David Ray Griffin on Distinguished Despisers of the 9/11 Truth Movement: Some Selected Passages

Blogger's Note: I am reproducing here only a very limited extract from Griffin's July 6, 2010, web publication at GlobalResearch.ca, though I highly recommend reading this long article in its entirety.

My purpose in doing this is threefold: (1) to introduce you to Griffin's always-well-researched and on-the-mark writings on the events of 9/11, (2) to introduce you to some of the liberal intellectuals who despise the 9/11 Truth movement, and (3) to provide background for the wholly original article that I am also posting today (don't miss it!).

Left-Leaning Despisers of the 9/11 Truth Movement: Do You Really Believe in Miracles?

An Open Letter to Terry Allen, Noam Chomsky, Alexander Cockburn, David Corn, Chris Hayes, George Monbiot, Matthew Rothschild, and Matt Taibbi [1]

by David Ray Griffin [2]

Global Research, July 6, 2010

According to several left-leaning critics of the 9/11 Truth Movement, some of its central claims, especially about the destruction of the World Trade Center, show its members to be scientifically challenged. In the opinion of some of these critics, moreover, claims made by members of this movement are sometimes unscientific in the strongest possible sense, implying an acceptance of magic and miracles.

After documenting this charge in Part I of this essay, I show in Part II that the exact opposite is the case: that the official account of the destruction of the World Trade Center implies miracles (I give nine examples), and that the 9/11 Truth Movement, in developing an alternative hypothesis, has done so in line with the assumption that the laws of nature did not take a holiday on 9/11.

I.  The Charge that 9/11 Truth Theories Rest on Unscientific, Even Magical, Beliefs

Several left-leaning critics of the 9/11 Truth Movement, besides showing contempt for its members, charge them with relying on claims that are contradicted by good science and, in some cases, reflect a belief in magic. By “magic,” they mean miracles, understood as violations of basic principles of the physical sciences.

For example, Alexander Cockburn, who has referred to members of the 9/11 Truth Movement as “9/11 conspiracy nuts,”[3] quoted with approval a philosopher who, speaking of “the 9-11 conspiracy cult,” said that its “main engine . . . is . . . the death of any conception of evidence,” resulting in “the ascendancy of magic over common sense, let alone reason.”[4] Also, Cockburn assured his readers: “The conspiracy theory that the World Trade Centre towers were demolished by explosive charges previously placed within them is probably impossible.”[5] With regard to Building 7 of the World Trade Center, Cockburn claimed (in 2006) that the (2002) report by FEMA was “more than adequate.”[6]

Blogger's Note: Like David Ray Griffin, I too admire these "left leaners" in all they do ...except for their disparagement of the 9/11 Truth movement. 

Alexander Cockburn is an Editor of the web magazine CounterPunch which, in addition to many articles supportive of liberal causes, published a series of three articles by a Ph.D. physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Manuel Garcia, purporting to provide a "primer" to aid the layman to understand the physics of the official conspiracy theory of the 9/11 attacks. Since I'm a Ph.D. physicist of similar national-laboratory stature, I decided to work through Garcia's first article to assess his reasoning. And when I did so, I found his "primer" to be egregiously faulty. Thus I became motivated to explain these faults in my second-ever post at Cherche la Verite. Please revisit it. It's readable by the layman, contains some physicist humor, and has just been upgraded by adding a photograph (something I didn't know how to do back in my early days as a blogger). 

I will now skip over Griffin's thoughtful and fair selection of comments by six of the eight left-leaning despisers of the 9/11 Truth Movement ...but not before listing some of the names they have been calling those of us who are members of that movement: 

"9/11 conspiracy nuts,” fantasists,” “conspiracy idiots,” “morons,” “idiots,” “The 9/11 Faith Movement,” “9/11 conspiracy silliness,” “9/11 conspiracy poison,” “9/11 fabulists”

However, here below are Griffin's comments on, and quotes from, Noam Chomsky's much more measured position on non-official 9/11 conspiracy theories:

Noam Chomsky has also declared that the available facts, when approached scientifically, refute the 9/11 Truth Movement. Speaking of evidence provided by this movement to show that 9/11 “was planned by the Bush Administration,” Chomsky declared: “If you look at the evidence, anybody who knows anything about the sciences would instantly discount that evidence.”[10] In spite of his dismissive attitude, however, Chomsky in 2006 gave some helpful advice to people who believe they have physical evidence refuting the official account:

“There are ways to assess that: submit it to specialists . . . who have the requisite background in civil-mechanical engineering, materials science, building construction, etc., for review and analysis. . . . Or, . . . submit it to a serious journal for peer review and publication. To my knowledge, there isn't a single submission.”

Blogger: Kudos to Chomsky for this advice! And now we skip ahead to Griffin's Section II, subsection 8...

II.  Miracles Implied by NIST’s Explanation of the WTC’s Destruction

The main reason why NIST’s [National Institute of Standards and Technology] theory of the destruction of the World Trade Center is profoundly unscientific is that it cannot be accepted without endorsing miracles, in the sense of violations of fundamental principles of physics and chemistry. I will demonstrate this point in terms of nine miracles implied by NIST’s accounts of the destruction of Building 7 of the World Trade Center (WTC 7) and the Twin Towers (WTC 1 and 2).
...

8. Inextinguishable Fires

Besides having the power to produce the miraculous effects already reported, the World Trade Center fires were also miraculously inextinguishable. The fact that fires continued burning in the Ground Zero rubble for many months, in spite of every attempt to put them out, was widely reported. The title of a New York Times story in the middle of November, two months after the attacks, referred to the “Most Stubborn Fire.” A New Scientist article in December was entitled “Ground Zero’s Fires Still Burning.” Very hot fires continued to burn in the Ground Zero debris piles, these stories reported, even though heavy rains came down, millions of additional gallons of water were sprayed onto the piles, and a chemical suppressant was pumped into them.[105]

According to Greg Fuchek, vice president of a company that supplied computer equipment to identify human remains at the site, the working conditions at Ground Zero remained "hellish" for six months, because the ground temperature ranged from 600 to 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit (316 to 816 degrees Centigrade).[106]

These inextinguishable fires were a mystery. Assuming the truth of the official account of the destruction of the World Trade Center, there would have been nothing in the debris pile other than ordinary building materials, and these can burn only in the presence of oxygen. There would have been little oxygen available in the densely packed debris piles, and wherever it was available, the fires should have been easily suppressed by the enormous amounts of water and chemical suppressants pumped into the piles. The fires’ seemingly miraculous power to keep burning could not be explained by the airplanes’ jet fuel (which some people seem to think of as having miraculous powers, even though it is essentially kerosene), because it would have all burned out, as mentioned above, within a few minutes.

A non-miraculous explanation is suggested by the discovery of a large amount of nanothermite residue in the WTC dust, which was reported in a peer-reviewed scientific journal in 2009.[107] Being both an incendiary and a high explosive, nanothermite is one among several types of “energetic nanocomposites” – described by an article in The Environmentalist as “chemical energetic materials, which provide their own fuel and oxidant and are not deterred by water, dust or chemical suppressants.”[108] The discovery of nanothermite residue in the dust provided, therefore, an empirical basis for a non-miraculous explanation of the long-lasting fires at Ground Zero.

According to the official account, however, the buildings were all brought down without the aid of any incendiaries or explosives. WTC 7 was said by NIST, as we saw above, to have been brought down by fire alone, and this fire, NIST added, was “an ordinary building contents fire.”[109] As for the Twin Towers, they were brought down through the combined effects of the airplane impacts and the ensuing fires: NIST explicitly rejected “alternative hypotheses suggesting that the WTC towers were brought down by controlled demolition using explosives.”[110]

For anyone who accepts the official account, therefore, the inextinguishable underground fires at Ground Zero provide still another demonstration of miraculous powers that must have been possessed by the World Trade Center fires.

Blogger's note: Having already writen the above, philosopher and theologian David Ray Griffin leaves me, the physicist, little to do in my following blog but fill in some of the details.

[1] As those who know the history of modern theology are aware, one of its seminal writings was Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Speeches on Religion to Its Cultured Despisers (1799). These “cultured despisers” of religion were people whom Schleiermacher admired and with whom he agreed on most issues. He believed, however, that they had a blind spot with regard to religion, mainly because they did not understand its true nature and the experience on which it is based. I address those I call “left-leaning despisers of the 9/11 Truth Movement” in the same spirit.

[2] David Ray Griffin is the author of 36 books dealing with various subjects: philosophy, theology, philosophy of religion, philosophy of science, and 9/11 and US imperialism. In September 2009, The New Statesman ranked him #41 among “The 50 People Who Matter Today.” His most recent book is The Mysterious Collapse of World Trade Center 7: Why the Final Official Report about 9/11 is Unscientific and False (2009). His next book will be Cognitive Infiltration: An Obama Appointee’s Plan to Undermine the 9/11 Conspiracy Theory (September 2010).

[3] Alexander Cockburn, “The 9/11 Conspiracy Nuts,” ZNet, September 20, 2006 (http://www.zcommunications.org/the-9-11-conspiracy-nuts-by-alexander-cockburn-1). A shorter version appeared in the September 24, 2010, issue of The Nation.

[4] Alexander Cockburn, “The Conspiracists, Continued – Are They Getting Crazier?” The Free Press, September 16, 2006 (http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/2/2006/1433).

[5] Alexander Cockburn, “Conspiracy Disproved: Distractions from Awful Reality,” Le Monde Diplomatique, December 2006 (http://mondediplo.com/2006/12/02dconspiracy).

[6] Ibid.

[105] Eric Lipton and Andrew C. Revkin, “The Firefighters: With Water and Sweat, Fighting the Most Stubborn Fire,” New York Times, November 19, 2001 (http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/19/nyregion/19FIRE.html); Jonathan Beard, “Ground Zero's Fires Still Burning,” New Scientist, December 3, 2001 (http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn1634).

[106] Trudy Walsh, “Handheld APP Eased Recovery Tasks,” Government Computer News, 21/27a: September 11, 2002 (http://911research.wtc7.net/cache/wtc/evidence/gcn_handheldapp.html).

[107] Niels H. Harrit, Jeffrey Farrer, Steven E. Jones, et al., “Active Thermitic Material Observed in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe,” The Open Chemical Physics Journal, 2009, 2: 7-31 (http://www.bentham.org/open/tocpj/openaccess2.htm).

[108] Kevin R. Ryan, James R. Gourley, and Steven E. Jones, “Environmental Anomalies at the World Trade Center: Evidence for Energetic Materials,” The Environmentalist, 29 (2009): 56-63, at 58, 56.

[109] NCSTAR 1-9, Vol. 1: 330.

[110] NIST, “Answers to Frequently Asked Questions,” Question 2.

YES WE CAN!: Scientists Report Evidence of Explosive Residues in Dust Samples from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe.

World Trade Center photos taken about 4 and 8 seconds after initiation of the collapse of the south tower. (N.B. These photos are used here for educational purposes only. The copyright holder is Steve Kahn).

Physicists: Note that ejecta has been thrown laterally about 0.8 building widths, i.e. ~50 meters, in the first 4 seconds. How could that have happened powered solely to gravity, given that 4 seconds of free fall would displace the upper block only 78 meters downward?

 






The Open Chemical Physics Journal
Volume 2

ISSN: 1874-4125

Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe

pp.7-31 (25)

Authors: Niels H. Harrit, Jeffrey Farrer, Steven E. Jones, Kevin R. Ryan, Frank M. Legge, Daniel Farnsworth, Gregg Roberts, James R. Gourley, Bradley R. Larsen

doi: 10.2174/1874412500902010007

NO WE CAN’T: National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)

On April 12, 2007, a 32-page request for corrections was submitted to NIST asserting that NIST's Final Report on the Twin Towers violates information quality standards and harms the interests of the petitioners -- scientists Steven Jones and Kevin Ryan, architect Richard Gage, engineer Frank Legge, 9/11 family members Bob Mcllvane and Bill Doyle, and the group Scholars for 9/11 Truth and Justice.

Below, I reproduce a single paragraph from NIST’s September 27, 2007, letter of response to these petitioners, interspersed by my reaction to what they are saying there:

“Your letter also makes three requests for changes to Section 6.14.4 under the objectivity standard to include: (1) supporting data with transparent documentation and identification of error sources, with regards to the potential energy released during the downward movement of the upper stories, the absorptive capacity of the intact structure below the collapse zone, and the increase in falling mass below the collapse zone; (2) to revise the section if NIST finds the absorptive capacity of the intact structure below the collapse zone was greater than the energy of the falling stories; and (3) to include the results of tests for explosive residue. With regard to the first request, NIST has stated that it did not analyze the collapse of the towers. NIST’s analysis was carried to the point of collapse initiation. The text of section 6.14.4 is based upon the analysis of photographic and video evidence of the collapses from several vantage points.”

So that’s it? I watch the videos; ergo the reality behind what I see is whatever I think it is?

“With respect to the second request for change, it was most critical for NIST to explain why the collapse initiated. Once the collapse initiated, it is clear from the available evidence that the building was unable to resist the falling mass of the upper stories of the towers.”

It “is clear”? Yes, it is clear the towers fell down... But the whole point of request (2) was to answer the question: Could the collapses have taken place in the absence of explosives to weaken or destroy the steel columns below “the point of collapse initiation”? NIST HAS CLEARLY DUCKED THIS QUESTION! However, they do continue...

“Finally, NIST has stated that it found no corroborating evidence to suggest that explosives were used to bring down the buildings.”

So how hard did they search?

“NIST did not conduct tests for explosive residue...”

Huh? Of course, they wouldn’t find any “corroborating evidence” if they didn’t look. So why didn’t they?

“...as noted above, such tests would not necessarily have been conclusive.”

Well, any undergraduate college student giving this as an excuse for not bothering to do his assigned physics or engineering lab experiment would have been given a no-recourse F!

At the very least, NIST has convicted itself of incompetence here. But being that NIST was the lead government agency that was paid $30 million to answer the lingering questions surrounding the 9/11 attacks, I think they’ve also convicted themselves of criminal malfeasance and nonfeasance.

B.T.Y. Anyone who thinks that the need for explosives to bring down the WTC towers had long ago been debunked by experts might want to read my debunking of one of the more credentialed "debunkers".

Any reader inspired to get deeper in to the history of the scientific investigations leading to the conclusion that explosives were involved in the WTC collapses would be well advised to start here.

And anyone with frank doubts that the WTC towers could have been rigged with explosives without detection, should check out this highly plausible scenario.

And finally, some of you are bound to have your doubts that any pre-planted explosives could possibly have been synchronized with the arrival of a pair jetliners piloted by a couple Arabs who could barely fly a Piper Cub. But the bigger question is how the alleged hijackings of the four jetliners on the morning of 9/11 – and their choreographed guidance to three of their selected targets – could have been so well synchronized at all. To answer that question, I developed a comprehensive hypothesis capable of accounting for the entire aviation part of the 9/11 equation. To download my work, go here and select the first pdf and the two highly-animated PowerPoints – if you can play them – otherwise select all three pdf’s (the latter two being inferior un-animated versions of the PowerPoints).

“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” (http://www.counterpunch.org/physic11282006.html). 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.” http://911research.wtc7.net/mirrors/guardian2/wtc/eng-news-record.htm

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”:
http://911review.com/articles/griffin/nyc1.html#multipleevidence
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