Day: October 4, 2016

Europhysics News Trutherism — Trutherism, the belief that Al-Qaeda terrorists were not entirely behind the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, received a boost, Aug. 24, in the latest issue of Europhysics News which carries an article claiming that the World Trade Center was brought down by controlled demolition.

The magazine is published by the prestigious European Physical Society.

The authors of the piece are Steven Jones, a former full professor of physics at Brigham Young University; Robert Korol, a professor emeritus of civil engineering at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada; Anthony Szamboti, a mechanical design engineer; and Ted Walter, who holds master of public policy degree from the University of California, Berkeley.

The authors cite, among other things, the lack of heat to melt, or adequately weaken, the girders to cause the collapse.

Melted girders was widely reported as a reason  immediately after the attack. This was quickly understood to be impossible, however. In fact, it was even being noted that things didn’t get hot enough to cause enough loss of structural strength.

This paper from the December 2001 issue of JOM, — the member journal of The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society , — is in full agreement with the Jones group on this point. The authors Thomas W. Eagar and Christopher Musso, however, don’t feel the need to deny what was before everyone’s eyes. Their article points out that temperature along the 18-meter long joists was certainly not uniform and that given the thermal expansion of steel, a 300 F temperature difference from one location to another will produce yield-level residual stresses hence causing distortions resulting in buckling failures

Jones et al makes the point that fire never collapsed a skyscraper before 9/11 and has yet to bring one down since.

The rebuttal to this is that jet aircraft have never been flown into skyscrapers before or since. Further, a fire, while not collapsing a skyscraper, did make One Meridan Plaza in Philadelphia unstable enough to cause its demolition.

The Jones article discusses the collapse of the 47-story 7 World Trade Center with no deaths hours after the Twin Towers fell. The official version is that falling debris from the North Tower weakened its structure and caused fires while the Jones group says it had the hallmarks of a controlled demolition. We won’t address the engineering claims but we do find it puzzling that conspirators seeking to bring forth war and the New World Order would bother with bringing down 7 World Trade Center after collapsing the main towers.

Regarding the publication of the article by Europhysics News, a cynic might ascribe self promotion or politics. We take a more charitable view.

Not letting dissenters and skeptics air their claims only fans the flames of conspiracy theories. If proponents of global warming theory understood this, their claims — some of them anyway — might be treated with less skepticism by the general public.

Europhysics News Trutherism