The Elements of a Great Scientific and Technical Dispute

An interesting article published by the Santa Barbara Independent:

"If the scientific fight over the World Trade Center was not so hugely important, it might be viewed as simply ridiculous that core elements of an event could be so severely disputed by people equally pledged to the scientific method. But with the stakes so immense, the vastness of the gap is far from ridiculous and is, in fact, of such magnitude that it is almost certainly going to take wide public understanding of the elements of the dispute to force re-examination of the evidence in a manner that would win the trust of both the public and the experts.

For the record, here is a summary of just some of the technical areas in dispute and what the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) and its building trade and science allies on one side and its equally credentialed science, professional and licensed critics (building and structural engineers, architects, physicists, chemists) on the other side, put forward as their cases. It was compiled from NIST’s official report and from analysis that included papers and reports by independent professionals or members of groups representing each side of the argument, as well as from some other independent technical experts who have not taken sides.

The dispute takes place in a context that no other high-rise steel buildings ever collapsed in such a manner without the use of explosives. NIST alleges that in this special-circumstances case the buildings, like the “unsinkable” Titanic, did just that. NIST’s independent critics believe that what is “titanic” here are NIST’s scientific mistakes, evasions and willful refusal to examine all evidence."

Read more:
http://www.independent.com/news/2009/sep/17/elements-great-scientific-and-technical-dispute/

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Congratulations to the Santa Barbara Independent for practicing real, independent, unbiased journalism.

That article could easily have been written by Gage, Griffin, Hoffman, or any of several other prominent "truth movement" propagandists. In fact, I suspect it was, but anyway, the salient point is that anyone who has been led to believe that the "truth movement" has valid scientific and technical arguments for a controlled demolition has been deceived by those propagandists and has not researched what REAL experts have to say about it.

The article writers did not take sides. They presented arguments of both sides in a respectful, balanced and equidistant manner. They are not advocating in favor of "truthers", nor are favoring to the government explanation, neither trying to prove a point, but just presenting the official explanation, the alternative explanations and leaving to the readers the conclusion.

It's what real journalists should do. You're an advocate for government official account, I was already expecting this kind of hysterical reaction. But anyone able to read can see this is an unbiased article, no matter how much you try to deny.

"the salient point is that anyone who has been led to believe that the "truth movement" has valid scientific and technical arguments for a controlled demolition has been deceived by those propagandists and has not researched what REAL experts have to say about it."

The truth is that when you say "REAL experts" you just mean "experts that agree with the government" and that means absolutely nothing. You are nobody to decide which experts are "real" and which are not. Sorry.

Please point me to a specific one of these "equally credentialed science, professional and licensed critics" and the specific scientific or technical argument that you find convincing. Pick one that you think is conclusive evidence of a controlled demolition, and please pick one that you're willing to defend, or I won't waste my time. First we'll see what we shall see about the qualifications of those making the claims and those disputing them, and then we'll dig into what a layman can make out of the arguments using sound facts and valid logic.

But as for your claim that the article is "unbiased," that's easily dispensed with: The article was written to superficially resemble a "balanced" presentation of the two sides, when in fact it is an attempt to give the "truth movement" claims far more credibility than they deserve. In the first place, what the article represents as the "government explanation" is often the "truth movement's" strawman misrepresentation of it, which is precisely why I suspect virtual plagiarism from well-known propagandists. In the second place, just like Gage, Griffin, and Hoffman, the article repeats many "truth movement" claims that have been thorough debunked years ago as if they were still credible and relevant. And in fact, no attempt was made to present any rebuttal to any of the "truth movement" arguments presented or to steer the reader toward numerous websites where they could read the rebuttals themselves, leaving the mistaken impression that no such rebuttals to these "expert" arguments exist. Even in the cases where valid claims are made, in the trademark manner of all "modern conspiracists" since JFK, the article repeats several "anomalies" advanced by the "truth movement" without really connecting them to anything except the implicit fallacy of: anomaly -> "official story" wrong -> conspiracy. All of those things are clear evidence of bias; a competent and unbiased investigative journalist would not so gullible buy what the "truth movement" is (literally) selling.

"The article was written to superficially resemble a "balanced" presentation of the two sides, when in fact it is an attempt to give the "truth movement" claims far more credibility than they deserve."

Who are you to decide how much credibility the "truth movement" deserve?

"In the first place, what the article represents as the "government explanation" is often the "truth movement's" strawman misrepresentation of it,"

What you call "truth movement" is often the government's strawman misrepresentation of the individuals who are skeptical of the mainstream account. So what's your point?

"the article repeats many "truth movement" claims that have been thorough debunked years ago as if they were still credible and relevant."

Ha ha. You people are so funny. You see, claiming hysterically that something was "debunked" does not make something become really debunked. No, dear, Popular Mechanics is not the voice of the international scientific community - Popular Mechanics is just Popular Mechanics, i.e., half a dozen engineers working to cooperate with an agenda. The same is valid to all the other "debunkers". Nothing about September 11 has been "thorough debunked" because nothing about September 11 has really been researched and studied by REALLY independent institution and experts so far. And you all know this.

"the article repeats several "anomalies" advanced by the "truth movement" without really connecting them to anything except the implicit fallacy of: anomaly -> "official story" wrong -> conspiracy."

Thank you. You have just proven to all of us that you didn't even read the article - which really does not rely on any kind of connection - implicit or explicit - toward conspiracies. But I already knew that.

"Nothing about September 11 has been "thorough debunked" because nothing about September 11 has really been researched and studied by REALLY independent institution and experts so far. And you all know this."

Oh, dear...

Let me see if I can help you out here.



Throughout the article, it's sort of hard to miss that the so-called "Great Scientific and Technical Dispute" here is whether the Twin Towers and/or WTC 7 were brought down through some form of controlled demolition.

Maybe you can find a way to parse that such that it doesn't entail any "conspiracies" -- even when it comes to the "culprits" in the last paragraph -- but why bother?

As for why you dragged Popular Mechanics into a discussion about NIST....

... and I never expect debunking to have the slightest effect on "truthers." Nonetheless, it is the reason that the "truth movement" remains a fairly insignificant net cult. The only point here is that it's apparent the author of this article did not do a proper investigation into the claims that he was reporting or the people who were making them.

> Who are you to decide how much credibility the "truth movement" deserve?

Just for starters, I am someone who apparently knows more about the subject than you. But I am also someone who knows that claims based on dubious "facts," fallacious logic, and incredulity based on willful ignorance do not deserve credibility. Just like other varieties of pseudo-scientists, "truthers" claim that people are ignoring their evidence when in fact their real enemies are people who dig into it and find it to be a pile of crap. That's exactly what will happen if Gage ever gets his new investigation, but it's not my job to convince you of that.

> What you call "truth movement" is often the government's strawman misrepresentation of the individuals who are skeptical of the mainstream account.

:wtf: "government's strawman" are you talking about? Do you know what the term means? Since "truther" arguments are so pathetically weak that they can't even convince each other what happened, it's certainly true that not all "truthers" believe the same things, but that doesn't mean that the most prominent beliefs are "strawmen." Anyway, I don't know why this needs to be said so often, but the issue is not with "individuals who are skeptical of the mainstream account." It's with individuals who are attempting to sell (literally in many cases) an alternate version of reality without anything resembling the necessary evidence. It's with people who not only believe highly implausible things for no good reason, but actively try to resell it to others by offering reasons that won't withstand scrutiny. And the antidote is simply to continue to point out how far short they fall of making a credible case. Deal with it.

> Ha ha. You people are so funny. You see, claiming hysterically that something was "debunked" does not make something become really debunked.

No, what makes it debunked is credible facts and valid reasoning. Since "truther" beliefs don't seem to derived from evidence-based reasoning, I'm not surprised that you don't understand why I say that the "truth movement" has consistently failed for ten years to build a convincing case. But whether or not you understand it or accept it, that's the real reason the only thing left of the "movement" is a handful of net crackpots and frauds like Gage and the gullible people who idolize them and who are allergic to any attempts to explain what's seriously wrong with their case.

> Nothing about September 11 has been "thorough debunked" because nothing about September 11 has really been researched and studied by REALLY independent institution and experts so far. And you all know this.

What I know is that you're wrong about that: Virtually all of the "movement" claims have been investigated by independent experts, but anyone who doesn't tell the "truthers" that their paranoid delusions are reality gets accused of being part of the conspiracy and therefore not independent. But you completely dodged this challenge: "Please point me to a specific one of these 'equally credentialed science, professional and licensed critics' and the specific scientific or technical argument that you find convincing. Pick one that you think is conclusive evidence of a controlled demolition, and please pick one that you're willing to defend, or I won't waste my time." Here's your opportunity to show me that there are claims that haven't been debunked, but you passed it by?

> You have just proven to all of us that you didn't even read the article - which really does not rely on any kind of connection - implicit or explicit - toward conspiracies.

Oh, I see -- it was a controlled demolition that wasn't a conspiracy? :eyes:

Those folks very definitely take sides. This article is just full of science-reporting fail. "Teach the Controversy!"

Can you give us examples? Or are you just pretending to have read the article?

Before Richard Gage started AE911Truth, would anyone have identified Richard Gage as an expert on the topics he discusses in this article?

It isn't hard to find climate change denialists with Ph.D. degrees. But if one sets out to explore expert opinion on climate change, it becomes apparent that the denialists are very much in the minority.

You could try that with 9/11, but it might sting too much. :shrug:

The article is supposed to be satire? Right?

It's often difficult to tell if these sorts of narratives are supposed to be satire, or just thruther goofiness.

Can you prove that they are not 'equally credentialed science, professional and licensed critics'?

Because I see no reason for giving you more credit than I give to the article's writers. Do you have reasons? If you do, tell me them.

But I can imagine that the writers might have been thinking of AE911Truth, where we find such skyscraper architectural & engineering heavyweights as:

http://www2.ae911truth.org/profile.php?uid=982986
http://www2.ae911truth.org/profile.php?uid=999194
http://www2.ae911truth.org/profile.php?uid=995707
http://www2.ae911truth.org/profile.php?uid=992202
http://www2.ae911truth.org/profile.php?uid=984119
http://www2.ae911truth.org/profile.php?uid=990899
http://www2.ae911truth.org/profile.php?uid=998956
http://www2.ae911truth.org/profile.php?uid=980119
http://www2.ae911truth.org/profile.php?uid=998997

I could go on, but the list of petitioners is pretty much in the same vein.

Once again, truthers take a page from the creationist play book.

Is your post supposed to have a meaning?

Creationists get a handful of people with biology degrees to claim there is a dispute regarding evolution when there is none. They try to claim a controversy where none exists. The article in the OP does the same thing. Complete bullshit, there is no scientific or technical controversy, there is only the truther industry trying to make money off of suckers.

'Hey, nobody said anything about a conspiracy. We only said that it appears that thermite or explosives were used to destroy the towers, and NIST refuses to examine the evidence!'

But nooo, the 9/11 Truthers aren't stuck in the past at all...

ETA: I mean, if there was such a great dispute back then, surely something would have come of it by now? Right? Or are Gage et. al. still gathering signatures for a petition he (Gage) refuses to submit? Where's the properly peer reviewed papers (so no, the therm*te pamphlet doesn't count) directly refuting the NIST findings? When will all these accredited critics actually get off their rear posterior and actually DO something?

From the article:

Errors in paragraph:
Critics point out that there is no hard evidence the fireproofing was stripped on impact or that so many core beams were damaged by fire, the hard evidence having been destroyed or carted away. NIST therefore had to rely on computer models to determine this a process in which the information chosen to be input was all important. They note that it is simply a NIST hypothesis that significant dislodging occurred. To support this theory, NIST performed laboratory tests in which shotguns pellets were fired at steel surfaces coated with spray-on foam insulation like that used in the twin towers. Critics note that the underlying assumption is that a crashing Boeing 757 it was a 767 but this is a minor quibble, would have been transformed into the equivalent of the thousands of shotgun blasts needed to dislodge fireproofing from the 6,000 square meters of surface area of structural steel in the fire areas.

1) They located numerous beams without fire protection both from the core and the perimeter columns. They specifically looked for beams damaged from the initial impact and from fire damage. The beams were marked during construction so they could tell where they came from in the building after collapse in a large number of these cases.

2) While the steel was carted away, NIST and at least two other investigation groups had access to all of the steel at Freshkills. I just saw a couple of documentaries on the forensics of the WTC 3 buildings that collapsed as well as the Pentagon I had recorded from the 10th anniversary of 9/11 and they showed numerous steel beams without any fire protection and numerous with fire protection intact and it is easy to tell which is which. After inspecting the steel, NIST sent over 200 pieces to their labs to be examined.


Errors in paragraph:
Opposing building professionals argue that no other fire in a steel-framed building ever caused so much floor sag and that in fact NIST’s own tests demonstrated only a few inches of sagging in the middle - and this after two hours in a high-temperature furnace. NIST, some critics allege, could have pumped the statistics fed into the computer in order to achieve a pre-desired outcome, justifying doing so with its questionable hypothesis that the fire-proofing was stripped as severely as NIST estimates.

Here is a photo of the floor sagging. Note how much it sags and how large an area it was:
The second photo clearly shows at least a six foot sag in the middle, it's almost touching the lower floor.


Errors in paragraph:
NIST claims that crucial evidence that helped steer its research into what brought on the collapse is a film by two Czech brothers showing perimeter support columns near the area of impact bending inwards, thus “applying an inward pressure” on the inner support beams, forcing them to bear some of the load of the perimeter columns. Once it saw the perimeter beams bend in, NIST says, it began to search for the cause which led to its understanding of the sagging floors.

If they are talking about the Naudet brothers, they were French not Czech, this is another minor quibble but how lazy were these writers? If there is indeed film from two Czech brothers, lets see it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jules_and_Gedeon_Naudet

Errors in paragraph:
...Underwriters Lab chemist and whistleblower Kevin Ryan, fed into the computer information that “doubled the height of the unsupported wall sections , doubled the temperatures, doubled the duration of the stress, and ignored the effect of insulation...”

Relying on Kevin Ryan, really? The comment that this was written by AE911 is valid when they use the same,"experts".

Here is another couple of paragraphs that could have come from AE911:
(1) NIST only surmised but did not actually test the hypotheses that silvery molten aluminum could turn yellowish-red when compounded with building contents; (2) NIST only studied carefully-selected whole steel sections; (3) there is some eyewitness testimony and a few photos showing that quantities of non-aluminum molten metals were seen above ground and so could not be explained by underground fires; (4) metal fires burned for weeks “consistent with the use of high-temperature cutter charges such as thermite … routinely used to melt/cut/demolish steel,” producing temperatures above 2000C, as one NIST-rebutting technical essay claims, and (5) it is physically impossible and absurd beyond science that fires in trapped rubble could burn hotter than the building fires and thus melt fallen steel unless some other chemical element were in place to reinforce those fires. A chemical such as thermite, which contains its own oxygen, would allow burning in oxygen-less underground spaces. The critics also note that NIST admits it never saw or tested any of the molten steel itself, and some of NIST’s lead scientists even deny its existence.

The question of molten steel sightings is important and unresolved. AE911 posts some photos and eyewitness accounts of molten steel on its website that its critics challenge as misrepresentative. Brent Blanchard, senior editor for the demolition industry magazine Implosionworld.com and director of field operations for a New Jersey company called Protec Documentation Services, which provides extensive building technical services to the demolition industry, supports NIST with a claim that of numerous debris crew members interviewed by him and his colleagues, none reported seeing molten steel.

Other NIST supporters accept the eyewitness accounts of molten steel cited by AE911 (though the “debunker” website 911myths.com challenges all the eyewitnesses it can identify). They argue, however, that if any melting occurred underground, the oxygen to fuel the fires would have derived from particulate matter in the building walls and contents. One NIST-supporting chemist, Dr. Frank R. Greening, former senior research scientist at Ontario Power Generation, argues that the great amount of aluminum from the cladding of the towers as well as from the planes might well have supplied both the fuel and oxygen needed to help melt the steel in the towers and later underground.

C'mon now, they cite Gage, Prof Jones and Kevin Ryan as "experts" yet I didn't see any quotes from Bazant and Zhou, who are clearly experts in their fields, why?