BYU physics professor disputes WTC collapse explanation
 

This issue was given short shrift over on CougarBoard, but I think it raises some interesting issues.

Here's the CougarBoard link:

http://www.cougarboard.com/noframes/...tml?id=1563561

Here's the link to the Deseret News article:

http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,635160132,00.html

The Deseret New article also contains a link to the draft of his paper.

I find it particularly interesting, because I brought up similar concerns on CougarBoard several months ago, in relation to the Pentagon crash. As expected, I was pretty much ridiculed. I had seen the same concerns the professor brought up about the WTC, but I never got beyond the Pentagon issues. (By the way, I never did get a satisfactory scientific explanation for how the Pentagon crash and damage occurred.)

He is not the first scholar to look at the issue, but he may be the first to have a peer-reviewed paper on the issue published. I'll be very interested to see what happens to that.

I have read through part of his paper, and so far, it makes sense. Of course, I'm not a physicist, but he is. It's very interesting, too, that he's putting his name on the line on this.

When otherwise respected scientists start questioning something like the WTC collapse, does it mean they're actually crackpots? A lot of the CougarBoarders seem to think so.

Pons and Fleischman were respected
 

scientists as well.

that's interesting. I think Jones was my teacher for PHysics 101.

I think he should keep his mouth shut about whether it was Muslims or not, cause I don't see how he has proof of that, even if there were explosives.

His paper, I think sheds light on why he made that comment. He says not only that it appears this was a demolition job, but that it was a demolition done so well and on such a large scale that there are only a few demolition companies in the world who could accomplish such a thing. I kind of doubt that al Qaeda runs any of them.

I think the point he's making about that, too, is that if his hypothesis is true, the ramifications are significant.

I have no opinion on the validity of the science, but I am surprised how quick people are to dismiss his theories just because they are uncomfortable with where his conclusions might lead.

It's the usual (and very vocal) suspects over there, too: Snipe & DixieCougar being the prime among them.

The WTC collapses aren't the only holes in the 9/11 explanations. I have seen inconsistencies regarding the Pentagon crash, the military's response to the off-course airliners, the identities of the hijackers (apparently a couple of the alleged hijackers are alive and well in the middle east), and President Bush's response to the news of the first WTC crash.

Usually, conspiracy theory nuts can be debunked pretty easily. I have not seen logical explanations for some of the inconsistencies I have done a little research into myself.

I think Professor Jones is a gutsy man for publishing his paper, especially if he believes the hypothesis. I think the ramifications of this sort of thing may have chilled others from doing the same. If you follow the logic of his hypothesis, there are conclusions involving very powerful people.

this argues in favor of tenure. a junior level person could never publish something like this. he would never be able to go anywhere and would be ridiculed by his colleagues.

obviously jones feel secure enough that he can go against the grain and be provocative.

what's up with a byu professor being provocative? Fire him now! he's hurting the church!

I was a rather vocal opponent to the Pentagon theories
 

you posted on CB, and remain very skeptical of those particular claims. I am no scientist, but I have talked to a few engineers. I have a deadline at work and so can't get into great detail right now, but here is the bottom line. I find the arguments presented by Jones et al. about the WTC twin towers to be very weak but find it harder to dismiss what happened to WTC 7.

OTOH, ask yourself this: How likely is it that the one or two demoiltion ocmpanies in the owrld that have the ability to perfrom such a clean demoliton would be able to
1. perfrom all their set up without being noticed;
2 Get a sufficient number of managemnt and on the line people to go along with this idea before the blasts
3. Keep all of these poeple quiet after the blasts;
4. convince not one but two groups of hijackers to attack

and finally, WHY? We do have a pretty good idea that Ossama wants to kill us; why would the shadowy 'they' need to go to these great lengths to demo these buildings? Nothing about the post 9/11 actions at the site suggests that anyone had some great plan that was being hindered by the presence of any of these bulidings, so why do it? THere are many, many places that they could have created a sufficiently large attack to justify oging after Afghanistan and, once having done so, Iraq would follow whether or not thre WTC had been attacked. So why did it happen?

Look at it in reverse, Creekster. Starting with the premise that 9/11 happened as we believe, we should be able to go back to the circumstances and find evidence which will support that premise. There will be an engineering and scientific explanation for how the towers were caused to fall as a sole result of the jetliner crashes. Four years after the fact, however, the questions are still being raised, and have not been debunked.

If the evidence does not support the premise, then the premise fails. If the premise is correct, it should be supportable by the evidence.

I disagree
 

There are engineering models, but we don't have the ability to recreate the exact circumstances.

I don't think we always should be able to recreate a singular event like 9-11.

Your reasoning isn't consistent.
 

The evidence does support what happened. Two planes collided with the twin towers which began to burnm and then coillapsed, tkaing other strucutres witht hem, including WTC 7. The jet fuel weakned the steel superstructure sufficiently that the weight of the towers led to an implosion, which implosion continued as the weight accumulated. The peretrators were hateful exteremists.

This all fits. We all saw it. This evidence does support the observed phenomenon.

THe claims of Jones aand others rely on examining some of the eivdence and asserting that this evidence (such as the powdery smoke on the exterior of th ebuilding that Jones says is typically seen with demolitions) is consistent with another theory but never explaionign why this evidence is UNIQUE to the new theory. IOW, what is it that CAN'T be explained by the traditional explanation? There are many. many a;lternate theoerie that might fit some or most of the eiuvdence, but only the evidence that is impossible to explain should really be examined.

Pluys, you say ythat the quyestions haven't been debunked, but they have. What do you think hasn't been debunked and what are you relkying on to reach that coinclusion?

FInally, you blithely, but skillfully, ignore the quesiton of why and how could the laternate explanation have happened? "Hey buddy, what are youdoing with that crate full of C-$ in the corner of the WTC?" how could this expert demotloion have been set up without notice before and with out a revelation afterwards?

The most plausible explkanation is also the least exciting.

Here's one of the problems Jones has seen: the jet fuel could not have burned hot enough or long enough to weaken the steel superstructure. He also says fire caused by the materials located in the offices in the building could not have burned hot enough, either. In other words, he is saying that according to the laws of physics, as well as principles engineering, it is physically impossible for the destruction of the towers to have happened as you just described, which is the commonly-accepted explanation.

He's not saying the evidence is merely consistent with another explanation. He is saying the evidence makes the official explanation impossible.

I haven't read the article yet but here's my first question. If it was implosions that brought the structures down, why didn't we hear or see any of them? I've watched several implosions of old stadiums etc... on video and they are audible and visible. Since the whole incident happened live and before our eyes, why didn't anybody report hearing several explosions just prior to the buildings coming down? And for that matter why not just blow the things up via implosions and then blame it on Al-Qaeda? Why bother with the planes?

He refers to eyewitness accounts and photos & videotape which he says appear to be evidence of the implosions.

Short answer, he says we did.

Perhaps I should read the article before I post! Sorry.

One skilled person could set all the explosives.

One question is if it wasn't Al Qaeda, who then? What were the motives? Why wouldn't they claim responsibility.

If it wasn't Al Qaeda, and they have stayed quiet......the usual answer is "who profited from subsequent events?"

Also, sometimes it is more convenient to convict the wrong person than it is to say you don't know what happened.

If several of the hijackers are in fact alive, then I think there need to be some serious questions asked.

And if Prof. Jones ends up dead in an accident anytime soon, we should be suspicious.
:)

I thought jet fuel burned at 2000 degrees. Isn't that hot enough to melt or soften steel, especially if it has been sprayed all over the internal structure of the buildings?

I can't believe I got sucked into this
 

I have just spent the last hour going through various websited that linked back to Jones' paper. I then googled various topics and, quite honestly, none of my opinions have changed.

-WTC 7 is hard to expalin. But there is a helluva lot of smoke coming out of the building before it collapses; plus the upward rising squibs don't look upward rising to me, they look relatively stationaZry as the building moves downward.

-interpreting video is hard, hard, hard. For example, to conlude, as does the wtc7 website, that the comm. tower fell first based upon that frame by frame analysis is pretty suspect. I clicked through the frasme by frame view a number of times and it seemed to me that it could have easiuly have been part of the collapse, which probably started in the core, where it was suppoerted.

Are there some strange issues? Yes. Can I answer them all? No. OTOH, the most compelling evidecne, to me, is that WTC 1 & 2 fell becasue planes flew into them. WTC 7 is an odd duck, however.

Btw, a physiscist is only marginally more qualified to opine about building collapse than any of us. If he was a structural engineer I would be more impressed.

This is too funny. Here's a CB post verbatim on the issue, which was titled, "I spoke with father about [t]his last night":

Good enough for me!

I re-read that article again last night and went through one of the sites that he refers to.

To me, the issue is an important one. But I think my biggest frustration is how many people are simply dismissing his hypothesis out of hand, because they can't accept the ramifications. That's cognitive dissonance. You ignore facts because they don't mesh with your belief system.

I love to look at crackpot conspiracy theories. No, it's not because I believe them. It's because it's entertaining, and it's an interesting diversion for me (who argues for a living) to identify the faulty premises and unreasonable leaps in logic.

I have found that while there are, of course, quite a few crackpot theories surrounding 9/11, there are also many more reasonable and logical questions than I had expected when I first started looking at them.

I hope this paper gets some scholarly discussion going, and then some real investigation into the issue.

Is there anyone who cannot truly agree that if Professor Jones' hypothesis is true, there are some very significant questions that need to be answered. Is it not worth serious investigation?

Hmm, why does that sound like my mission to the bible belt....

I can assure you that most of what he says is flat-out wrong. I find this article a great embarassment to BYU. He should stick to physics and stay out of civil/structural engineering.

Specifics, please. You go by "homeboy" - that's supposed to be enough to take your word for it? :)

I'm interested to know what he's got wrong.

Sheesh, where to begin...

1) First of all (on the non-technical side), he says:

"Muslims are (probably) not to blame for bringing down the WTC buildings after all."

That statement alone has me scratching my head. If in fact there were explosives in the building, how does he know they were not put there by muslim extremists? More significantly, it is clear that muslim extremists flew the plances into the building. If the explosives were NOT put there by muslims, is he implying that the muslims were:

a) Partners in a massive conspiricy? Who would be the partners? Many supporters of Jones's theory say that it was the Bush Administration ultimately hoping to insitute a world government via the UN. Yeah.... right.

b) Duped into flying the planes into the building? Did someone put the bombs there just waiting for the day that some planes would come?

Both scenarios are simply absurd.

2) Jones said:

"Why would terrorists undertake straight-down collapses of WTC-7 and the Towers when 'toppling over' falls would require much less work and would do much more damage in downtown Manhattan?"

What on earth makes him think that the straight-down collapse was planned in any way? They just flew the planes into the building. Further, if someone else planted the explosives, why would they be doing a straight-down collapse? Another absurd comment.

3) Jones said:

"No steel-frame building, before or after the WTC buildings, has ever collapsed due to fire. But explosives can effectively sever steel columns, he says."


Yes and there has never been a case where two buildings of this size had massive fuel-laden airplanes flown into them. Nothing remotely similar. This is evidence of nothing.

4) Jones said:

"With non-explosive-caused collapse there would typically be a piling up of shattering concrete. But most of the material in the towers was converted to flour-like powder while the buildings were falling, he says. How can we understand this strange behavior, without explosives?"

How does he know how buildings of this size are supposed to collapse in a non-explosive sense? Once again, there is nothing even remotely similar to this in the history of structural engineering. Once again, this is evidence of nothing.

5) Jones said:

"Horizontal puffs of smoke, known as squibs, were observed proceeding up the side the building, a phenomenon common when pre-positioned explosives are used to demolish buildings, he says"

There are lots of possible explanations for this. Any kind of pressure differential due to the collapse of the building would force smoke out the windows.

6) Jones said:

"Multiple loud explosions in rapid sequence were reported by numerous observers in and near the towers, and these explosions occurred far below the region where the planes struck, he says."

First of all, this is anectdotal. Second, the pressure from the collapses above could have causes structural members to burst, resulting in the noise and the "squibs" referred to above.

7) From the article:

"Jones says he became interested in the physics of the WTC collapse after attending a talk last spring given by a woman who had had a near-death experience. The woman mentioned in passing that "if you think the World Trade Center buildings came down just due to fire, you have a lot of surprises ahead of you," Jones remembers, at which point "everyone around me started applauding.""

Ahhh great. He gets his inspiration from a comment made by a woman who had a near-death experience. Boy, that adds a lot of credibility to his story, eh?

8) and finally, his theory implies that someone put a series of explosives throughout the building to do a controlled deomolition. Anyone who has studied controlled demolitions knows that this requires weeks of work and massive amounts of explosives, wiring, and drilling. To think that this could be accomplished without anyone noticing is beyond absurd. And why would someone go to all the effort to rig the smaller building (WTC7) with explosives?

This is junk science in the worst way.

I ran across this link:

http://forum.physorg.com/index.php?showtopic=3108

It's a physics forum where the problems with the physics of the WTC collapse are discussed by people with phyics backgrounds. The link was apparently started before Dr. Jones' paper was publicized (they link to it later in the thread).

I haven't read the entire thread (it's 51 pages long), but it has some very interesting discussions regarding the physics of the collapse. In case anyone is interested in what physicists are thinking about it.

There are also tons of links to other analyses, websites, and papers on related issues.

Interesting blurb on BYU's recent response:

http://www.freemarketnews.com/WorldNews.asp?nid=2820


Saw this posted on cb today.

I found Dr. Jones' statement incredulous when I first heard it and everything I've seen about it since has not changed my mind.

Consider the Support structure of the building:

http://static.howstuffworks.com/gif/wtc-tube.jpg

When the WTC was constructed, the common mode of construction of skysrapers was a simple steel grid skeleton, which spread the weight of the building throughout the structure. As shown by the image above, the World Trade Center's support structure did NOT follow this mode of construction. Instead, the main support structures which carried the vertical load (weight of the building) are the 47 larger red tubes located in the center. On each face of the building are 59 steel columns that countered horizontal forces on the building (wind) in addition to shouldering some of the vertical load. This effectively made the WTC towers a box within a box.

Now, imagine a plane crashes into the building. It will cut through some of the 59 columns on the outside, but since they don't carry the weight of the building, this loss is minimal. The real damage would have been caused by the impact to the central structures. Every tube compromised by the impact of the airplane would have increased the load carried by the remainder of the support structures. After surviving the physical impact of the plane and the explosive fireball that immediately ensued, you have that fire. Even if it was not hot enough to melt the steel, the heat would have made the steel much less able to bear loads. Think of a blacksmith sticking a steel tool in the fire-- the hotter it gets, the easier it is to bend the metal, even though it doesn't melt. With the increased pressure caused by the destruction of support structures due to the physical impact of the plane, the remaining support columns would have carrying an extra heavy load and been even more susceptible to failure.

One of Dr. Jones' big points is that the collapse of the towers was too cleanly done to have been an accident. If the collapse was due to failure of support structures located in the center of the building, the outer support structure would have acted as a wall containing the rest of the falling building. The outer wall was a support structure in and of itself, and while it would not have survived the collapse, it would have channelled the falling building into an implosion.

Dr. Jones' astute observation shows only that we don't know everything there is to know about what happens when we fly jumbo jets into skyscrapers. The buildings acted as one designed as they were would have under those circumstances. The inconsistancies are relatively minor compared to the ones suggested by Dr. Jones in order to make his theories work out.