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Nuy 9-11 Physics

Steven Dutch, Natural and Applied Sciences, University of Wisconsin - Green Bay
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No amount of evidence will dissuade a conspiracy theorist, but when they appeal to scienc evidence,
they're fair game. And the 9-11 conspiracy sites have some very strange science.

9-11 conspirators seem to be a mix of liberals sll smarng over 2000 and ultra-conservaves angry that
George Bush Jr. hasn't opened the naonal parks to a land rush. But if Dubya orchestrated a massive
conspiracy to bring down the World Trade Center as a pretext for launching a Mideast War, why didn't he
pull o the far simpler trick of faking the discovery of weapons of mass destrucon in Iraq? Think of it - his
biggest polical liability could have been avoided with a piddling investment in special eects, Bush would
be seen as America's savior, his strategy would be completely vindicated, and he'd be polically
unassailable. All it would take would be spritzing an empty factory with the ingredients for nerve gas, with
just enough cross-contaminaon to create a whi of the real thing. Yet for some strange reason he didn't do
it.

Cause and Eect

We live in a universe of paerns. Once a paern is established, the burden of proof is on people who claim
the paern does not hold. When some philosopher of science points out that we cannot prove that the sun
will rise tomorrow, I say he's absolutely right. There is no way to prove axiomacally that the sun will rise
tomorrow, and nobody in science cares in the slightest. When the sun doesn't rise as scheduled, call me.
Unl then I absolutely refuse to waste me worrying about it. When Immanuel Velikovsky claimed the
planets underwent wild disturbances in their orbits, the burden of proof was on him to show that it
happened. The burden was not on sciensts to show it didn't.

In the case of 9-11, we have planes hing the World Trade Center and the buildings failing at precisely the
level of impact. The observaonal evidence clearly shows a cause and eect relaonship.

It Looks Like A Controlled Demolion

What else is a large building collapse going to look like?

Unl 9-11, our only experience in bringing down very large buildings was controlled demolion. The highest
buildings (apart from broadcast towers) brought down were in the 30 story range. Once the building starts
to fall, the physics is going to be the same regardless of the inial cause. So alleged similaries between
9-11 and controlled demolions prove nothing. You might as well argue that the collapse of Mount St.
Helens in 1980 was set o by explosives because it looked just like a landslide caused by explosives.

One thing radically dierent about 9-11 is that controlled demolions always set o charges low in the
structure and let the weight of the building do the rest. Nobody ever set o charges high in a building to
pancake the stories beneath. So why resort to a radical and unproven method if you want to bring down the
World Trade Center?

Probably the most revealing commentary on the controlled demolion theory is Bringing Down The House

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by Michael Satchell in US News and World Report (June 30, 2003). This arcle describes the work of
Controlled Demolion Inc., far and away the world leaders in controlled demolion, and Mark and Doug
Loizeaux, who run it.

Like most Americans, the Loizeauxs were transxed by the televised scenes of destrucon shortly
aer the rst jet struck. But as experts in buildings' vulnerabilies, they knew right away what few
Americans realized. "I told Doug immediately that the tower was coming down, and when the
second tower was hit, that it would follow," remembers Mark.

Horried, the Loizeaux brothers watched rst responders streaming into the doomed towers and tried
francally, and unsuccessfully, to phone in warnings. In the following days, CDI was called to ground zero to
consult on safety and develop plans for demolion and debris removal. What if the twin towers, though
badly damaged, had somehow remained standing? Without doubt, the Loizeaux family would have been
called upon to bring them down. "Quite simply," says Mark in a rare moment of introspecve uncertainty, "I
don't know how we would have done it."

So according to the world experts on building demolion:

It was immediately obvious that the towers were going to fall

They have no idea how they would have brought down the towers in a controlled demolion.

Of course, you can always claim the Loizeaux brothers were in on the plot. Some sites link to a story about
Controlled Demolion later being charged with illegal campaign contribuons, which certainly proves
something. Or other.

Actually, the collapse doesn't look like a controlled demolion. Real controlled demolions try very hard to
avoid inging debris far beyond the building itself. They blow the lower stories and the center of the
building to cause the building to collapse in on itself. The collapse of the World Trade Center doesn't look
remotely like a controlled collapse, apart from stu falling down.

Implosion World, a site dedicated to controlled building collapse, agrees (hp://www.implosionworld.com

/wtc.htm)

DID THE WORLD TRADE CENTER TOWERS ACTUALLY IMPLODE? No. They collapsed in an
uncontrolled [emphasis added] fashion, causing extensive damage to surrounding structures,
roadways and ulies. Although when viewed from a distance the towers appeared to have
telescoped almost straight down, a closer look at video replays reveal sizeable porons of each
building breaking free during the collapse, with the largest secons--some as tall as 30 or 40
stories--actually laying out in several direcons. The outward failure of these secons is believed
to have caused much of the signicant damage to adjacent structures, and smaller debris caused
structural and cosmec damage to hundreds of addional buildings around the perimeter of the
site.

HOW DOES THIS EVENT COMPARE WITH A NORMAL BUILDING IMPLOSION? The only correlaon is that in a
very broad sense, explosive devices (airplanes loaded with fuel) were used to intenonally bring down
buildings. However it can be argued that even this vague similarity relates more to military explosive
demolion than to building implosions, which specically involve the placement of charges at key points
within a structure to precipitate the failure of steel or concrete supports within their own footprint. The
other primary dierence between these two types of operaons is that implosions are universally
conducted with the utmost concern for adjacent properes and human safety---elements that were
horrically absent from this event. Therefore we can conclude that what happened in New York was not a

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building implosion.

Check out the videos of the demolion of the Stardust Hotel in Las Vegas. Fireworks. Big pyrotechnic
countdown clock. None of that on 9/11. Not even remotely similar. Silly? Yes, but sll above the intellectual
level of most 9/11 conspiracy theories. I mean, the similaries the conspiracy bus point to are on the same
level of superciality as whether or not there were reworks.

Jet Fuel Doesn't Get Hot Enough to Melt Steel

For the umpteenth me, nobody ever claimed the steel melted. It got hot enough to lose its strength.

So Where Did All The Molten Steel Come From?

There are lots of accounts

alleging that rescue workers
encountered molten steel. The
rst queson that comes to mind
is whether these witnesses know
the dierence between
incandescent and molten. Steel
can get hot enough to glow long
before it gets hot enough to
melt. The fact that glowing steel
was pulled out of the rubble
doesn't mean it was molten.

One parcular red herring that crops up frequently is that temperatures in the rubble were high enough
long aer the collapse to melt aluminum. Since aluminum melts at 660o C (1220o F) I don't have the
slightest doubt of it. Since a backyard trash re can melt aluminum, so what?

Apparently, the melng of steel signies the use of explosives or thermite cung charges. But the purpose
of either is to cut steel, not melt it. A controlled demolion simply does not produce large amounts of
molten steel. You might as well argue that all the concrete dust shows the buildings were taken down by an
army of gnomes armed with grinding wheels.

If the World Trade Center was hot enough to melt steel, where's all the molten concrete? Iron melts around
1500o C but so do many of the silicate minerals in concrete, and a mixture of silicate minerals would melt at
a temperature lower than any of the individual minerals (I'm a geologist - I get paid to know about stu like
that). The ne parcle size of the concrete dust would facilitate melng. So why wasn't there a huge puddle
of molten concrete at Ground Zero? (There was some, but about what you'd expect from a large re;
certainly not what you'd expect from something hot enough to melt large amounts of steel.)

In a paper by Steven E. Jones, who bills himself as a "Physicist and Archaeometrist," there are pictures of
glowing material falling from the World Trade Center, together with this comment:

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Who can deny that liquid, molten metal existed at the WTC disaster? The yellow color implies a
molten-metal temperature of approximately 1000o C

1000o C, is about 500o C below the melng point of iron.

Oh, by the way, there would have been cung of steel during the construcon. And there's another
construcon process that melts steel. Welding.

No Steel Frame Building Has Ever Collapsed Due To Fire

So if something happens for the rst me, it can't happen because it never happened before?

No 110-story buildings were ever hit by fuel-laden airliners hard enough to strip the insulaon o the
structural steel before, either. Steel-frame buildings are incredibly strong. They have survived major
earthquakes and res, and the Twin Towers merely rocked when hit by airliners at full throle. But the
towers were not designed to survive an impact by fully-laden airliners at full throle, then a re in contact
with unprotected steel. An impact from a jet approaching JFK at 200 miles an hour, with nearly empty tanks,
and one slamming into the building at 450 miles an hour with full tanks, are two quite dierent things.

Free Fall
According to Roedy Green's How You Know 9-11 Was an Inside Job:

All three World Trade Towers fell faster over the rst half of the collapse than physics allows by free
fall. That meant they had to have an assist, e.g. an explosive push from pre-planted demolion
charges, not just gravity pulling them down. The maximum collapse for free fall is computed by

distance = g t

where g is the acceleraon due to gravity 32 feet per second per second, and t is me in seconds. In other
words, free fall collapse should start out slowly and accelerate faster and faster for the big nale.

This is just plain weird. Whether a building falls by deliberate demolion or catastrophic failure, the collapse
will be governed by gravity. Even if you used a teleporter to magically make several stories vanish, the part
above would only fall as fast as gravity would accelerate it. Only if there was some kind of thruster pushing
the building down could it fall faster. Why install a useless Rube Goldberg device? Once the building begins
to collapse, who needs anything to accelerate it? Gravity has a prey reliable record of pulling things down.
And where's the evidence for faster than free fall collapse?

The videos show that the towers took 15 seconds to collapse. The free-fall me for something to fall 400
meters is about 9 seconds. So, no, the towers did not fall faster than free fall.

911Research claims:

This rate is sll much too fast to be explained by a gravity-driven collapse given that the descending
rubble would have to crush and accelerate almost 1000 feet of vercal intact structure. It is
especially revealing that each tower disappeared at about the same rate as the rubble fell through
the air, as if the tower's structure provided no more resistance to the descent of rubble than did air.

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All photos of the collapse show a plume of debris

extending far below the main level of collapse. So the
debris did fall appreciably faster than the building
itself. The building provided lile more resistance than
air for the simple reason that a skyscraper is mostly air.

In the photo at le the collapse is about where the

cloud lls the enre width of the picture, but the debris
in free fall has almost reached the ground.

Note that the debris is at least a building width beyond

the building itself. No competent controlled demolion
ings debris that far.

The fall doesn't have to crush the stories beneath. It merely has to stress the structural elements unl the
fasteners pop and the welds break. The impact of that pancaking material will cause the outer vercal
members to bow outward, then y outward violently when failure occurs. There's no need to appeal to
explosives to ing material outward from the buildings.

If a story is 4 meters high, it will take an object about 0.9 seconds to fall one story, by which me it will be
going 9 m/sec. So once the collapse starts, the overlying structure will be falling at 9 m/sec by the me it
has fallen one story. If we crush the collapsing story into rubble half a meter thick and expect the collapse to
stop at that point, what kinds of forces are involved? We go from 9 m/sec to zero in half a meter, or 1/18 of
a second. However, during that deceleraon the velocity is decreasing, and the average velocity turns out to
be half of the inial velocity, so the crunch me is 1/9 second. So the acceleraon is -9 m/sec divided by 1/9
sec = -81 m/sec2, or about 8 g's.

This is the dierence between a stac load and a dynamic load. In the north tower, with about ten stories
above the impact, the dynamic load was about equivalent not to ten stories but to eighty, nearly the total
height of the building. I doubt if the tower at that level was engineered to support eighty stories - why
waste the steel? Actually the loads are much greater because the inial collapse involved a fall of about
three or four stories, not just one, and the dynamic loads on the points that actually resist the fall - the
welds and the rivets, will be far greater. If you try to stop the collapse in the millimeter or so a rivet or weld
can deform before failing, you're talking hundreds of g's. In the south tower, where the top 25 or so stories
fell, the impact load at eight g's would be equivalent to 200 stories, or twice the total height of the building.
Some conspiracy bus argue that engineering standards require a safety factor several mes the actual load
on the structure, but the dynamic loads would far overwhelm those standards.

This, by the way, is the reason controlled demolion works at all. If physics worked the way 9-11 conspiracy
bus think, once you blew the lower stories of a building, the upper part would just drop and remain intact.

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Of course it doesn't because once the building begins to fall, the dynamic loads are far beyond the stac
strength of the building.

911Research devotes a lot of eort to debunking what it regards as disinformaon campaigns designed to
deect aenon from the theory of controlled demolion. But we keep coming back to the fundamental
issue how any building can fall faster than gravity or why a conspirator would feel the need to set up a
mechanism to do something so useless.

"But the Government Said So"

9-11 troofers keep blind-siding me because they keep on coming up with things I can't believe any toilet-
trained human being would be dumb enough to say. Lately I've been hit a couple of mes with the asseron
that the 9-11 Commission Report states, on Page 305, that "At 9:58:59, the South Tower collapsed in ten
seconds" Indeed it does. The 9-11 Commission Report deals with events leading up to 9-11, agency
responses to the crisis, and possible changes in procedure and policy to cope with future crises. It contains
no technical informaon whatsoever about the causes of the building collapse. Nevertheless, because the
report says the South Tower collapsed in ten seconds, 9-11 troofers insist that is the ocial Government
posion.

People who take that stance aren't merely sciencally illiterate; they're verbally illiterate as well. Insisng
that ten seconds is meant to be a sciencally denive nding in a paragraph dealing with reghng
eorts shows a complete lack of crical reasoning. A person who reasons like that is completely lacking in
the crical reasoning necessary to sort out the events of 9-11.

The technical informaon on the building collapse is in the NIST reports, not the 9-11 Commission Report.
There is lile discussion of the chronology of the collapse once the buildings began to fall, but the NIST FAQ
(Frequently Asked Quesons) site has the pernent informaon.

The seismic spikes for the collapse of the WTC Towers are the result of debris from the collapsing
towers impacng the ground. The spikes began approximately 10 seconds aer the mes for the
start of each buildings collapse and connued for approximately 15 seconds.

So according to the seismic record, the rst impacts are about ten seconds aer the onset of collapse.
That's the free-falling debris. Seismic signals connued for 15 more seconds. So it took at least about 25
seconds for the buildings to collapse. The seismic records are probably the best informaon because the
last stages of collapse were obscured by dust, but a me indexed series of video frames on the 9-11
Research site shows the collapse of one tower sll in progress aer 19 seconds. So the collapse speed was
less than half of free-fall speed. Also:

From video evidence, signicant porons of the cores of both buildings (roughly 60 stories of WTC 1
and 40 stories of WTC 2) are known to have stood 15 to 25 seconds aer collapse iniaon before
they, too, began to collapse. Neither the duraon of the seismic records nor video evidence (due to
obstrucon of view caused by debris clouds) are reliable indicators of the total me it took for each
building to collapse completely.

And the people who like to take "ten seconds" and "essenally in free fall" literally don't seem to care much
about paragraphs like this:

In other words, the momentum (which equals mass mes velocity) of the 12 to 28 stories (WTC 1
and WTC 2, respecvely) falling on the supporng structure below (which was designed to support
only the stac weight of the oors above and not any dynamic eects due to the downward

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momentum) so greatly exceeded the strength capacity of the structure below that it (the structure
below) was unable to stop or even to slow the falling mass. The downward momentum felt by each
successive lower oor was even larger due to the increasing mass.

9-11 troofers are a lot like some Biblical fundamentalists. Anything that they want to believe is to be taken
with absolute literalness, and anything that contradicts what they want to believe, they just ignore.

The Building Collapsed Straight Down

Gravity tends to do that. You can't extrapolate what happens in the collapse of a small building, which may
lt intact, to what happens in the collapse of a 110-story building. The videos show clearly that the top
oors of the South Tower did lt during the rst few seconds of collapse.

A lot of conspiracy sites talk about "sequenal collapse" as if there were explosive charges placed on every
oor detonated in sequence, like the destrucon of the Empire State Building in Independence Day. But
controlled demolions don't do that - they use a small amount of explosives and let the weight of the
building do the rest. Thirty-story buildings have been brought down with only a few hundred pounds of
explosives.

The Concrete Is All Pulverized

What exactly did you expect? Actually photos of the site show lots of concrete, admiedly broken into small
chunks. Falling 1000 feet, or having stu fall from 1000 feet onto something else, will pulverize it.

Fireghters reported that no oce furnishings were recognizable either. Did somebody rig a bomb to every
single desk, chair, computer and telephone in the buildings?

Too Much Dust

From 911Research:

If the collapses were merely gravity-driven, then any clouds of debris produced in the immediate
aermath should have occupied about the same amount of space as the intact towers before they
had me to signicantly mix into the surrounding air. The bulk of the clouds could only come from
the expulsion of gases in the buildings as they collapsed, and the mixing of ambient air into the
clouds.

This just makes me shake my head in wonder. First, the expulsion of air from the towers would have been
prey impressive, second, air rushing in to ll the space formerly occupied by the towers would have been
equally impressive. Falling debris would also have displaced a large amount of air. Together they would have
created a huge amount of turbulence, just what was seen at Ground Zero.

Actually the dust cloud at street level bore a remarkable visual resemblance to a pyroclasc ow, a hot,
dense mixture of volcanic ash and gases. The dust cloud was cool, but the cloud itself was a density ow, a
mixture of dust and air much denser than normal air. Density ows, whether in air or water, maintain their
identy for quite a while. They stop moving when they run out of momentum, the denser parts of the ow
sele out, and the lighter parts mix with the surrounding medium. Now here's a theory for conspiracy bus
to toy with - maybe someone triggered a volcanic erupon under the Twin Towers.

I should know beer than to ridicule conspiracy theories on line. I simply don't have enough imaginaon to

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top what conspiracy theorists actually come up with. If you search 9-11 and "pyroclasc," you will nd sites
that assert the dust cloud was an actual pyroclasc ow. I could assist these folks in learning the dierence.
All they need to do is nd an acve volcano and stand in the path of a real pyroclasc ow. I guarantee it
would cure them of posng nuy stu on the intartubes.

The drywall used around the central core of the towers was an inch and a half thick. Now that will create a
lot of dust.

Somehow the collapse of a quarter-mile tall building was supposed to produce no turbulence so that the
dust cloud would remain over the footprint of the building and mix gradually with sll air. Shades of the
Road Runner, who goes "beep-beep" and leaves a road-runner shaped dust cloud behind. This is physics
several levels beyond weird.

A lot of people confuse opcal density with amount of dust. The fact that the dust cloud was opaque means
only that light didn't penetrate it. The clouds that hung above the site weren't much denser than air so the
total volume of dust in them was not large. Typical clouds in the sky contain a few grams of material per
cubic meter. If we assume the 9-11 cloud had 10 grams per cubic meter - far more than even thick water
droplet clouds, and the dust cloud occupied a cubic kilometer, far more than its actual volume, we have a
billion cubic meters mes ten grams per cubic meters, or ten billion grams, ten million kilograms, or 10,000
tons of dust, paltry compared to the million ton mass of the towers.

The Crime Scene Was Not Preserved

So what exactly were 52 FBI Evidence Recovery Teams, totaling more than 400 agents, doing on Staten
Island for nine months?

This just in, the FAA doesn't leave the debris from plane crashes in place either; they take it to a hangar and
lay it out for study.

Paired up with this queson is why the cleanup trucks were so carefully monitored with GPS units. These
days, trucks rounely have GPS units, so that's not parcularly unusual, especially since a truck driver could
probably sell a load of 9-11 steel for a dy sum on the souvenir market. One driver who took a 1-1/2 hour
lunch was red, but that can get you red lots of places.

So not leaving the debris in place is evidence of a plot, and tracking it en route to make sure it gets where
it's supposed to go is also evidence of a plot.

The people clearing the site and examining the debris were responsible for removing a connuing hazard,
recovering human remains, and nding any evidence that might shed addional light on what the obvious
visual record shows - that the buildings collapsed aer being hit by aircra. They were not responsible for
doing an archeological dig to sasfy the objecons of every conspiracy theorist on the planet. Don't like
that? Too bad. Deal with it.

When I did a radio interview with a truther a while ago, the discussion came around to temperatures in the
re. According to government reports, samples from the oors where there were res showed only a few
indicaons of very high temperatures. A much more signicant queson is this: if evidence wasn't properly
collected, how did invesgators know which oors the debris came from?

Ironically, the fact that personal eects of hijackers and passengers were found is not evidence that
evidence was carefully sied, for some odd reason.

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Seismic Evidence
Again, from Roedy Green:

Seismic evidence shows the two main world trade towers were taken down by demolion.

The link goes to a site of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory showing seismic records
of the plane impacts and tower collapses. The impacts registered below magnitude 1, the collapses a bit
over magnitude 2. The records look like perfectly ordinary seismograms. There's no elaboraon on how
exactly the seismic evidence shows demolion. Apparently some conspiracy thinkers believe a seismic
imprint must mean an explosion, but the collapse of a large building will do very nicely. Oil companies
rounely do seismic soundings by dropping masses of several tons, called "thumpers," to generate seismic
waves. A million-ton building will make a very good thumper.

Other sites look in detail at the seismograms, arguing that a slow buildup of the signal shows a progressive
use of explosives. But a building collapse spread out over 15 seconds will produce a signal of growing
amplitude.

Why Did WTC 7 Collapse?

Good queson. The invesgators were baed. But the conspiracy theory doesn't explain anything. Why
bring down an empty building hours aer the main aack?

Photos published to support the claim of a controlled demolion show pus emerging from the top of the
building. These could be explosives. Or they could be concrete suddenly failing, or windows shaering. But
again we have the irritang queson, why start a collapse from the top, completely at odds with the way all
controlled demolions are done, especially if you want the building to fall onto its own footprint?

If it was actually a controlled demolion by the Fire Department or the building owner, or both, as some
people allege, so what? The remains of the World Trade Center itself were brought down in controlled
demolions aer 9-11. What does that have to do with the collapse of the Twin Towers? It seems unlikely
that a demolion crew would enter a burning building and install charges to bring down something 15
stories taller than any other recorded controlled demolion, all in the space of a few hours, but if the
building was brought down by the owners or the Fire Department, what's the connecon to the Twin
Towers? How does a planned demolion of one building prove the Twin Towers were deliberately brought
down?

I've goen a fair amount of ak over this issue but I've yet to see anyone present a coherent explanaon of
what, exactly, the collapse of WTC-7 proves.

Complexity
"Osama Bin Ladin, sing in a cave in Afghanistan, could never have pulled o something of this
complexity."

What complexity? You put 19 guys on four airliners on the same day armed with box cuers, aer rst
giving a few of them enough ight training to allow them to perform some rudimentary maneuvers. Any
travel agent who couldn't book 19 people on four separate ights on the same day needs a new job. The
complex part would have been gaining and keeping control of the passengers and crew once the hijacks
were in progress.

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If Bin Ladin had known what would happen, he would certainly have had the hijackers hit the buildings
lower. That would have trapped far more people while increasing the load on the heated steel, resulng in
faster collapse. So if it wasn't Bin Ladin, why didn't the alleged conspirators do it? More outrage, more
backing for the War on Terror. Why did they miss such an obvious opportunity?

Suppose It Was A Conspiracy

What was the intent? If it was to bring down the Towers, why demolish from the top down? That's not how
any other controlled demolions are done. Why not strike low, maximizing the number of casuales and
more fully galvanizing the country for war?

If the intent was to collapse only part of the Towers, keeping casuales limited but providing a pretext for
war, then the total collapse was unancipated. Or maybe the intent was simply to crash planes into the
Towers and produce casuales but not cause building collapse at all. In either case, if the building collapses
were unexpected, they happened through structural weakening and gravitaonal collapse and all the
alleged "evidence" for sequenal explosive charges and so on becomes worthless.

Why use planes at all? Why not simply stage a bigger and beer remake of the 1993 aack? Why not claim
the terrorists detonated a large truck load of explosives at the central core of the building, or smuggled
explosives into the core? Instead of passenger planes, why not have the terrorists steal a FedEx or UPS
cargo plane and ll it with explosives?

Why have a me gap between the plane crashes and building collapse, and why did the South Tower, which
was hit later, fall rst? That makes perfect sense in the convenonal scenario, because the South Tower was
hit lower and thus the load on the damaged structural members was greater. It makes no sense at all from
the standpoint of a conspiracy.

Like all conspiracy theories, the 9-11 conspiracy idea suers from the fatal aw of having the conspirators
engage in a complicated Rube Goldberg process to do something a raonal person could do more
eecvely in a much simpler way.

The Ulmate Best Words on Conspiracies

Jonah Goldberg, Skepcism Versus Paranoia, The Corner, Naonal Review On Line, Wednesday, September
13, 2006

I distrust the government but as a realisc conservave I think government is staed with mostly
well-intenoned but incompetent people not because they're dumb, but because bureaucracies
are dumb. These conspiracy theorists reverse this enrely. They think government is evil-
intenoned but supremely, even divinely, competent. That's crazy-talk, Count Chocula.

Neal Boortz is a conservave-libertarian talk show host who gets under a lot of folks' skins, but he has one
saving grace. He's death on conspiracy theories (and creaonism). A listener e-mailed him asking him to
explain about "chemtrails," which the government is supposedly using for mind control. His reply works just
as well for 9-11 conspiracy thinkers.

OK, Jim. I'll explain. You're a nutcase. Those "chemicals" you think the military is spraying on cizens
are nothing more than ice crystals formed by the condensaon created by high-ying aircra.
Somewhere along the line some lonely demented hysteric decided that the military was crop
dusng people with all sorts of chemicals designed to make us sick, change our behavior or neuter

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us. I have no idea in the world what went wrong in your educaon, upbringing or mental health
history that caused you to actually believe this insane nonsense ... I can only hope that you don't
vote.

Then there's Mark Steyn's wonderful observaon:

There's a kind of decadence about all this: If 9/11 was really an inside job, you wouldn't be driving
around with a bumper scker bragging that you were on to it. Fantasy is a by-product of security: it's
the dierence between hanging upside down in your dominatrix's bondage parlor aer work on
Friday and enduring the real thing for years on end in Saddam's prisons.

I think it's rather interesng that, although you nd moonbat leists and righsts alike arguing for an inside
job, all the comments above come from rock solid conservaves.

Dueling Conspiracy Theories

Since a lot of people have begun to catch on to conspiracy theories, 9-11 theorists have begun pung their
own spin on the term. Just like creaonists have begun using the word "pseudoscience" to brand evoluon
and blur the disncon between their own ideas and those of science, 9-11 conspiracy theorists have
begun using the term "conspiracy theory" to label the convenonal view of 9-11. So you get 19 guys, give
some of them rudimentary ight training, they board airliners, hijack them, and y them into buildings. Yup,
that's a conspiracy all right. So the term "conspiracy theory" is enrely accurate.

On the other hand, government operaves spent days planng explosive charges in the towers, then
crashed the airliners or ew them to a secret locaon, brainwashed, imprisoned, or killed the passengers
and crew, and that's not a conspiracy theory? Or the videos of the airliner crashes are all fake and some
exoc parcle beam or energy weapon disintegrated the towers into dust and that's not a conspiracy
theory, either?

Well, they're both conspiracy theories, so they're both on the same plane, so you get to pick whichever one
you like. This is the classic relavism of the pseudoscienst.

Fortunately, there's a way to sort through the conicng claims. Which of the two is more consistent with
well known facts? Do Middle Eastern terrorists hijack airplanes? Check. Do Middle Eastern terrorists target
civilians? Check. Do Middle Eastern terrorists deliberately cause mass casuales? Check. There's absolutely
nothing in the standard picture of 9-11 that conicts with these facts. Number of previous cases where U.S.
government operaves have hijacked airliners? None known. Number of previous cases where the U.S.
government has collapsed a building full of innocent people? None known (apart from arllery or bombing
in war). Number of previous cases where the U.S. government has collapsed a building full of its own
cizens? None known. So one conspiracy theory has a host of historical precedents, and the other has none
at all.

Fascinang, isn't it, that the fact that no steel frame skyscraper had ever collapsed due to re is touted as
ironclad proof that planes couldn't have brought down the World Trade Center, but the total absence of
historical precedent for the government doing it counts for nothing?

Who Stands to Prot?

A queson much asked by 9-11 truthers, who point to gold allegedly being removed from the World Trade
Center, invesgave les being destroyed, a pretext for invading Iraq or declaring maral law, etc.

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A few months ago I agreed to be on a truther talk show (I'll try almost anything once. Almost.) and the
commercial breaks were a revelaon. There were endless spiels for crank medical remedies and nutrional
supplements, investment schemes that ranged from shady to crazy, newsleers for conspiracy cults, and
wacko theories on how to avoid taxes. One former truther who became disillusioned said he would no
longer help the movement sell T-shirts and DVD's. It's a lot more than just T-shirts and DVD's. Look at the
Web sites, the newsleers, listen to the talk shows and look at who's bankrolling them and adversing on
them. Truther sites are to conspiracy thinkers what televangelists are to lonely Chrisans: a place to send
money to buy a feeling of parcipaon and fulllment.

Feedback
physics is quite clear on this....if random res and structural damage was all it took to bring down
buildings (onto their footprint, at free fall speed) why would there be demolion companies? Just
start random res and damage the top, the building will disintegrate...not likely...

The towers didn't collapse onto their own footprint, not by a long shot. They didn't topple like trees, but
debris ew and did damage a long way away. The whole reason we have controlled demolions beginning
at the base of buildings is to prevent debris from ying as far as it did on 9-11.

I know this sucks, I was a Republican....I understand how much it seems crazy, but please, I beg of
you, as an American...look at the facts... forget about polics for a min...just look at the physics.
Look at the videos, there are many (of the towers falling and building 7)....

Forget about polics? Polics is hardly menoned at all in the discussion above, which does "just look at the
physics." The only people who are constantly dragging polics into the discussion are the 9-11 conspiracy
believers.

========================

I have read what you said on the internet about the collapse of the towers. First I nd it
unprofessional the constant use of pejorave to make your case....

Really? 9-11 conspiracy bus can slander government ocials, accuse them of mass murder and conspiracy,
and ridicule their crics, and I'm being pejorave? If people are going to talk like that they should at least
have the guts to take cricism. The conspiracy bus supposedly have the courage to expose a massive high
level conspiracy, but they whine like pre-schoolers when anyone aacks their ideas. Some courage. They
can play these games because they know perfectly well that nobody is really going to do anything to them
no maer how much they blather about conspiracies. It's all play acng. How else can you call bull$***
what it is without being pejorave?

The amazing thing is this guy can slander people he's never met and who have done him no harm, and
somehow he thinks that is acceptable professional behavior. You can't have a meaningful conversaon
about professionalism with this guy any more than you can play chess with a duck.

Really Nuy 9-11 Physics

Vaporizing the World Trade Center
Nanoparcles at the World Trade Center

Return to Pseudoscience Index

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Created 27 February, 2006; Last Update 15 April, 2011

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