating a plume of white smoke, stands out”.

11) High-Temperature Steel Attack, Sulfidation. FEMA (based on work by a Worchester Polytechnic Institute investigative team): “Sample 1 (From WTC 7)… Evidence of a severe high temperature corrosion attack on the steel, including oxidation and sulfidation with subsequent intergranular melting, was readily visible in the near-surface microstructure…. Sample 2 (From WTC 1 or WTC 2)… The thinning of the steel occurred by high temperature corrosion due to a combination of oxidation and sulfidation. …The severe corrosion and subsequent erosion of Samples 1 and 2 are a very unusual event. No clear explanation for the source of the sulfur has been identified… A detailed study into the mechanisms of this phenomenon is needed…"

12) Computer Modeling and Visualizations. New Civil Engineer: "World Trade Center disaster investigators [at NIST] are refusing to show computer visualisations of the collapse of the Twin Towers despite calls from leading structural and fire engineers, NCE has learned. Visualisations of collapse mechanisms are routinely used to validate the type of finite element analysis model used by the [NIST] investigators. …"

13) Total Collapse Explanation Lacking. NIST: “This letter is in response to your April 12, 2007 request for correction… we are unable to provide a full explanation of the total collapse.”

14) Search for Explosive or Thermite Residues. From a NIST FAQ: [Question: ] “Did the NIST investigation look for evidence of the WTC towers being brought down by controlled demolition? Was the steel tested for explosives or thermite residues? The combination of thermite and sulfur (called thermate) "slices through steel like a hot knife through butter." [Answer: ] NIST did not test for the residue of these compounds in the steel”.

It can be seen from the above examples that NIST has failed miserably in their attempts to explain the collapse within the confines of the official story. By only going up to the point of collapse initiation they absolve themselves of having to deal with the obvious evidence that explosive charges were used to destroy the towers. A real investigation should cover the entire collapse, not just the initiation. Will we ever get a thorough and complete investigation?

NIST: "We are Unable to Provide a Full Explanation of the Total Collapse"

On April 12th members of the 9/11 Truth Movement, including such luminaries as Steven Jones, Kevin Ryan and Richard Gage, filed a Request for Correction(RFC) to demand that NIST correct some of their statements and findings in their report they issued in October of 2005. NIST stated that one of the goals of their investigation was to determine,

"why and how the WTC 1 and 2 (the WTC towers) collapsed after the initial impact of the aircraft, and why and how WTC 7 collapsed."

NIST never fulfilled their objective to explain "how" the buildings collapsed. They state clearly in their report that they do not analyze the "structural behavior of the tower after the conditions for collapse initiation were reached." In this sense, the report is merely a pre-collapse analysis.

In their response to the RFC issued by members of the 9/11 Truth Movement, they responded, "we are unable to provide a full explanation of the total collapse." Why is this? NIST stated that they carried the analysis, "to the point where the buildings reached global instability. At this point, because of the magnitude of deflections and the number of failures occurring, the computer models are not able to converge on a solution."

In other words, the collapse of World Trade Towers 1 and 2 are to complicated to model. The individuals at the JREF forum can sum it up best:

Dave Rogers: "NIST can't model the collapse to a degree of accuracy that specifies exactly where every perimeter column ended up, what exact proportion of the concrete was pulverised to what particle size distribution, what proportion of the debris fell within the original footprint, or all the other insignificant minutiae of the collapse that the truth movement obsesses about..."

Wildcat: "No, there is too little data. There is simply no way to model such a chaotic event, likely never will be."

The Doc: "There is no reason to determine what happened during the collapse."

These statements seem to imply that it is not possible to model the collapse of the World Trade Centers and even if we could it would not be important. These comments seem strange coming from the James Randi Educational Forum, "a place to discuss skepticism, critical thinking, the paranormal and science in a lively and friendly manner." Are these people really saying that the collapse of two buildings will forever be beyond the ability of science to explain?

What types of problems, events and occurrences are computers modeling today? According to an article in Wired, "Scenario planning is not a waste; computer models can now game the behavior of millions of variables and render nuanced predictions of everything from bioterror attacks to massive earthquakes."

Mathematical software is also being used to solve complex linear algebra problems. "BCSLIB-EXT is used to solve these sparse linear algebra problems, which arise in many applications. It is used by Boeing application packages for circuit analysis, trajectory optimization, chemical process control, machine tool path definition, constrained data fitting, and finite element analysis (FEA) programs...BCSLIB-EXT solves problems arising out of static and frequency response analysis (which use Ax=b) and for buckling and vibration studies (using AX=BXΛ). Instead of taking days to solve problems of 50,000 variables, FEA programs using BCSLIB-EXT now solve problems in the range of 3 million variables in just hours!"

An article in the Newscientist from 2005 states, "An effort to create the first computer simulation of the entire human brain, right down to the molecular level, was launched on Monday."

According to CNET News, "The petaflop era has begun. IBM has devised a new Blue Gene supercomputer--the Blue Gene/P--that will be capable of processing more than 3 quadrillion operations a second, or 3 petaflops, a possible record. Blue Gene/P is designed to continuously operate at more than 1 petaflop in real-world situations."

Computer models are also being created to simulate nuclear explosions. "One of the first problems that scientists working on the ASCI project had to tackle was finding computers that could handle the large datasets necessary for simulating nuclear blasts. A typical model can be as large as tens of millions of elements, and over the next couple of years the simulations will grow to more than tens of billions of elements...the major focus of the ASCI program is terascale computational simulations, visualization is essential to understanding the terabytes of data produced."

In an interview with the Boston Globe, computer scientist Roscoe Giles was asked:

Boston Globe: "What are the most complex kinds of calculations made on high-performance machines?"

Roscoe Giles: "One is modeling weather and climate, which involves hundreds of millions of variables. In the microscopic realm, you get similarly big problems. I was involved in simulating patches of surface of the kind of magnetic material in disk drives, studying features on the scale of nanometers, which are billionths of a meter. The goal of the new Department of Energy program called [Advanced Strategic Computing Initiative] is to replace a lot of experimentation and testing of nuclear weapons and materials by computer simulations. That probably is the largest single supercomputing effort in the world and is driving machines on the 30-teraflop scale."

We can see from these examples that NIST's claim that the collapse of the two towers is to complex to model simply does not stand up to scrutiny. The collapses occurred in roughly 15 seconds. Can NIST model the first 3 seconds and see if the model correlates closely to the observable reality of the actual collapse? Would the number of variables be to many in just the first three seconds?

NIST cannot provide a full explanation of the total collapse, not because the event is to complex to model, but because their theories as to how the towers collapsed contradict basic laws of physics.