A 911 Thought Experiment

- some out of the box thinking from Green Island

by Dave Patterson, September 2006

(NOTE: If you are looking for the meat, click here and get to it - if you like reading long introductions that try to set some context, carry on; if you've come for the fire picture, it's here)

Albert Einstein used to do what he called 'thought experiments', or mind games, to help him envision things that had no 'seeable' versions here on the home planet - you can only do empirical experiments to a certain point. (Others 'envision' things too, of course, such as people who see giant green spiders crawling on walls if they have had too much or not enough of their desired recreational chemicals, or others whose lives are perhaps a bit boring or confused and they desire some attention. Which is simply to say that such things can be useful at times, but one should of course not necessarily believe everything one hears about such things. In the way of sort of dealing with ahead of time those who will dismiss the following as more akin to green spiders than relativity ... you must decide for yourselves.)

I am hoping some will find the following helpful, however, as the Official Conspiracy Theory (OCT) of what happened on Sept 11 2001 that so many people apparently believe is not delusional, but is one of the truly evil lies of all time, and is being used to justify pushing the entire planet closer and closer to annihilation. If we can stand up together and expose this lie for what it is, and then bring the issuers of that lie to justice, we just might stand a chance of saving everything. If this lie continues to be the basis of the future, then we are going nowhere good. So first we must become as certain as we can be that it is indeed a lie, and since the mainstream media is working with the government to promote the lie, we are left much to our own devices. And since few of us can order large investigations into such major crimes, we are left to deal with them as we can. It's a Holmesian approach as well - those familiar with the Holmesian method will recall that after hearing the facts of a case, the great man would close his eyes and ponder for awhile, performing thought experiments of his own, and his examination of the crime scene was usually to verify the conclusions he had arrived at. As I have no doubt an examination of the crime scene we discuss here would have confirmed the conclusions we arrive at, had it ever been properly forensically examined which, of course, it never was, and now never will be.


The destruction of the twin towers on Sept 11 2001 has caused a huge amount of controversy, with the official version being that airliners full of fuel (they were actually somewhat less than 'full', but that's a minor point, except insofar as it indicates from the beginning the looseness with facts which the OCT shows throughout) driven into the WTC 1 and 2 with those huge explosions we all saw time and time again, which caused structural damage which, along with the fires caused by the burning remaining fuel spreading throughout the structures, weakened them to the point where 'global collapse' suddenly, unexpectedly ensued and they both just dramatically 'pancaked', the top floors falling onto the lower floors in a domino-effect sort of thing, resulting in the terrible pictures we have all seen hundreds of times of those great structures crumbling into a pile of dust and broken metal in a few seconds. Which sounds like a reasonable enough theory, at least to people raised on Marvel comic books and Hollywood special FX movies. Of course, other theories have sounded reasonable enough until they got probed a bit - everyone knew the earth was flat and the sun revolved around it, at one time - that theory fit all the known evidence. A lot of people still believe that the earth is but four thousand odd years old too, and the theory that Saddam had WMD and was related to those attacks on 911.

And then there are those who say this planes-fires-pancaking scenario is quite implausible, impossible even, and the only way to bring those great buildings down was through some form of controlled demolition.

I happen to believe that the latter theory is the correct one, but how does one prove such a thing, given that the actual scenario is pretty much non-reproducible? - at least I myself do not have the billions of dollars that would be required to rebuild a similar building in an out of the way place, buy a used 757, and (through remote control) have it driven into the building and observe what happened.

Well, it occurred to me one night as I lay in those minutes before sleep mulling various things over that a thought experiment, such as Einstein used to satisfy himself that if E =MC2 it might explain a lot of stuff, and some further experiments might be in order to test that idea, might be of some assistance in demonstrating to the many believers of the jetfuel-fire theory, in showing how unlikely the official OCT actually is. A little probing and poking around behind the scenes of those comic book FX-like explosions and stories might reveal some things that show the official story is somewhat less plausible than they would have us believe - 'fall down go bang' works great in the pages of a Marvel comic book - but does it really work in real life? Let's have a look.

So. Basics - for the experiment to be useful, you have to have certain things in your mind, you have to get your feet on the ground and know what you're dealing with, what the parameters are, when to pay attention to something and when to brush something aside as unhelpful. (and you are free of course, encouraged actually, to perform any other real or thought experiments you like, and compare the results, and decide for yourself what is most believable)

Let's start with simple construction things. Where's the ballpark? What sort of structure was it that fell down in this spectacular way?

Let us start with a small card house, we have all built them as children, cards balanced together, sometimes even two or three stories high - but as fragile as a butterfly's wing (perhaps even moreso), apt to fall if a door slams in the house or you accidentally breathe on it. Not strong, not robust, if a modern jetliner flew by the card house, or possibly even the house the card house was being built in on final approach, the card house would disintegrate into a pile of cardboard fluttering in the air, and the plane would not be disturbed in the slightest. Perhaps as close to absolute 'zero' as one can get on the 'strong' scale.

Consider a mountain, tens of thousands of feet tall, solid stone. If, after destroying the house of cards, the plane I mentioned previously went on and flew into the mountain, the result would be quite the reverse - the plane would leave hardly a mark on the stone as it shattered into pieces, leaving only some debris lying around, all that energy involved with a couple of hundred tons of metal moving at 500 miles per hour with a few thousand gallons of exploding fuel - nothing to the mountain at all. The mountain is maybe not 100, maybe not entirely indestructible, but very high on the 'strong' scale.

So that is sort of the 'how strong is it' ballpark we work in today when considering the WTC - somewhere between a house of cards and a mountain.

Size is not the only thing, of course, as tiny is not always weak and large is not always strong - think of, perhaps, a huge but substanceless cloud that the plane flies through - or other small human-created things - a cheap cardboard suitcase, a metal computer box, a well-constructed wooden jewelry box, a wall safe - some things you can put your fist through if you become motivated to do so or at least make a good dent in, others, even such small things, will stand up to a great deal of abuse or accidental violence of various sorts. Imagine if, in a fit of temper, you wanted to destroy the family silverware box - it would take a bit of doing, but a few good whacks with a sledgehammer would break it into pieces, and then with a small fire you could reduce those pieces to ashes and scatter them to the wind quite easily, really. But what about the smallish floor safe you see in various small businesses? Solid steel and iron - if it's any good at all, you could beat on that sucker all day with a sledge hammer and barely scrape the paint off it, and set it in the fire from the silverware box, and add on piles and piles of wood - and tomorrow or the next day, that ol safe will be sitting there laughing at you. That little tiny safe, a couple of feet square - as close to indestructible as can be, for you or I, without highly sophisticated destructive devices, things as highly sophisticated, and scientifically advanced, as the process by which the safe was made in the first place. When we humans really want to do something, we can do a damn good job of it.

Or consider bigger things - your house. We have all seen pictures of accidents where a car has gone off a road at a high rate of speed and crashed through a house wall. In every case, at least in pictures I recall, the house has not crumbled from this violent blow, but the frame has remained solid, and the hole repaired. Fire, of course, in a wooden framed house, can mean destruction if it is not quickly controlled. Fire is not so hard on the car, of course, I am sure we have all also seen a lot of pictures of cars that have been in fires - all black and burned - but all that steel in the frame, and even the lightweight aluminum of the panels, is pretty much intact, after an hour or two of burning from a fuel fire, fed by the seats and other burnable stuff around. Me, at least, I have never seen any 'melted' cars after a car fire. Any metal is pretty resistant to fire, hardened steel very, very resistant.

So. The only point of all that was to be sure you have it in your mind that there are few absolutes here - most human built things can be destroyed, at least to some extent, but the larger and stronger those things are, the more it takes to destroy them. If I give my son a child's plastic tool kit I can let him loose in the playroom with little fear he will do much damage as he plays away - I would be much less sanguine about setting him behind the controls of a backhoe in the back yard and merrily leaving for work.

So let us then consider a bit about how strong tall steel and cement skyscrapers are - are they fragile things like the house of cards, likely to fall at any unexpected blow (not simply a rhetorical question - I am on a mailing list where one participant holds that this is the case, and claims that all engineering is thus) - or are such things stronger, and if so, how much stronger? (I am sure that some are stronger than others, for various reasons from better construction methods in more recent years (to just the opposite, modern bottom-line-conscious corp-owned construction companies cutting safety factors to the bone to save a few pennies, and worse), to different construction methods in general, and etc, but the thought experiment just goes to general ideas of strength of steel and concrete skyscrapers) Are skyscrapers like wooden houses, that can be brought down by a fire, or like a steel safe that is very hard to destroy, or something else altogether?

(One final aside - please note this is a 'thought experiment' for the non-professional, non-scientist, but reasonably intelligent citizen - don't get lost in all the 'physics' talk we've all heard the last few years - melting point of steel, weakening point of steel, freefall speed, global collapse, the rest of it. There are some responders I would consider honest, but a great amount of it has been bafflegab in my opinion, people with things to conceal trying to preach from on high and convince you that you can have no opinion if you are not a senior scientist with a stack of 'peer-reviewed' papers to wave around, without such you are too stupid to believe your own eyes or make simple observations about obvious things. Think for yourself, as a free person. You don't need a degree to know that gravity is, that fire burns, that steel is strong and that people sometimes lie. Leave the 'experts' to their chatter and think for yourself - experts can be useful sometimes, but experts can also be wrong and experts can be bought or shut up - in the end, at all times, you can only listen to and consider their advice and filter it through your own BS and reality filters. We have 'experts' telling us there is no global warming and other 'experts' telling us the planet is on the verge of disaster because of global warming. We have 'experts' telling us all of the available evidence indicates there is no god, and other 'experts' telling us that there is no possible explanation for the things we see around us EXCEPT god. We have 'experts' telling us that 'free trade' will make us all rich and bring us a nirvana on earth, and other 'experts' telling us 'free trade' will create a new feudalism of a small super-rich elite and huge serfdom existing in conditions no better than similar serfs in the middle ages. You can say whatever you want, and find some 'expert' somewhere to point to to back up your opinion, and all we have is a 'my expert is better than your expert' contest, unwinnable by anyone, which doesn't actually get us much closer to any solutions about anything. So at such times, the intelligent person, the citizen who actually cares about the truth and about his or her community and what is happening therein, pretty much has to fall back on their own resources. Which should be ok, if you have an open mind, are well read, and haven't allowed your brain to be turned to mush by watching too much television. Really. Trust yourself - you were born with the greatest computing device known to humans pre-installed, so just use it.)


I think first we need to see clearly what exactly we are dealing with here - a good part of the plausibility, insofar as there is any, of the OCT is that we do not get a good perspective of the whole situation of those huge buildings, we see a small section of a square box up in the air that doesn't look all that impressive being impacted by a plane that looks almost as big as the box is, and a big explosion - and it's all very much OUT of context, and filtered only through hysteria and shock 'n' awe 'commentary', so the following collapse is spectacular (except for those who were not so 'shock 'n' awed', but were aware of the general situation from the first and reacted 'what the f**??!!!!' - but those people didn't get much airtime either then or more recently).

So let's start here and get our feet firmly on the ground in the thought experiment, with a picture of the early, below ground construction of the WTC buildings 1 and 2 -

(the original of this can be found here , which is also a good place to go for a read of the construction of the WTC in general, with a lot more details than just this pic; also a a bit more here..)

Just spend a minute with this pic. Look at it, and around it, get a feel for the scale here, which is big - this is still just the below ground construction of one of those buildings, remember, but it's going to be essentially the same for the next 900 feet or so straight up. That is some strong looking stuff to me - if you scroll through the whole story, you will see other details of the construction, read as much as you want - one thing this is not, is a 'house of cards', apt to topple the first time somebody drops a hammer or something, this is a huge construct, a couple of hundred feet per side, seriously anchored to the bedrock about 60 feet below ground level as can be clearly seen here and is explained further on in the article. And even in this foundation bit, you can see hundreds and hundreds of huge steel beams, all welded and bolted together. Look at that central core - 47 huge steel columns, all interlocked together with bolted and welded crossbeams going all over the place, in a 87x137 foot rectangle, that will run all the way to the top of the building. Look at the outer wall, all again huge steel beams, staggered in their lengths so there is no single cross-seam creating any weak lines, with a huge network of floor trusses, stretching between wall and core every six feet or so, again bolted and welded together.

Now, since this is a good place for comparison, picture the body of a 757 aircraft lying on the floor of the uppermost floor area you can see beside that central core (I am not a computer whiz and cannot do a graphic, but this is, after all, a thought experiment) - the 757, the type of plane that is said to have been flown into the building, is about 150 ft long, so it would be just a bit longer than the long dimension of that core, and the hollow body is about 12 feet in diameter - the floor between central block and wall is about 60 feet in that direction, so the body of the plane would take about a fifth of the width. Picture that lying there, that hollow shell - you can get a couple of views of the plane here -

• Boeing 757 specs
• 757 cutaway
  
• 757 schematic.

- and you can imagine the wing, which is a bit shorter, about 130 feet long, lying beside it on the floor (noting again that the wing is not solid, but a lightweight, strong, frame overlain with aluminum sheeting)

Just look at that for a minute, and think. That huge amount of steel (actually a whole lot more, another 90 or so stories worth) is what is actually behind that facade we see the plane crashing into. That hollow plane body, impacting that steel frame. At 400 mph, give or take. 400 mph is fast, but most of us have been in cars on the ground going 100 mph or more - this is a bit faster, but not hugely so, not the stuff of unimaginable destruction like a huge, solid rocklike meteor or something coming in at thousands of miles per hour. Perspective - don't let your imagination run away with you as the boogabooga MSM encourage as they give you no perspective on things but want you to think of comic-book like nightmares with no attachment to reality. This is a hollow, lightweight 12-ft diameter aluminum-shell projectile impacting a huge 1000x200x200 ft steel matrix of heavy steel and cement construction at about 400 mph. (Give or take, nobody knows how fast those planes were going, but top speed is around 500 mph, and it's unlikely they were being steered by inexperienced people at max speed - but even if they were, it makes little difference to the thought experiment). Close your eyes and let that image into your brain - that 12 foot diameter cylinder, with its framed wing, 150 ft long, impacting a 1000x200x200 building constructed around that 140x80 foot steel-beam matrix with that outer steel shell.

Scale this whole thing to a useful size for some more ideas, that's what's so beautiful about thought experiments, you can do all this stuff - imagine a box in your driveway or something about 10 feet tall and 2 feet square of the same matrix like steel construction, with that core and walls of steel, and 'floors' of crossbracing every inch or so, anchored firmly to a cement foundation a few inches under the cement driveway - and then I give you a somewhat elongated cigar tube of about an inch in diameter and a foot in length (and remember, scaling everything, the 'walls' of the cigar tube will be sort of the thickness of a sheet of paper or something like that), a hollow lightweight aluminum tube (imagine it with appropriately scaled wings if you like). Your instructions are to imagine loading that hollow tube into an elephant gun or something, and firing it into the ten foot tall steel matrix somewhere near the top, and thinking about how much structural damage it would cause to your ten foot by two foot by two foot steel matrix anchored below your cement driveway. Look at that one inch tube in your hand, and that ten foot tall steel box in your driveway. Think about it. Are you getting some idea of the scale of things, the actual size of that airplane compared to the WTC? If you were a betting person, would you bet on that cigar tube initiating a 'global destruction' sequence - or not?

Now think about that hollow tube of the 757 hitting that steel frame of the WTC in a realistic way, not the out-of-context closeup pics and explosion we are all familiar with, just the plane itself, that 150 long hollow aluminum tube hitting that 1000 foot tall, 200x200 building, with that steel shell around it and that immense steel core (another fact - they like to point out the plane weighed something like 120 tons, which sounds big, and is, compared to some things - but that building weighed about 500,000 tons, so keep that in perspective - this is not a 120 ton jetliner flying into your living room, which would be scary and hugely destructive to your small house, but a 120 ton jetliner flying into something that might more aptly be compared to a small manmade mountain. 120 tons vs 500,000 tons. Just keep that in mind. How fast would something weighing 120 pounds (to scale it down a bit) have to be going to damage something weighing 500,000 pounds? Just imagine what damage you think might be done. Leave the fire for a bit, in the thought experiment we'll deal with that later (although in the driveway model, you'd have, oh, maybe a shot glass full of fuel on board the cigar tube - how far could you spread a shot glass of liquid through that 10x2x2-ft matrix with 100 floors, and how much damage would you expect it to do?), just that hollow tube hitting that immensely strong, interconnected steel frame. How much do you really think that great inner core has actually been weakened, after that outer wall absorbs a lot of the energy of impact? How much impact did that smallish tube have on that huge matrix of construction steel, welded and bolted together for over 100 stories? (and that was, remember, designed to deal with not only accidental crashes from just such aircraft, but also gale-force winds over its entire surface and withstood such winds on a regular basis for over 30 years, even had a special buffering system to mitigate the building sway)

Now you may feel like my friend on the email list, who claims to deal with engineers and understand engineering principles, that the construction steel used in skyscrapers like this is some kind of technological booga booga and not really very strong at all, indeed its supposed 'strength' is actually highly illusory, and in reality flying that 120-ton hollow 757 tube into 500,000 tons of welded and bolted construction steel will expose it for the house of cards it really is, and down it will crumble. Or you may feel as I do, that all that welded and bolted high-strength steel, anchored solidly to the bedrock, is not illusory at all, but is actually about as close to the rock-solidness of a mountain as humans are likely to build, and that hollow, light weight plane will fold up like a stepped-on beer can upon impact, breaking up into pieces like we see lying around on the ground after most airplane accidents. The engines might manage to compromise one or two of the steel columns of that core if they impact it after breaking through the outer steel wall, as parts of the engines are pretty high grade solid steel, but that wouldn't be anywhere near the kind of force needed to seriously endanger the overall structure, it seems to me. I think of thousands of such high rise buildings all around the world, and how many of them have ever fallen over, which indicates to me they are pretty solid things.

Just look at that frame again, and think of various impact scenarios (no report has ever done this that I have read, nor the MSM or any of the various tv docs later produced - like bogeymen of all sorts, some things are better left to the imagination, as trying to put details to them quickly exposes them as much less frightful than those spreading the stories want you to believe). Does the nose of the plane hit between floors, or on one of the actual floor levels? If directly on a floor level, it is hard to imagine it even penetrating to the core of the building, as that outer steel wall, braced by the steel and cement floors against that inner core, is just not going to disintegrate upon impact from a hollow lightweight aluminum tube, is it? Really? It would be like driving the plane into a man made mountain, really, or perhaps the edge of a giant steel knife, as the body might penetrate above and below the floor, but surely the floor would cut that body right in half as it passed along it, no? Imagine taking the cigar tube and driving it against that steel matrix in your driveway - is the steel and cement floor just going to fold up like cardboard, or is the cigar tube going to lose that battle? And if it hit between floors, it might well penetrate the outer wall given its speed and that energy concentrated on a single small area, but that would dissipate so much of the energy that it would surely have no serious impact on that inner core.

But step back a bit and then think of the big picture - this steel frame is a huge steel lattice, 200 feet square and hundreds of feet tall with that incredibly solid-looking 80x140 foot, 47-steel beam core, all crisscrossed by connecting steel beams and interconnected by the steel and cement floor trusses which are solidly connected to both outer frame and inner core. And look at the picture again, that outer shell is not aluminum siding like on your house you can easily drive a nail through, it is solid construction steel, several inches thick, extremely strong stuff - that (hollow, remember) plane body upon impacting that outer lattice at a high speed in some 'optimal for max damage' way would be able to perhaps carve out at most a circular hole in these outer shell steel columns 15-20 feet in diameter (which means also, of course, it is going to be getting cut up seriously by at least one of the floors, or more likely two, as it passes through that wall), and a lesser hole another few feet either side of that where the engines hit, with the main wing lengths between the body and engines maybe breaching the outer wall but that is all, with huge amounts of the momentum energy being dissipated in this destructive process, and it is hard to see any serious damage to that inner core at all, unless one of those huge columns was damaged or even severed by an engine - but even if one of those columns was severed, there are still 46 others, and there is just no way that the smallish, already greatly diminished in force and physical integrity from penetrating the outer wall, projectile that an engine would be, is going to take out more than one column. Just think about it - look at one of the trucks in the picture, envision an engine about the size of the cab of one of those trucks, flying like a bullet (somewhat slower than a bullet, of course), being mangled and losing much of its velocity force impacting that outer shell and then finishing against that inner core (just imagine driving that truck at 100 miles an hour into one of those steel beams - what do you think would win, the truck (even with its solid engine), or the solid beam, the beam that is part of that huge matrix? - look at the picture and think of that). Sure that engine coming at your wooden framed house would be scary as hell - but against that steel column? And then picture that whole steel inner core, that whole huge steel matrix, of core and shell and over a hundred steel-cement floors, all welded and bolted together, being damaged, so my friend thinks, like a house of cards loosely balanced one on top of the other from the impact of two such engines so it is shattered and weakened to the point it is little stronger than that house of cards. Can your imagination make that leap? Or does the thought experiment lead you to different conclusions about how strong that great structure actually is, and what might happen in a collision between that hollow aluminum tube that would sit comfortably on one small section of one floor of that huge steel matrix, and that huge matrix?


So. We must also consider fire, of course, as we all recall the smoke that day, and the explosion, and fires, and the OCT maintains the collapse of the WTC 1 and 2 was a combination of structural damage from the plane impacts followed by further weakening of the structure by fire. So now that we have tried to envision exactly what structural damage might have resulted from the impact of the planes and seen (if you agree with my analysis at any rate) that there would be no serious structural damage at all to the overall structure, let us put down the wild-eyed tv-supported childish hysteria about 'great explosion and fire fall down go boom!!!' boogabooga stuff, and look at exactly what sort of fires might have happened following those plane crashes, and what damage might have followed, and whether or not such damage is consistent with a 'global collapse' of that huge steel matrix or not. (A perspective, one might note, that has never been attempted in the mainstream media, for reasons, I would suggest, as noted above - such an examination might very quickly cause some serious grief to the OCT.)

So to start, let us once again consider how big those fires actually were in the context of that whole building, and how much they were likely to damage that huge steel construct.

It is helpful at this time to add a couple of other pictures to the experiment - here, for instance, are a few we can use, starting with the very top one - -


- now just look at those fires, or that smoke, actually, as there are not actually any visible flames here. And it does not indicate at what time these pics were taken, but we know the fires did not burn long, as the buildings came down in not much more than an hour. And don't forget the construction of these buildings - these are not some sort of hollow wooden tubes or rickety scaffolding type thing susceptible to fire as is easy enough to imagine from simple outside pics like this which leave it all to your imagination, they are basically the huge steel and concrete matrix as we looked at in the earlier pic, 500,000 tons of steel and concrete bolted and welded together stretching up over 1000 feet. These buildings did not, apparently do much more than give a small shake when the planes hit them - well, how much would you expect 500,000 tons to react when hit by a mosquito barely 1/5000 th its weight?

But the fires did happen, after the planes crashed into them and the fuel exploded. But once those great fireballs died out, most of the fuel was gone, and the solid steel buildings were still standing tall and firm as can be seen in the last pic, with some sort of small interior fires still going on, in places never actually determined (it is also interesting that there has never been any released report of what offices were located at the places the planes hit - that way we could know more or less how much other flammable material was involved, desks and paper and curtains, things like that - to judge by the black smoke in the pics, there were not very serious fires happening anyway, as we all know that black smoke indicates oxygen-deprived fires - and we know also that many floors in the WTC buildings were more or less empty, with no tenants - what if the plane flew into a big empty cement floor?). In my own thought experiment, I have some problems with the idea of any more than small amounts of kerosene (jet fuel) remaining after those explosions - that is, I have trouble seeing a scenario where there is a large explosion such as we saw that does not consume all available combustible fuel, which will all be flying around in the air in the seconds after the great destruction of the aircraft hitting the building etc - but it doesn't really make much difference to the overall effect that fuel might have had, even if there was no explosion at all - read on).

Now just in the way of background again, to get some rooting in reality rather than don't-think-about-anything comic book 'fall down go boom' stuff where the MSM and official reports like to keep you and your tv-numbed brain, think of what you know of fires and concrete and steel, just from your own experience. If you have access to some stuff, try this - get a few old desks and curtains and boxes of paper, and a few gallons of kerosene, and take it all down to some abandoned cement road somewhere with no buildings or trees or anything nearby, and start a fire. Big fire. Get a box of beer and spend a few hours there, keep the fire big and hot with the paper and wood and kerosene. Get a piece of building steel from somewhere, and heave it in the middle of that fire. Just watch, and think, and after a few hours get some long metal rod and start poking and hitting at that piece of steel, to see how much it has softened up after all those hours in the fire. It will be quite a lot of hours before that steel gets anywhere near the 'redhot' stage, if ever, although it depends to some extent on how big of a piece you have - it takes special attention to the fires, and special fuels, to get to any temperature that discomforts construction steel in any way, well above what you can do with wood and paper and kerosene under any normal circumstances. And remember that in those buildings you're not talking about little isolated pieces of steel, but that whole matrix, more or less intact as I at least concluded from the first part of the little thought experiment, and steel conducts heat quite well - that is, all of those beams in the matrix are going to be live corridors for whatever heat is generated by the fires to pass along, making it extremely (that is to say, extremely, extremely, extremely, exTREMELY) unlikely that any particular section ever got anywhere near hot enough to start weakening, let alone the many, many, many, many areas that would have to weaken sort of uniformly throughout that great structure to lead to the sort of 'global collapse' scenario we were to see that day.

And then after the fire is out and you come back in a day or two, observe the damage to the concrete where the fire was. ???? you're thinking - of course, fire does not damage concrete, at least any fire outside of something you might find in a volcano or something. And the inner cores of those buildings were thick, solid construction steel, as was the outer wall, and the floors were 4 inches of concrete over steel trusses bolted and welded to the outer wall and inner core, over 8000 of these steel trusses in the building. Over 100 of those floors. With a few desks and stuff in the offices that might burn a bit if set on fire from the explosion and/or what was left of the kerosene - but as you can see if you scroll down that page a bit, there have been some very serious fires in high rise buildings that were still standing tall and strong if a bit ratty looking after the fires were put out - so what's with the little fires that that black smoke is coming from in the pics we see of the WTC? What kind of mystical magical things are going on behind those walls that is eating away at the strength of that great steel matrix, eating so fast that both of those buildings are minutes away from crumbling to the ground like a poorly assembled mechano kids building the dog bumped into? Where, through that 1000x200x200 matrix with over 100 floors are you going to spread even 15000 liters of jet fuel to cause any sort of fire that will heat to the point of weakening any significant amount of that steel? When you get away from the intentionally vague statements of the official reports, you can see they are very much hypothesizing things that simply cannot be. Go on, look at that first picture again, imagine a truck even full of kerosene, and how much damage you are going to do to that great central core, those 47 steel columns, with a little kerosene fire such as you burn in your kerosene heater at home - and then if you can even get a vaguely plausible scenario for that - what about the other 100 floors, and all that steel?!?!

How in the name of anything do those little fires we can infer from the smoke in the last pic cause all of those lower floors, and all of that steel, to just give up and collapse like a loosely stacked house of cards as they are going to do in a few minutes? Does that make any sense to your thought experiment? If you have figured some plausible ways that could happen, you'll have to let me know.

Yes, yes, I know, the story is the fuel from the airplane, whatever was left after the initial explosion, filtered down through the building through the elevator shafts or something and caused fires that weakened the steel etc and etc (this is of course ignoring the fact that there were no elevator shafts that ran the length of the building, but there were at least three staggered systems - to get to the top, you had to change two times. And the inner shafts were sealed, no place for the fuel to get out onto the floors if any actually did go down the shaft - another 'idea' spread in the official OCT that simply evaporates if examined at all). Can you really buy that? We are trying to have a reality based thought experiment here - get some figures out and start passing them around. Look down the buildings in the pics on that last page - do you see any sign of fires at all in the bottom 50 or 60 stories that we can see? Think of that immense steel core, those 47 supporting columns running all the way from the bedrock to the top, and just try to imagine the immense amount of fire, over a long period of time, it would take to even start to weaken that core (if you go to the last website from the last picture, you can see other highrise fires that raged for 10-20 hours in some cases, and we can see the much looser steel frames still standing tall and intact - keep that in your thought experiment data bank).

Think of the amount of aviation fuel in one of those planes - a max of about 30,000 liters - which sounds pretty impressive, but actually is about 30 cubic meters, which is about the volume of a medium-sized bathroom. Think about it. An area with dimensions of 2x3x5 meters. Now think about that first construction picture again, and a container of fuel sitting in it somewhere, 2x3x5m in volume. You could set the container beside the airplane fuselage, it's sort of the size of one of the smaller trucks in the pic. Really, if you ignited and burned the whole thing right there beside the plane, or pushed it over beside that central core and lighted it, what do you think would happen? Exactly - big fire for a few minutes, no damage whatsoever to all that steel. None. Steel does not melt or weaken in any serious way from little kerosene fires (when was the last time you replaced your oil furnace because the darn thing up and melted on you? - and the average oil furnace is a considerably lesser brand of steel than construction grade stuff ..).

Think about the amount of heat needed to melt structural steel. Think about the amount of structural steel in that building - I don't have any actual breakdown of how the 500,000 tons the building weighed was divided, but let's say half and half, 250,000 tons of steel and the same of cement - it makes little difference if the actual ratio is different, that's still going to be one hell of a lot of steel to start to weaken with a few thousand gallons tops of kerosene. Where are you going to put that little amount of kerosene sitting in that container beside the airplane body to start melting that huge amount of steel? How are you going to maintain the fires after the desks and papers burn up? As you may have found out already, an hour or two of burning desks and paper and kerosene is NOT going to make construction-grade steel very malleable (and those fires in that building smoldered for barely an hour). Oh, it's just ludicrous to even consider that a truckful of kerosene could do any damage at all to that huge amount of steel. Isn't it? Throw in all the desks and paper you want - I'll bet on the steel any day.

The OCT talks about 'raging fires' - a statement somewhere between wild exaggeration and outright lies, if we just look at the picture above for instance, or consider such things as that terrible picture of the young woman standing clutching one of the steel columns only a few minutes after the impact, a few minutes before her death (her murder, really) or the reports of the firemen reaching burning floors and radioing back that there were only a couple of small but controllable patches of fire.

I can hardly go much further with this. The OCT, as promoted by the media and the official reports, is completely Alice-in-Wonderlandian when actually looked at in feet-on-the-ground detail rather than 'scientific' mumbo jumbo designed to obfuscate rather than illuminate, with no attachment to reality whatsoever. Completely impossible, as I hope the questions I have been asking in the thought experiment make more than clear to any reader whose mind is not totally corrupted and incapable of rational thought from too much television watching.

The whole pancaking theory, the supposed result of the 'structural damage' and 'fires throughout the building', is no more plausible than the 'damage' of 'fires' themselves, if those hallucinatory fantasies are considered against the actual construction of these buildings, as seen in the picture at the first. Do your own thought experiment with this - with the evidence of those construction photos in front of you, the solid steel core sticking up like a huge spindle over 1000 feet from bedrock to the top floor, and the steel outer walls, with cement covered trusses welded and bolted between them every 6 feet or so all around the building for 100+ floors - try to imagine a scenario that could cause not only the floors to pancake, but those outer walls and that inner core to obediently pancake in tandem with the floors, all the way around the core on each level, all the way down those huge buildings, one after another.


A couple of closing thoughts - after considering how utterly unlikely it is that those huge buildings came down as they are said to have come down in the official reports, just look at this short vid - Landmark Hotel Implosion - and see what thoughts occur - and try to figure why the official 'investigation' began with the premise that no sir, no way, there was no controlled demolition, no sir, we are NOT going to even consider that idea, case closed. Hmmmmmmmm -


Are people capable of being fooled by their government or anyone else? Perhaps the most famous example is the Orson Welles broadcast of The War of the Worlds in 1938, in which he wasn't even trying to fool anyone, but thousands of people fooled themselves into believing they were being invaded by Martians on the basis of only a radio broadcast. We all know about sleight of hand card tricks, shell games at the county fair, fast talking salesmen who sell junk as it if was gold, the amazing things that can be done in movies that look amazingly lifelike (most of us recall the Forrest Gump movie, with Forrest shaking hands with the long dead president, but so believably....)

Is the US gov capable of trying to fool people intentionally? (Does it ever NOT might be a more useful question) Examples are legion. Think for instance of the litany of lies and exaggerations presented to the UN by Colin Powell to justify the upcoming US invasion of Iraq.

Is the US gov capable of mass murder? Ask the families of the five hundred+ thousand dead Iraquis whose country was invaded twice on false pretenses, the survivors of Hiroshima, the spirits of the once mighty Indian nation of the North American continent. (But their own people?!?! - well, for starters ask the families of the 60,000 dead soldiers killed in Vietnam or the relatives of those massacred at Waco. Just for starters - make your own list...)


And what then does all of this mean?

Well, as a Socratic sort of teacher I can only open doors for you - what you find on the other side, and how you deal with it - well, that is up to you.

Good luck. If you follow the path well, you may end up in Green Island some day, where we much prefer peace and truthful things and intelligent conversations with our friends and fellow citizens to comic book fantasies and Big Brother governments based on lies and violence. If those things attract you too, welcome, neighbor.



( Apr 2010 - a recent piece I just found that goes over some of the same stuff with a bit more of an academic, but readable, approach - "Hand Waving" the Physics of 911, by a guy called Dave Griscom)

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