I’m generally sympathetic to the idea that the events behind 9/11 were insufficiently investigated, and that the full story is a bit more than the common narrative.
But I don’t see
how many steel-frame buildings have collapsed due to fire previous to 9/11.
As terribly relevant without the corresponding “how many steel-frame buildings were sprayed with massive amounts of aerosolized jet fuel and then ignited?”
Wow, posted a few minutes ago and already upvoted to 4?
As terribly relevant without the corresponding “how many steel-frame buildings were sprayed with massive amounts of aerosolized jet fuel and then ignited?”
WTC7 was not, yet it collapsed. It wasn’t hit by any plane. Why is this always conveniently not mentioned?
While your point here is superficially valid, the debris that hit WTC7 damaged 10-12 floors so badly that the gash was visible (according to the NIST report on WTC7). Large amounts of damage occurred to other floors. The fact that you more or less had large sections of another building dropped onto WTC7 massively damaged the structural stability such that the fires resulted in complete collapse. So for the Twin Towers you had less direct damage but lots of jet fuel, and for WTC7 you had large segments of a building fall onto it.
I’m also somewhat puzzled by how 9/11 Truthers like to point to the collapse of WTC7 so much. I would think that one would want to argue that the destruction of WTC7 was inadvertent. If not, you need to explain why the conspiracy bothered bringing down a much smaller, not very well-known building. Thus for example, the standard conspiratorial explanation of the government creating 9/11 fails massively to explain this. The only conspiracy explanation I’ve seen that remotely explain this tries to claim that the entire plot was designed to get rid of WTC7 since it had the SEC offices investigating Worldcom and ENRON. I don’t think I need to explain in detail why that seems unlikely.
There seems to be a problem going on here similar to the standard problem with creationists. They argue in the form “Anomaly → Evolution wrong → creationism.” There’s both a false dichotomy here and a general failure to properly apply Bayes’ theorem.
There were also fires in WTC7 that the Fire Department didn’t even attempt combat. They pretty much just let them burn for like six hours.
Also, the fire department knew building 7 was going to collapse. They pulled all their people away from building to protect them after they noticed signs of structural failure and there are a bunch of accounts from firefighters to this effect.
The fact that you more or less had large sections of another building dropped onto WTC7 massively damaged the structural stability such that the fires resulted in complete collapse.
Incorrect. There were damages, but none to the central supporting columns. Even after accounting for the fires they were not enough to explain the free fall speed collapse.
If not, you need to explain why the conspiracy bothered bringing down a much smaller, not very well-known building.
Slow down here. I’m trying to work forwards from the evidence and for all that I know it points to controlled demolition as the only plausible explanation and falsifies the theory of collapse by fire and structural damage. You again are conflating two or more separate questions: how did it collapse and who did it and for what reason.
Slow down here. I’m trying to work forwards from the evidence and for all that I know it points to controlled demolition as the only plausible explanation and falsifies the theory of collapse by fire and structural damage.
I think you are falling victim to a subtle reasoning error here. Imagine a doctor is asked to examine a dead body and determine the cause of death. He observes almost certainly fatal injuries that are consistent with those caused by a bullet and reasonably concludes the man was shot.
If he is then informed that a grenade went off in the vicinity of the man and he fell to the ground shortly afterwards he will conclude that in fact the man was probably killed by shrapnel, even if the injury looks more like injuries he has previously observed from gunshots than from shrapnel.
I recognize that you are claiming the injuries look much more like the injuries you would expect from a bullet than they do the injuries you would expect from shrapnel but I think it is important for you to consider that the fact that the grenade is known to have gone off nearby just before the man fell to the ground is very relevant to the probabilities you assign to the two possible explanations. It is not appropriate merely to ‘work forwards from the evidence’ without acknowledging this fact.
Hahaha, I think it is funny that every comment against the 9/11 orthodoxy is voted down while every comment in favor of it is voted up, is it possible that the audience is a bit biased here?
But on to your point.
First I think the example is a bit misleading because in the reader’s mental model a grenade will cause death in a manner similar with the firing of bullets. Not so in the case of 9/11, for all that is known, a building sustaining some amount of structural damage and fire will not collapse the way WTC7 did, which is why from the start you should place a higher probability on explosives being involved.
But back to your example:
A man is dead after a grenade exploded in his vicinity. His wounds are consistent with bullet wounds which usually look different that shrapnel wounds. Now, what killed the man, was it the grenade or bullets(he could have been fired at when the grenade went off). One way to distinguish the causes of death would be to examine the body for bullets or shrapnel. We might find one or the other or even both. If you only find shrapnel you falsify the hypothesis of death-by-gun, if on the other hand you only find bullets it’s the other hypothesis that is falsified.
I assume you accept that the buildings collapsed in a manner consistent with the use of explosives. This already nullifies one argument that was repeated several times here on LW, that the prior for explosives is too low to even be seriously considered. Now this is of course not enough to prove that it were explosives and here is where additional evidence has to come in like:
can structural damage(e.g. as happened in 9/11 to WTC7) and fire explain a collapse in almost free fall speed? No
were there eye-witness testimonies of explosions? Yes, lots of them.
is there evidence for explosives in the rubble/dust? Yes. As a side note, NIST didn’t even bother to look for this evidence:
“12. 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.”
NIST did not test for the residue of these compounds in the steel.”
It is not appropriate merely to ‘work forwards from the evidence’ without acknowledging this fact.
The fact that a grenade went off is part of the evidence.
I assume you accept that the buildings collapsed in a manner consistent with the use of explosives.
Yes, to the extent of my limited knowledge of the issue. Part of my problem judging the evidence (and I think this affects many people) is that I feel like a doctor who has seen lots of gunshot wounds but no shrapnel wounds. I have seen many videos of buildings collapsing due to a controlled demolition and to the best of my layman’s ability to judge they look similar to the 9/11 footage. I have never seen any other footage of a building being hit by a large jet airliner with a full fuel load.
You are correct that there was likely not that much damage to the central columns. However, damage may have occurred and other damage to the south side may have contributed. See in particular pages L-34 and L-35 of the NIST progress report: http://wtc.nist.gov/progress_report_june_04/appendixl.pdf Moreover, claims of collapse at free fall speeds for both the WTC7 and the main towers are both false. In the case of the WTC7, the east penthouse started collapsing a full 6 seconds before the rest of the building.
As to your claim that I’m “conflating two or more separate questions” the questions are fundamentally interrelated. If you are trying to claim that WTC7 was brought down by controlled explosives, that claim becomes fundamentally less likely if you don’t have a plausible motive for that.
I’m going to have to make a comparison to the creationists again who love to make “peer reviewed journals” (there are I think in the US now at least 2 such entities). Constructing y journals does not make something science. Making journals of people who agree with a fringe belief and then claiming peer review doesn’t make that peer reviewed science. And the claim that they had to do so because the mean editors and reviewers at other journals wouldn’t let them play is textbook from the ID movement. Now, of course, making a claim that is similar in form to that made by someone else doesn’t mean they share the same truth value. But it should raise a red flag. The fact that all the editors are people who are convinced that the standard account must be false also should raise a red flag.
If you are trying to claim that WTC7 was brought down by controlled explosives, that claim becomes fundamentally less likely if you don’t have a plausible motive for that.
I actually think most people don’t understand how hard it is to bring down a building the size of WTC7 (much less the towers!) with demolition explosives. Any evidence put forward to show that it would be unlikely for the buildings to collapse due to fire and structural damage is also evidence for how hard it is to implode them with explosives. It’s not like the movies where the secret agent can go in with three detonators the size of baseballs that stick to the walls, we’re talking days, even weeks of preparation with a full crew drilling into support columns, loading them with dynamite, RDX, connecting blasting caps, and wiring the whole thing up.
Here’s an account of what it took to demolish a steel structure building 300 feet shorter than WTC7 (but 300,000 square feet larger in total floor space):
CDI’s 12 person loading crew took twenty four days to place 4,118 separate charges in 1,100 locations on columns on nine levels of the complex. Over 36,000 ft of detonating cord and 4,512 non-electric delay elements were installed in CDI’s implosion initiation system, some to create the 36 primary implosion sequence and another 216 micro-delays to keep down the detonation overpressure from the 2,728 lb of explosives which would be detonated during the demolition.
The east penthouse collapsed 6 seconds earlier. So what? The relevant question is how much time did the entire building take to collapse, the time the roofline took to hit the floor? The only way it could be so fast is if all the supporting columns were destroyed. I don’t see how the collapse of the penthouse is relevant to that. It would only be relevant if said collapse would destroy the supporting columns but then we would have seen that effect much earlier. What we see is the penthouse collapsing but the building still standing still.
Moreover, claims of collapse at free fall speeds for both the WTC7 and the main towers are both false. In the case of the WTC7, the east penthouse started collapsing a full 6 seconds before the rest of the building.
Roland:
There are plenty of videos of the collapse, so I’ll let you watch and decide for yourself:
Do you not see why the fact that your video doesn’t contain the penthouse collapse because of angle or timing problematic in this context? Putting aside the fast rate of collapse once the rest of the building is going down the fact that there is visible evidence of the structural integrity of the building failing before the whole thing comes down is very strong evidence against a controlled demolition.
visible evidence of the structural integrity of the building failing before the whole thing comes down is very strong evidence against a controlled demolition.
Even in a controlled demolition explosive charges go off before the building comes down and already start doing structural damage, if you watched some videos(there are plenty on youtube) you will see for yourself.
Yes, there was some damage done to the building by falling debris and fire which of course was before the collapse and no one is denying this. But the key is: what kind of structural damage would be necessary for the whole building to collapse at approximately free-fall speed(counting from the moment the rooftop starts moving down)? For that to happen all supporting columns underneath would have to be destroyed. For this to happen in a random fashion through fires or whatever is highly unlikely. Btw, if you watch the NIST videos again you will see that their model is not convincing exactly because not all supporting columns are destroyed and you see the building folding instead of coming down vertically and yes, this is the case in both models of NIST.
So the natural conclusion from 3. is that at least the hypothesis of explosives being planted in the building should have been examined by NIST, why wasn’t it done?
Just to reiterate my point which I suspect was long lost in the discussion: I think the controlled demolition hypothesis is the most likely given the facts(regardless if there was a government conspiracy or not). Is it the only possible explanation? No. But I didn’t see any explanation that is consistent with the evidence and at the same time the use of explosives was never falsified, on the contrary NIST simply refused to even examine the rubble/dust for evidence thereof.
I think the model that includes the fire damage basically matches what I see in the video. It might not be perfect, but it is good enough for government work. As discussed before, I think the priors for controlled demolition are insanely low and that the the video evidence is consistent with NIST’s explanation. If some other commenter wants to arbitrate, that’d be fine (though please look at past exchanges on this topic, not just this thread), but otherwise I’m done. I think my position is clear and convincing to anyone reading this exchange (if such people disagree they’re welcome to ask me anything) and so much so that I’m comfortable leaving roland the last word…
You are right that that sort of collapse would require all the supporting columns to fail simultaneously, but that is not a surprising event. Large building collapses are not intuitive. Once a building starts to collapse, it introduces major vibrations and other forces that could, under the right circumstances, destroy all the supporting columns simultaneously, especially if they’d already been weakened by high temperatures.
Phlogiston made specific testable predictions about mass and combustion. Phlogiston theory was thrown out not because it was useless but because it was wrong. In this respect, phlogiston was good science.
(The fact that what you said isn’t a substantive reply to jimrandomh’s remark is a separate issue)
As to your claim that I’m “conflating two or more separate questions” the questions are fundamentally interrelated. If you are trying to claim that WTC7 was brought down by controlled explosives, that claim becomes fundamentally less likely if you don’t have a plausible motive for that.
Less likely? I think the claim can be stated and proven independently of the motive. A motive certainly will give it more plausibility but not necessarily make it more likely in a Bayesian way. I’m trying to answer a question of how, whereas the motive would be relevant to a question of why, for what reason.
JFK was assassinated and it is certainly possible to reconstruct how it happened: how many bullets where fired, from which angles, etc… The next question would be, who did it, for what reason, etc...
Second, you seem to be operating under the assumption that if the plane attacks were executed by terrorists they couldn’t also have planted explosives?
Less likely? I think the claim can be stated and proven independently of the motive. A > motive certainly will give it more plausibility but not necessarily make it more likely in > a Bayesian way. I’m trying to answer a question of how, whereas the motive would be > relevant to a question of why, for what reason.
On the contrary, motive is a perfectly relevant Bayesian modifier. I’m also not sure what you mean by saying that the motive can make something more plausible but not necessarily more likely. What is plausibility if not a metric of likelyhood given the evidence?
Second, you seem to be operating under the assumption that if the plane attacks > were executed by terrorists they couldn’t also have planted explosives?
And they would have done so when exactly? Moreover, why bother? The entire success of using planes in this way is that you don’t need to bother with bombs in your target. The planes themselves do the work. Setting explosives makes the plan for more complicated with little gain.
On the contrary, motive is a perfectly relevant Bayesian modifier. I’m also not sure what you mean by saying that the motive can make something more plausible but not necessarily more likely. What is plausibility if not a metric of likelyhood given the evidence?
Person X drops down dead with a perforation of his head. Claim: he was killed by a bullet. This can be examined independently of the question: Who had a motive to do so? Do you agree that it would be wrongheaded to start the investigation with: X was a well known and popular person and so no one would have a motive to kill X therefore the claim of death by bullet is extremely unlikely and we shouldn’t even bother investing much time in its investigation.
That’s a really bad analogy with multiple problems: First, stray bullets exist. Second, insane people shooting at random individuals exist. Third, the assumption that no would have a motivation to kill the person in question is an incredibly strong one. Moreover, even in that situation, if you did have a very high confidence that no one would deliberately shoot the individual, that would in fact reduce the confidence value that the person had been killed by a gunshot since it reduces the probability of certain gun-shot hypotheses being correct. You might think it doesn’t reduce it by enough to matter but it can’t no alter it if the presence of motivations would increase the probability. Conservation of evidence and all that.
Moreover, the notion you’ve constructed of not even bothering to investigate the hypothesis is a strawman. No one has said that alternate investigation might not have made sense at one point. But it simply isn’t a useful tool at this point. To extend your analogy, slightly differently, if the doctors all say that the person died from a random piece of shrapnel and have a lot of evidence for that claim (including videos of the shrapnel impact) then at a certain point it isn’t useful to spend resources investigating the bullet hypothesis. If you can’t construct a plausible motive for the shooter that becomes yet another reason to reduce confidence in the (already low) probability assigned to the bullet hypothesis.
How much explosive charge would it take to cause the failure observed? Where would it have to be installed? How many hours would that take, and how many workers? How many people would have to be displaced so as not to witness the building being prepared to blow? Where did the explosives come from? Who paid for them? Who delivered them, and to whom, where? Why would the project be timed to go on September 11th? Why would the denotation of the explosives be delayed to seven hours after the debris struck the building? Why didn’t the fire interfere with the operation of the explosives? How much noise would the explosives make? How quickly would the building collapse after the explosion?
Even if you think the official story is not well supported, I have to say it stacks up positively magnificently compared to the building-implosion theory.
It seems you have ignored my queries. In the spirit of staying as close to the original question as possible, however, I shall withdraw “Why would the project be timed to go on September 11th?” and “Why would the denotation of the explosives be delayed to seven hours after the debris struck the building?”, and ask again:
How much explosive charge would it take to cause the failure observed?
Where would it have to be installed?
How many hours would that take, and how many workers?
How many people would have to be displaced so as not to witness the building being prepared to blow?
Where did the explosives come from?
Who paid for them?
Who delivered them, and to whom, where?
Why didn’t the fire interfere with the operation of the explosives?
How much noise would the explosives make?
How quickly would the building collapse after the explosion?
In the art of rationality there is a discipline of closeness-to-the-issue—trying to observe evidence that is as near to the original question as possible, so that it screens off as many other arguments as possible.
Maybe I should have emphasized “screens off as many other arguments as possible”. You have a made a list of such arguments/questions. Mind you, they are all worth investigating but I’m screening them off the key question, namely:
“Were explosives planted in WTC7?” or “What caused WTC7 to collapse”(hat tip to Morendil).
Do you agree that this was a controlled demolition?
Do you agree that you can make this statement without having any of your listed questions answered?
If yes, you can then proceed to ask your previous list of questions:
How much explosive charge would it take to cause the failure observed?
Where would it have to be installed?
How many hours would that take, and how many workers?
How many people would have to be displaced so as not to witness the building being prepared to blow?
Where did the explosives come from?
Who paid for them?
Who delivered them, and to whom, where?
Why didn’t the fire interfere with the operation of the explosives?
How much noise would the explosives make?
How quickly would the building collapse after the explosion?
That video was pretty awesome, actually—a superb job of imploding a thirty-story building (the Landmark Tower in Fort Worth, Texas, March 18, 2006). And did you hear the noise of those explosive charges, and see those bright flashes as they detonated—it was most distinct!
And did you hear the noise of those explosive charges, and see those bright flashes as they detonated—it was most distinct!
Someone pointed this out a while ago and so the truthers decided that the buildings were brought down by thermite. Someone then pointed out that thermite can’t make horizontal cuts and that’s how the truthers figured out the government used nanothermite.
Roland, sorry to address you again after I disengaged. I don’t want to reenter the argument but I am curious: What do you believe was used to bring down the building? Presumably not thermite since you put all that effort into getting us to watch that video of the guy who heard an explosion…
The question in this case is: “Were explosives planted in WTC7?”.
No. Fool. They got hit by freaking planes. I saw it live on TV. You’re just WRONG and RIDICULOUSLY SO. It doesn’t matter which person you signal affiliation with. Or which works you link to. You’re still wrong.
Aside from the fact that ata is right and WTC7 was actually brought down from fires and structural damage caused by the falling tower, not the airplanes themselves, this strikes me as a reasonable response to persistent and uncorrectable wrongness. Do people disagree? If so, what is the appropriate response?
WTC7 was not one of the buildings that got hit by a plane.
(Lest anyone misinterpret my motives… I’m just correcting a statement of fact. I am absolutely not defending the claim that any of them were brought down by explosives, which I do not believe.)
Incorrect. There were damages, but none to the central supporting columns. Even after accounting for the fires they were not enough to explain the free fall speed collapse.
Calculated time for the building to collapse by NIST models were similar in magnitude to observations.
Edit: Page 85 in the document, “Table 3-1.” Says “43″ as the page number in lower right corner.
EDIT:
Interestingly the NIST models only show the initial phase of the collapse before ending abruptly but nevertheless there already are significant discrepancies with the actual collapse, and yes, they were the same way on NIST’s webpage were I first saw them a while ago but can no longer find them.
According to this video the model your video is comparing to the real collapse is is NISTs guess at what would have happened without the fire damage (poor scholarship which reflects on all the other truther claims) The second model in the clip I just linked to shows (according to the video) NIST’s model of the collapse+fire damage which approximately matches the actual fall. According to the model the supports buckle from the fire damage around the 7th floor and once that happens, yeah, 40 stories is going to fall pretty fast.
Did you actually watch the video I linked? It contains both NIST models.
NIST’s model of the collapse+fire damage which approximately matches the actual fall.
Why does NIST’s model end right at the beginning of the collapse? Even in the first few seconds that the model portrays you can already see discrepancies in the way the building is folding in some parts.
I read it, the table is about collapse below the roofline, not total time of collapse unless I misunderstood something.
Btw, NIST took several years to make a post facto model that would explain the collapse without explosives. They kept tweaking their model(took them years) until they came up with something that would come somewhat near the visual evidence, yet even so didn’t quite manage to do it. There were videos on the NIST page of their simulations and to me there were significant differences between the videos and the way WTC7 actually collapsed. I can no longer find the videos, the link on NIST’s webpage is misleading now.
“12. 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.”
NIST did not test for the residue of these compounds in the steel.”
The iconic building collapses of 9/11 were the twin towers.
As for the point about buildings collapsing by fire, there were even at the time historical cases of fires damaging fireproofed structural members: in the One Meridian Plaza fire of 1991, significant but non-total damage to structural members was observed. That One Meridian Plaza did not collapse when 7 World Trade Center did reflects the differences in the designs and in the parts of the buildings affected.
I’m generally sympathetic to the idea that the events behind 9/11 were insufficiently investigated, and that the full story is a bit more than the common narrative.
But I don’t see
As terribly relevant without the corresponding “how many steel-frame buildings were sprayed with massive amounts of aerosolized jet fuel and then ignited?”
Wow, posted a few minutes ago and already upvoted to 4?
WTC7 was not, yet it collapsed. It wasn’t hit by any plane. Why is this always conveniently not mentioned?
While your point here is superficially valid, the debris that hit WTC7 damaged 10-12 floors so badly that the gash was visible (according to the NIST report on WTC7). Large amounts of damage occurred to other floors. The fact that you more or less had large sections of another building dropped onto WTC7 massively damaged the structural stability such that the fires resulted in complete collapse. So for the Twin Towers you had less direct damage but lots of jet fuel, and for WTC7 you had large segments of a building fall onto it.
I’m also somewhat puzzled by how 9/11 Truthers like to point to the collapse of WTC7 so much. I would think that one would want to argue that the destruction of WTC7 was inadvertent. If not, you need to explain why the conspiracy bothered bringing down a much smaller, not very well-known building. Thus for example, the standard conspiratorial explanation of the government creating 9/11 fails massively to explain this. The only conspiracy explanation I’ve seen that remotely explain this tries to claim that the entire plot was designed to get rid of WTC7 since it had the SEC offices investigating Worldcom and ENRON. I don’t think I need to explain in detail why that seems unlikely.
There seems to be a problem going on here similar to the standard problem with creationists. They argue in the form “Anomaly → Evolution wrong → creationism.” There’s both a false dichotomy here and a general failure to properly apply Bayes’ theorem.
There were also fires in WTC7 that the Fire Department didn’t even attempt combat. They pretty much just let them burn for like six hours.
Also, the fire department knew building 7 was going to collapse. They pulled all their people away from building to protect them after they noticed signs of structural failure and there are a bunch of accounts from firefighters to this effect.
As usual, this is all accessible by google.
Incorrect. There were damages, but none to the central supporting columns. Even after accounting for the fires they were not enough to explain the free fall speed collapse.
Slow down here. I’m trying to work forwards from the evidence and for all that I know it points to controlled demolition as the only plausible explanation and falsifies the theory of collapse by fire and structural damage. You again are conflating two or more separate questions: how did it collapse and who did it and for what reason.
If you want more science about the subject here is a good link: http://www.journalof911studies.com/
I think you are falling victim to a subtle reasoning error here. Imagine a doctor is asked to examine a dead body and determine the cause of death. He observes almost certainly fatal injuries that are consistent with those caused by a bullet and reasonably concludes the man was shot.
If he is then informed that a grenade went off in the vicinity of the man and he fell to the ground shortly afterwards he will conclude that in fact the man was probably killed by shrapnel, even if the injury looks more like injuries he has previously observed from gunshots than from shrapnel.
I recognize that you are claiming the injuries look much more like the injuries you would expect from a bullet than they do the injuries you would expect from shrapnel but I think it is important for you to consider that the fact that the grenade is known to have gone off nearby just before the man fell to the ground is very relevant to the probabilities you assign to the two possible explanations. It is not appropriate merely to ‘work forwards from the evidence’ without acknowledging this fact.
Hahaha, I think it is funny that every comment against the 9/11 orthodoxy is voted down while every comment in favor of it is voted up, is it possible that the audience is a bit biased here?
But on to your point.
First I think the example is a bit misleading because in the reader’s mental model a grenade will cause death in a manner similar with the firing of bullets. Not so in the case of 9/11, for all that is known, a building sustaining some amount of structural damage and fire will not collapse the way WTC7 did, which is why from the start you should place a higher probability on explosives being involved.
But back to your example: A man is dead after a grenade exploded in his vicinity. His wounds are consistent with bullet wounds which usually look different that shrapnel wounds. Now, what killed the man, was it the grenade or bullets(he could have been fired at when the grenade went off). One way to distinguish the causes of death would be to examine the body for bullets or shrapnel. We might find one or the other or even both. If you only find shrapnel you falsify the hypothesis of death-by-gun, if on the other hand you only find bullets it’s the other hypothesis that is falsified.
I assume you accept that the buildings collapsed in a manner consistent with the use of explosives. This already nullifies one argument that was repeated several times here on LW, that the prior for explosives is too low to even be seriously considered. Now this is of course not enough to prove that it were explosives and here is where additional evidence has to come in like:
can structural damage(e.g. as happened in 9/11 to WTC7) and fire explain a collapse in almost free fall speed? No
were there eye-witness testimonies of explosions? Yes, lots of them.
is there evidence for explosives in the rubble/dust? Yes. As a side note, NIST didn’t even bother to look for this evidence:
http://wtc.nist.gov/pubs/factsheets/faqs_8_2006.htm
“12. 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.”
NIST did not test for the residue of these compounds in the steel.”
The fact that a grenade went off is part of the evidence.
Yes, to the extent of my limited knowledge of the issue. Part of my problem judging the evidence (and I think this affects many people) is that I feel like a doctor who has seen lots of gunshot wounds but no shrapnel wounds. I have seen many videos of buildings collapsing due to a controlled demolition and to the best of my layman’s ability to judge they look similar to the 9/11 footage. I have never seen any other footage of a building being hit by a large jet airliner with a full fuel load.
You are correct that there was likely not that much damage to the central columns. However, damage may have occurred and other damage to the south side may have contributed. See in particular pages L-34 and L-35 of the NIST progress report: http://wtc.nist.gov/progress_report_june_04/appendixl.pdf Moreover, claims of collapse at free fall speeds for both the WTC7 and the main towers are both false. In the case of the WTC7, the east penthouse started collapsing a full 6 seconds before the rest of the building.
As to your claim that I’m “conflating two or more separate questions” the questions are fundamentally interrelated. If you are trying to claim that WTC7 was brought down by controlled explosives, that claim becomes fundamentally less likely if you don’t have a plausible motive for that.
I’m going to have to make a comparison to the creationists again who love to make “peer reviewed journals” (there are I think in the US now at least 2 such entities). Constructing y journals does not make something science. Making journals of people who agree with a fringe belief and then claiming peer review doesn’t make that peer reviewed science. And the claim that they had to do so because the mean editors and reviewers at other journals wouldn’t let them play is textbook from the ID movement. Now, of course, making a claim that is similar in form to that made by someone else doesn’t mean they share the same truth value. But it should raise a red flag. The fact that all the editors are people who are convinced that the standard account must be false also should raise a red flag.
I actually think most people don’t understand how hard it is to bring down a building the size of WTC7 (much less the towers!) with demolition explosives. Any evidence put forward to show that it would be unlikely for the buildings to collapse due to fire and structural damage is also evidence for how hard it is to implode them with explosives. It’s not like the movies where the secret agent can go in with three detonators the size of baseballs that stick to the walls, we’re talking days, even weeks of preparation with a full crew drilling into support columns, loading them with dynamite, RDX, connecting blasting caps, and wiring the whole thing up.
Here’s an account of what it took to demolish a steel structure building 300 feet shorter than WTC7 (but 300,000 square feet larger in total floor space):
There are plenty of videos of the collapse, so I’ll let you watch and decide for yourself:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zv7BImVvEyk
Your video is missing the 6 seconds in question. Oranges?
More in this comment:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/218/what_is_missing_from_rationality/1y36
I think I missed your point before.
The east penthouse collapsed 6 seconds earlier. So what? The relevant question is how much time did the entire building take to collapse, the time the roofline took to hit the floor? The only way it could be so fast is if all the supporting columns were destroyed. I don’t see how the collapse of the penthouse is relevant to that. It would only be relevant if said collapse would destroy the supporting columns but then we would have seen that effect much earlier. What we see is the penthouse collapsing but the building still standing still.
Uhh.
JoshuaZ:
Roland:
Do you not see why the fact that your video doesn’t contain the penthouse collapse because of angle or timing problematic in this context? Putting aside the fast rate of collapse once the rest of the building is going down the fact that there is visible evidence of the structural integrity of the building failing before the whole thing comes down is very strong evidence against a controlled demolition.
Even in a controlled demolition explosive charges go off before the building comes down and already start doing structural damage, if you watched some videos(there are plenty on youtube) you will see for yourself.
Yes, there was some damage done to the building by falling debris and fire which of course was before the collapse and no one is denying this. But the key is: what kind of structural damage would be necessary for the whole building to collapse at approximately free-fall speed(counting from the moment the rooftop starts moving down)? For that to happen all supporting columns underneath would have to be destroyed. For this to happen in a random fashion through fires or whatever is highly unlikely. Btw, if you watch the NIST videos again you will see that their model is not convincing exactly because not all supporting columns are destroyed and you see the building folding instead of coming down vertically and yes, this is the case in both models of NIST.
The following video has both models: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuyZJl9YleY
So the natural conclusion from 3. is that at least the hypothesis of explosives being planted in the building should have been examined by NIST, why wasn’t it done?
Just to reiterate my point which I suspect was long lost in the discussion: I think the controlled demolition hypothesis is the most likely given the facts(regardless if there was a government conspiracy or not). Is it the only possible explanation? No. But I didn’t see any explanation that is consistent with the evidence and at the same time the use of explosives was never falsified, on the contrary NIST simply refused to even examine the rubble/dust for evidence thereof.
I think the model that includes the fire damage basically matches what I see in the video. It might not be perfect, but it is good enough for government work. As discussed before, I think the priors for controlled demolition are insanely low and that the the video evidence is consistent with NIST’s explanation. If some other commenter wants to arbitrate, that’d be fine (though please look at past exchanges on this topic, not just this thread), but otherwise I’m done. I think my position is clear and convincing to anyone reading this exchange (if such people disagree they’re welcome to ask me anything) and so much so that I’m comfortable leaving roland the last word…
You are right that that sort of collapse would require all the supporting columns to fail simultaneously, but that is not a surprising event. Large building collapses are not intuitive. Once a building starts to collapse, it introduces major vibrations and other forces that could, under the right circumstances, destroy all the supporting columns simultaneously, especially if they’d already been weakened by high temperatures.
Is this the Phlogiston theory of building collapse?
Sigh. I’m not going to bother reposting the entire thing so I’ll just link:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/is/fake_causality/1vy8
Phlogiston made specific testable predictions about mass and combustion. Phlogiston theory was thrown out not because it was useless but because it was wrong. In this respect, phlogiston was good science.
(The fact that what you said isn’t a substantive reply to jimrandomh’s remark is a separate issue)
1:09 in: ”...but by 5:20 p.m. most of the fires had been extinguished.”
Citation needed.
Less likely? I think the claim can be stated and proven independently of the motive. A motive certainly will give it more plausibility but not necessarily make it more likely in a Bayesian way. I’m trying to answer a question of how, whereas the motive would be relevant to a question of why, for what reason.
JFK was assassinated and it is certainly possible to reconstruct how it happened: how many bullets where fired, from which angles, etc… The next question would be, who did it, for what reason, etc...
Second, you seem to be operating under the assumption that if the plane attacks were executed by terrorists they couldn’t also have planted explosives?
On the contrary, motive is a perfectly relevant Bayesian modifier. I’m also not sure what you mean by saying that the motive can make something more plausible but not necessarily more likely. What is plausibility if not a metric of likelyhood given the evidence?
And they would have done so when exactly? Moreover, why bother? The entire success of using planes in this way is that you don’t need to bother with bombs in your target. The planes themselves do the work. Setting explosives makes the plan for more complicated with little gain.
Person X drops down dead with a perforation of his head. Claim: he was killed by a bullet. This can be examined independently of the question: Who had a motive to do so? Do you agree that it would be wrongheaded to start the investigation with: X was a well known and popular person and so no one would have a motive to kill X therefore the claim of death by bullet is extremely unlikely and we shouldn’t even bother investing much time in its investigation.
That’s a really bad analogy with multiple problems: First, stray bullets exist. Second, insane people shooting at random individuals exist. Third, the assumption that no would have a motivation to kill the person in question is an incredibly strong one. Moreover, even in that situation, if you did have a very high confidence that no one would deliberately shoot the individual, that would in fact reduce the confidence value that the person had been killed by a gunshot since it reduces the probability of certain gun-shot hypotheses being correct. You might think it doesn’t reduce it by enough to matter but it can’t no alter it if the presence of motivations would increase the probability. Conservation of evidence and all that.
Moreover, the notion you’ve constructed of not even bothering to investigate the hypothesis is a strawman. No one has said that alternate investigation might not have made sense at one point. But it simply isn’t a useful tool at this point. To extend your analogy, slightly differently, if the doctors all say that the person died from a random piece of shrapnel and have a lot of evidence for that claim (including videos of the shrapnel impact) then at a certain point it isn’t useful to spend resources investigating the bullet hypothesis. If you can’t construct a plausible motive for the shooter that becomes yet another reason to reduce confidence in the (already low) probability assigned to the bullet hypothesis.
Eliezer managed to write much more eloquently what I’m trying to say:
In the art of rationality there is a discipline of closeness-to-the-issue—trying to observe evidence that is as near to the original question as possible, so that it screens off as many other arguments as possible.
The question in this case is: “Were explosives planted in WTC7?”.
How much explosive charge would it take to cause the failure observed? Where would it have to be installed? How many hours would that take, and how many workers? How many people would have to be displaced so as not to witness the building being prepared to blow? Where did the explosives come from? Who paid for them? Who delivered them, and to whom, where? Why would the project be timed to go on September 11th? Why would the denotation of the explosives be delayed to seven hours after the debris struck the building? Why didn’t the fire interfere with the operation of the explosives? How much noise would the explosives make? How quickly would the building collapse after the explosion?
Even if you think the official story is not well supported, I have to say it stacks up positively magnificently compared to the building-implosion theory.
In the art of rationality there is a discipline of closeness-to-the-issue—trying to observe evidence that is as near to the original question as possible, so that it screens off as many other arguments as possible.
It seems you have ignored my queries. In the spirit of staying as close to the original question as possible, however, I shall withdraw “Why would the project be timed to go on September 11th?” and “Why would the denotation of the explosives be delayed to seven hours after the debris struck the building?”, and ask again:
How much explosive charge would it take to cause the failure observed?
Where would it have to be installed?
How many hours would that take, and how many workers?
How many people would have to be displaced so as not to witness the building being prepared to blow?
Where did the explosives come from?
Who paid for them?
Who delivered them, and to whom, where?
Why didn’t the fire interfere with the operation of the explosives?
How much noise would the explosives make?
How quickly would the building collapse after the explosion?
And how did They (whoever They are) get all of those presumably well-intentioned workers to keep quiet, before and after the operation?
Quoting myself again for the 3rd time:
Maybe I should have emphasized “screens off as many other arguments as possible”. You have a made a list of such arguments/questions. Mind you, they are all worth investigating but I’m screening them off the key question, namely: “Were explosives planted in WTC7?” or “What caused WTC7 to collapse”(hat tip to Morendil).
Look at the following video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79sJ1bMR6VQ
Do you agree that this was a controlled demolition? Do you agree that you can make this statement without having any of your listed questions answered? If yes, you can then proceed to ask your previous list of questions:
How much explosive charge would it take to cause the failure observed?
Where would it have to be installed?
How many hours would that take, and how many workers?
How many people would have to be displaced so as not to witness the building being prepared to blow?
Where did the explosives come from?
Who paid for them?
Who delivered them, and to whom, where?
Why didn’t the fire interfere with the operation of the explosives?
How much noise would the explosives make?
How quickly would the building collapse after the explosion?
That video was pretty awesome, actually—a superb job of imploding a thirty-story building (the Landmark Tower in Fort Worth, Texas, March 18, 2006). And did you hear the noise of those explosive charges, and see those bright flashes as they detonated—it was most distinct!
...wait.
Edit: Here’s another camera angle on the Landmark Tower, I believe.
Someone pointed this out a while ago and so the truthers decided that the buildings were brought down by thermite. Someone then pointed out that thermite can’t make horizontal cuts and that’s how the truthers figured out the government used nanothermite.
And so, small concession after small concession, nothing changes...
Roland, sorry to address you again after I disengaged. I don’t want to reenter the argument but I am curious: What do you believe was used to bring down the building? Presumably not thermite since you put all that effort into getting us to watch that video of the guy who heard an explosion…
No. Fool. They got hit by freaking planes. I saw it live on TV. You’re just WRONG and RIDICULOUSLY SO. It doesn’t matter which person you signal affiliation with. Or which works you link to. You’re still wrong.
Aside from the fact that ata is right and WTC7 was actually brought down from fires and structural damage caused by the falling tower, not the airplanes themselves, this strikes me as a reasonable response to persistent and uncorrectable wrongness. Do people disagree? If so, what is the appropriate response?
WTC7 was not one of the buildings that got hit by a plane.
(Lest anyone misinterpret my motives… I’m just correcting a statement of fact. I am absolutely not defending the claim that any of them were brought down by explosives, which I do not believe.)
Calculated time for the building to collapse by NIST models were similar in magnitude to observations.
Edit: Page 85 in the document, “Table 3-1.” Says “43″ as the page number in lower right corner.
I found the NIST wireframe model videos on youtube, with a comparison to the real collapse:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuyZJl9YleY
EDIT: Interestingly the NIST models only show the initial phase of the collapse before ending abruptly but nevertheless there already are significant discrepancies with the actual collapse, and yes, they were the same way on NIST’s webpage were I first saw them a while ago but can no longer find them.
According to this video the model your video is comparing to the real collapse is is NISTs guess at what would have happened without the fire damage (poor scholarship which reflects on all the other truther claims) The second model in the clip I just linked to shows (according to the video) NIST’s model of the collapse+fire damage which approximately matches the actual fall. According to the model the supports buckle from the fire damage around the 7th floor and once that happens, yeah, 40 stories is going to fall pretty fast.
Did you actually watch the video I linked? It contains both NIST models.
Why does NIST’s model end right at the beginning of the collapse? Even in the first few seconds that the model portrays you can already see discrepancies in the way the building is folding in some parts.
I read it, the table is about collapse below the roofline, not total time of collapse unless I misunderstood something.
Btw, NIST took several years to make a post facto model that would explain the collapse without explosives. They kept tweaking their model(took them years) until they came up with something that would come somewhat near the visual evidence, yet even so didn’t quite manage to do it. There were videos on the NIST page of their simulations and to me there were significant differences between the videos and the way WTC7 actually collapsed. I can no longer find the videos, the link on NIST’s webpage is misleading now.
For a more thorough debunking of the NIST report:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFpbZ-aLDLY
There is certainly more material on the web.
And the hard question remains, why didn’t NIST falsify the explosives hypothesis by simply looking for residues in the dust/rubble?
http://wtc.nist.gov/pubs/factsheets/faqs_8_2006.htm
“12. 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.”
NIST did not test for the residue of these compounds in the steel.”
Two reasons:
The natural assumption is that the collapses are related. (Obligatory xkcd reference to amuse the lurkers.)
The iconic building collapses of 9/11 were the twin towers.
As for the point about buildings collapsing by fire, there were even at the time historical cases of fires damaging fireproofed structural members: in the One Meridian Plaza fire of 1991, significant but non-total damage to structural members was observed. That One Meridian Plaza did not collapse when 7 World Trade Center did reflects the differences in the designs and in the parts of the buildings affected.
3. I don’t know about you but I’m on Silverstein’s payroll.