Just search the web, you'll find it. Popular Mechanics has an article.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/defense/1227842.htmlAlso, this is an email from my friend, a PhD in Material Science
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OK, read the first article "Why Indeed Did the WTC Buildings Collapse?" by Steven E. Jones, Ph.D. and here are some problems with it. I've quoted bits out of the article and written responses.
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"Other explanations for the observations are sought, of course. For example, F. Greening has suggested that aluminum from the planes which struck the Towers could melt, and that this aluminum might fall on "rusted steel surfaces inducing violent thermite explosions." So a few students and I did straightforward experiments by melting aluminum and dropping molten aluminum on pre-heated rusted steel surfaces. There were in fact NO "violent thermite" reactions seen. We observed that the temperature of the molten aluminum in contact with the rusty iron simply cooled at about 25 C per minute (using an infrared probe) until the aluminum solidified, so that any thermite reactions between the aluminum and iron oxide must have been minimal and did not compete with radiative and conductive cooling, thus NOT supporting predictions made by Greening. There was no observable damage or even warping of the steel. (See photograph below.) Nor were violent reactions observed when we dropped molten aluminum onto crushed gypsum and concrete (wet or dry) and rusty steel. These experiments lend no support whatever to the notion that molten aluminum in the WTC Towers could have destroyed the enormous steel columns in the cores of the buildings, even if those columns were rusty and somehow subjected to direct contact with molten aluminum."
Their experiment is flawed. By their own admission (and I agree with this, I've worked with substrates at this temperature and used pyrometers on them), steel at 650 C is glowing red/orange. In the photo, the rusty steel isn't glowing, and they say the molten aluminum cooled and solidified, showing that the steel was cooler then the aluminum. They haven't heated the steel up enough for the aluminum to react with it.
They also argue consistently through the paper that the hydrocarbon fire was cool, because of the black smoke. The fact that some parts of the fire were cool and gave off black smoke does NOT mean that the WHOLE FIRE was cool. Thats such a dubious conclusion that it makes me doubtful of any other ones the paper makes. Such as;
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"Then there is the rather mysterious sulfidation of the steel reported in this paper -- What is the origin of this sulfur? No solid answer is given in any of the official reports."
Common wallboard in office walls is mostly gypsum, which has about 40% sulfur in it by weight. That took about a minute of research to find; pity the author of this article didn't put that much time in before making it a huge mystery.
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"The observed partly evaporated steel members is particularly upsetting to the official theory, since fires involving paper, office materials, even diesel fuel, cannot generate temperatures anywhere near the ~5,180oF (~2860oC) needed to evaporate steel. (Recall that WTC 7 was not hit by a jet, so there was no jet fuel involved in the fires in this building.) "
As a note, standard JP7 jet fuel is basically slightly purified diesel. If WTC 7 had diesel in it, and it caught fire, it could do anything that jet fuel could do. I also saw another article refuting the claims on this web site that discussed the collapse of WTC 7 and stated that it had a very unusual support system which led to its collapse. I'm not qualified to judge that though.
In terms of whether jet fuel (or diesel) can get hot enough to melt steel, the thermal energy of combustion per pound is very similar to that of charcoal. You can't melt iron in your charcoal grill. Charcoal is, however, used in blast furnaces to get them to 3000 C to make steel. It all depends on the ventilation and the physical configuration of the area confining the flames.
If, as I suspect, the central elevator areas in the WTC acted as a chimney and provided a "furnace-like" location to melt the central beams of the WTC, it would explain most of their points quite well. The early drop of the central antenna, the puffs of "smoke" from the sides (the main support beams went first, and the perimeter beams mentioned above which didn't get heated much were nowhere near strong enough to support the towers, so they failed abruptly in multiple places). This is supported by eyewitness accounts I've read elsewhere that talk of flames coming down the elevator shaft at ground level within minutes of the impact.
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"Of the more than 170 areas examined on 16 perimeter column panels, only three columns had evidence that the steel reached temperatures above 250ºC… Only two core column specimens had sufficient paint remaining to make such an analysis, and their temperatures did not reach 250C. ... Using metallographic analysis, NIST determined that there was no evidence that any of the samples had reached temperatures above 600C. (NIST, 2005, pp. 176-177; emphasis added.) "
The authors quoted a piece of the NIST report that dealt with analysis of beams which still had paint. Specifically, ones that *didn't* get heated much, around the perimeter. Evidently there wasn't much left of the core columns that actually supported the building. If anything, this argues against their main point.
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"Indeed, NIST makes the startling admission in a footnote on page 80 of their Final Report:
"The focus of the Investigation was on the sequence of events from the instant of aircraft impact to the initiation of collapse for each tower. For brevity in this report, this sequence is referred to as the "probable collapse sequence," although it does not actually include the structural behavior of the tower after the conditions for collapse initiation were reached...(NIST, 2005, p. 80, fn. 12; emphasis added.)
"Again, on page 142, NIST admits that their computer simulation only proceeds until the building is poised for collapse, thus ignoring any data from that time on.
"The results were a simulation of the structural deterioration of each tower from the time of aircraft impact to the time at which the building became unstable, i.e., was poised for collapse. ...(NIST, 2005, p. 142; emphasis added.)
"What about the subsequent complete, rapid and symmetrical collapse of the buildings? What about the observed squibs? What about the antenna dropping first in the North Tower? What about the molten metal observed in the basement areas in large pools in both Towers and WTC 7 as well? Never mind all that: NIST did not discuss at all any data after the buildings were poised for collapse. Well, some of us want to look at ALL the data, without "black-box" computer simulations that are adjusted, perhaps to make them fit the desired outcome. An hypothesis which is non-refutable is non-scientific. On the other hand, Occam's razor suggests that the simplest explanation which addresses and satisfies ALL the evidence is most probably correct."
I've talked to someone who studies rapid, high speed impact simulations. A simulation of the actual tower collapse *after* its reached the failure point is way, way beyond the state of the art of computer simulations, and would require completely different software then the simulation used for its initial failure. What he asks for doesn't exist, and can't exist, its not a conspiracy. For proof of this, look at the impact simulations they did on the space shuttle tiles that said striking foam wouldn't be a problem. When they did the experiment, it in fact blew a large hole in the graphite panels on the leading edge of the wing.
Heck, they were pushing the boundaries of state of the art to even try to simulate the fire and failure that caused the collapse. Which, to *my* satisfaction, explains why they made several different models and only used and tweaked the ones that matched what happened. Thats how they do weather prediction every day, and its how any useful "real world" computer modeling I've ever seen was done.
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"After presenting the material summarized here, including actually looking at and discussing the collapses of WTC 7 and the Towers, only one attendee disagreed (by hand-vote) that further investigation of the WTC collapses was called for."
I have never in my entire scientific career seen any scientist or engineer say "this subject doesn't need any more investigation.", not a huge surprise here, given the extreme complexity of the problem. :-)
Despite the web sites listing this as a "peer reviewed paper", the only place it seems that it is going to be published is in a "volume" being put out by the auther of one of the other papers on the web site. It doesn't count as peer reviewed until its in a scientific journal that exists independent of conspiracy buffs. It would obviously never be published in such; its extremely loaded language would prevent this, if not the major flaws I point out above.
I point out that the author carefully doesn't mention that controlled demolition of a building normally requires a substantial team of people working in a building for a week or two, drilling holes in support beams and stringing wires and such. This is not subtle. It also has never to my knowledge left pools of molten metal, since the explosions are over very quickly they certainly don't form puddles that are still molten weeks later. I suppose if you also applied a few tons of thermite all over the place you might achieve that, but then you need even more workmen and time, you would be working on huge sections of steel beams. To expect this work to go unnoticed in 3 buildings and such a large conspiracy to hold together for years afterwards seems to me to violate his Occams Razor test even more thoroughly then the fire theory.
I didn't have time to look much at the other "article" by Griffin, but like the one I discuss above, it would never pass muster in a true peer reviewed journal, and I saw a lot of problems just in the first readthrough. It is amusing that the two of them quote each other quite a bit as though they are independent experts, despite the fact they are writing (or have written) a book together.
Sorry, I'm not even close to convinced by the science in this work. Everything I have any expertise on is wrong, so I'm pretty dubious about the conclusions in areas I know less about.
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