BYU Professor: Explosives Used To Bring Down WTC

[PhantomWolf]

While I try not to get involved in this topic anymore due to the futility, I will point out that Building 7 did not actually collapse symetrically, nor from the basement.

The first sign of collapse was the eastern penthouse sinking into the building and vanishing. This was followed by the western penthouse vanishing inside the building. During this time the only apparent problem visible on the main facade of the building was a slight sag in the center, but this remained standing for a short time. Most of the videos shown start after the Penthouses re gone. If you look at the building you'll see that the roof is relatively flat, they are both missing. Since they have sunk inside the building, the collapse must already have been progressing prior to the facade itself falling and as such you have three very seperate sections to the collpase. As such it can't be called symetrical and I'd be most interested in how explosives could be used to sink the penthouses one after the other, and then finally drop the facade after the internal structure has started falling.

[akirabakabaka]

It's been admitted officially by NIST that no evidence was found from the WTCs that showed any beams ever met such high temperatures to significantly soften them...

Misleading. NIST said they had not found physical specimens of steel that had reached temperatures higher than 600 C or so. They specifically said that they only recovered 1-2% of the steel from WTC (although more was available) and that the specimens were not to be considered representative of temperatures reached. This is because NIST were not looking for samples representative of temperature, but rather samples representative of mechanical failure modes.

Actually it was less than 1% of the total steel, and less than half of that was identified. I've already shown how most of the WTC1/2 steel was likely from the upper levels, where the extreme temperatures supposedly existed.

The specimens and their location within the WTC 1 or 2 structure allowed NIST to validate their fire propagation, CFD, and CSD models by showing that the models predicted the specific temperatures at that point. The same models thus predict higher temperatures at other points.

It was not learned if the steel was exposed to those temperatures before or after the collapse, and the vast majority of simulations were based on photographic rather than material evidence, so how reliable are the models that you claim were 'validated' with so little material evidence? Could the models have allowed for significant tweaking? NIST claimed to have found some of the beams actually hit by one of the planes; how would the temperature be almost twice as great anywhere else than the point of impact?

...and also that there weren't enough materials to sustain such a high temperature.

Hogwash. The NIST fire models say exactly the opposite. In fact, NIST showed that "rubblized" building contents made a much better fuel source. Further, tests performed at Cardington on similar fuel loads validate that ceiling layers would reach temperatures of 1,000 C to 1,200 C. There is a vast amount of theoretical, simulational, and empirical proof to substantiate the NIST findings.

Which Cardington tests, can you supply a source? All of my search hits concern tests done well before 9-11. Here is a page that uses some Cardington tests as counter-evidence. Where is video evidence of these extreme raging fires just prior to collapse?

The official story demands the core supports of the towers on the upper levels be damaged such that collapse was imminent...

No, it is merely demanded by self-proclaimed "experts" that this must be the case. The NIST reports explicitly state that the structural dynamics were stable post impact.

Huh? Could you provide me a citation from the 2005 NIST report? From what I read in that report, their simulations assumed that the core supports in the upper levels of the towers were damaged until they were weak enough that collapse was imminent, at which point the simulations ended. If it wasn't the core supports which failed, how do you explain the communication tower in WTC collapsing through the roof before the walls come down?

You're pretending to know exactly how it would have been prepared and executed, which you don't...

But I do; which is to say I know how buildings are prepared for this kind of demolition. And Gillianren is right. If you claim that the standard methods weren't used and that some other method was used instead, you have the burden of proof to substantiate this alternate method. Saying that nobody knows how it "might" have been done is pure question-begging.

It hasn't even been agreed upon what sorts of explosives could have been used and where they could have been planted, so how can anyone know so much about which bombs were placed where? I've claimed explosives could have been planted in the basement levels, which many eyewitnesses claim was true, and shown that NIST et al. barely even considered damage in the basements contributing to the collapse. A bomb was planted in the basement levels in '93, so this scenario certainly has precedence.

Nobody has even answered dinAlt's basic question about the symmetry of collapse from an asymmetric fire. You apparently know quite a bit about these things, could you enlighten us?

WPI also unusually found that steel from WTC7 had been exposed to much higher temperatures than the steel from WTC1/2, to which no explanation has been attempted that I am aware of.

False. Some of the specimens recovered from WTC 7 had been exposed to higher temperatures than any of the specimens NIST recovered from WTC 1 and 2. This is not the same as a finding that temperatures in WTC 7 generally exceeded temperatures in WTC 1 and 2. In any case, prevailing temperatures are irrelevant; we are interested in hot spots. Individual specimens can validate models, but it is the model that arrives at the findings.

Yes, I was referring specifically to the WPI samples. There's been plenty of simulations that tweaked their values to get the results they wanted, and definitely show that there was some possible scenario which kept the required temperatures in the required places for the required amount of time. Unfortunately 99% of the material evidence was destroyed, so is it your simulation against mine? I don't see how these simulations can be as definitive as you claim.

The hard evidence taken from the site remains the most credible, and it does not conclusively show high enough temperatures existed before the collapse. Plus, you have to explain the symmetric collapse if only certain "hot spots" ever got hot enough to weaken the steel; how did the entire steel core in WTC1 collapse almost in unison under your "hot spot" model?

[akirabakabaka]

While I try not to get involved in this topic anymore due to the futility, I will point out that Building 7 did not actually collapse symetrically, nor from the basement.

I'm pretty sure the WTC7 collapse was blamed on poor construction of the penthouses which explains the observed collapse pretty well, but I'm not sure its ever been convincingly explained just how those penthouse beams collapsed in the first place.

[Alan G. Archer]

Hmm... yeah.

Unfortunately they fail utterly to explain why the U.S. would ever choose to undergo the vastly unnecessary economic consequences as I mentioned in my previous post.

Yes.

Or did you conveniently skip over that point...

Thought so.

Perhaps I should have only quoted the first sentence of your last paragraph.

[Alan G. Archer]

The report says the dog was locked up in a cage the whole time. Was bomb-sniffing an everyday activity? Did the dog make regular rounds of the basement and unoccupied levels of the towers?

I'd imagine that it would at least be a weekly occurance. Daily makes more sense. Still, are you suggesting an army of demolition experts could drive their squadron of vehicles, loaded with [literally] tons of material into the parking garages and work relentlessly for less than a week without anyone noticing anything?

These people have to move from floor to floor, carrying their equipment and explosives. There'd be lots of noise, no doubt. Yet no one working night shifts (about the only time this sort of operation could be consistently carried out) saw or heard anything unusual?

Oh, I know! They were Demolition Ninjas!

Demolition Ninjas with drills. Alex Jones, in his interview with Prof. Jones, said:

...people who said I was a kook two years ago, I mean big reporters at ABC news years ago and other people who’ve attacked me, Washington Post and others; before I was crazy to say there were bombs in the buildings, but now ’oh yeah, there probably were bombs. AlQaeda had planted them.’ Folks it takes months of teams drilling and planting to do this - ok, do you understand? But I’m going to shut up. Let’s go back to the professor.

Ok, OK, the Ninjas probably had silencers on their drills...

Somehow, Sirius didn't get cremated by the molten metal in the basement.

[PhantomWolf]

I'm pretty sure the WTC7 collapse was blamed on poor construction of the penthouses which explains the observed collapse pretty well, but I'm not sure its ever been convincingly explained just how those penthouse beams collapsed in the first place.

Actually it initiated around floors 5-7 where there was a rather elaborate truss and canitilever structure due to the substation generators. The problem with the penthouses was that they were added after the main structure was done, and so overloaded the structure. All that was needed to start the collapse was one of about three columns to be compromised and the others couldn't hold up the weight, initating a collapse. As the eastern half fell, the canitilever system would have misaligned the supports under the western penthouse and it's overloading weight would become a problem and cause the supports to buckle on that side.

The floors 5-7 suffered from a diesel feed fire for about 7 hours, easily enough to cause the steel to soften and be compromised, and a secondary action is that the sulphur in the fuel can mix into the metal and lower its melting point to a significant amount resulting in beams that seem to have had steel which was "vapourised."

[Peter B]

Akirabakabaka said:

It hasn't even been agreed upon what sorts of explosives could have been used and where they could have been planted, so how can anyone know so much about which bombs were placed where?

We know what sort of explosives are available, and we know how powerful they are. Even for the most powerful conventional explosives, theories require such a large amount of explosives that they would have been noticed around the building.

I've claimed explosives could have been planted in the basement levels, which many eyewitnesses claim was true, and shown that NIST et al. barely even considered damage in the basements contributing to the collapse. A bomb was planted in the basement levels in '93, so this scenario certainly has precedence.

People *heard* explosions, but they had no way of telling whether those explosions were caused by bombs or other means.

When you suggest that explosives could have been planted in the basement, when do you suggest they were detonated?

Is there any evidence of explosives being detonated at any time? I understand there's evidence that some fuel from one of the initial impacts travelled down a lift shaft to the basement, and this may be the basis for some ideas of explosions in the basement. But this was at the time of the impacts, not around the time of the building collapses.

[turbonium]

Even for the most powerful conventional explosives, theories require such a large amount of explosives that they would have been noticed around the building.

Not true. According to demolitions expert Van Romero, "It could have been a relatively small amount of explosives placed in strategic points,"

Link to article (bottom half of page)...

http://www.public-action.com/911/jmcm/ABQjournal/

[SynKronoS]

The setup time would have indeed taken months.

they would of had months with marvin bush's connections to securcom--

The idea that the U.S. would self-destruct one of it's core financial centers resulting in the loss of trillions of dollars over the next three years is absolutely ludicrous. No goal is worth that much, including oil, particularly when an investment worth 1/10th of what was lost could have been used to help us gain independance from foreign oil (http://www.eere.energy.gov/afdc/altfuel/biodiesel.html).

yes a loss of trillions of dollars but that money doesnt poof into fairy land-- it just changes hands!-- now lets look at some of the financial motives --
1)silverstein's insurance pay out was worth 7 billion dollars plus the added incentive of the tax payers footin the bill for the demo clean-up
2)the naturalgas pipeline through afghanistan which the taliban opposed that was completed before we went to iraq is worth an est 7 "T"rillion
3)bush was able to secure 280 billion dollars to plunder while faking liberation operations in the middle east
4)evidence was lost in the case against Mobil Oil and James Giffen on
illegal oil swaps between Iran and Kazakhstan (at that time before a New
York grand jury as described in great detail by Seymore Hersh in the July 9
New Yorker magazine)
5)also lost was the evidence in the investigation of gold price fixing stemming from charges brought against Alan Greenspan, Morgan & Comapy, Goldman Sachs.
6)there was also the future plans of iraq about trading their oil in euros rather than dollars

[SynKronoS]

Further, I've seen at least three other explanations for "puffs of smoke." Granted, I've only seen footage of the collapse of WTC 7 once or twice on the History Channel, but it seems reasonable to me that it's merely windows popping out or dust or whatever.

here are some great pieces of evidence-- let me know what you think
WTC1 --
video of collapseshowing flashes
*****************************
videos of collapse showing balls of fire erupting from the tower as well as ground tremor affecting the tripod and shot
image
************************************************** ******************
WTC2 --
cutting charge from wtc 2
image
************************************************** ******************
video of flashes from wtc 2
image
************************************************** ********************
WTC 7 --
video of WTC 7 collapsing showing the center building on top and center collapse first-evidence of a technique known as "crimping" or taking out the middle support first
*******************************
showing squibs in the collapse of WTC 7
video
image

[Gillianren]

Not true. According to demolitions expert Van Romero, "It could have been a relatively small amount of explosives placed in strategic points,"

"Relatively small," in these circumstances, would still be a heck of a lot. That's what that word "relatively" means.

[Peter B]

Turbonium said:

Not true. According to demolitions expert Van Romero, "It could have been a relatively small amount of explosives placed in strategic points,"

Link to article (bottom half of page)...

Well, now, isn’t that interesting. If you read the top half of the page you link to, it shows that Romero retracted that claim.

And you said exactly the same thing on the Apollohoax Board a month or so ago.

Now isn’t it a little disingenuous to make a claim which you already know the claimant has withdrawn?

[SynKronoS]

That is incorrect, Jay - which you should be well aware of from the AH thread on 9/11. The "shopping list" of steel samples was outlined in the link and excerpt below, and clearly states steel that was exposed to fire was to be sought out.

First, they could identify where much of the steel came from within the towers. As this link explains...

http://www.house.gov/science/hot/wtc...WTC_apndxD.pdf

excellent points turbo! wow i noticed you only have a few posts around here, i wonder why ive been accused of being you?!? ive noticed a tactic around here of ignoring evidence by proclaiming "sock puppet" and jabbering on about rule violations,bans and whatnot-- keep up the good work-- its time to wake up this forum

[Musashi]

Yeah, that's it.

[Alan G. Archer]

yes a loss of trillions of dollars but that money doesnt poof into fairy land-- it just changes hands!-- now lets look at some of the financial motives --

[snip]

2)the naturalgas pipeline through afghanistan which the taliban opposed that was completed before we went to iraq is worth an est 7 "T"rillion

What pipeline was completed before the invasion of Iraq? Are you referring to the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan natural gas pipeline? What is value of the projected yearly flow of natural gas for this pipeline, scheduled for completion, according to the 2002 McGraw-Hill Construction story, in 2008? How much would it be worth, lets say, over thirty years?

[Gillianren]

excellent points turbo! wow i noticed you only have a few posts around here, i wonder why ive been accused of being you?!? ive noticed a tactic around here of ignoring evidence by proclaiming "sock puppet" and jabbering on about rule violations,bans and whatnot-- keep up the good work-- its time to wake up this forum

A) In this case to which you refer, it was a sock puppet, which was also promptly banned for violating the forum rules.

B) No one will ever mistake anyone who can spell, punctuate, and capitalize as being your sock puppet.

[Alan G. Archer]

excellent points turbo! wow i noticed you only have a few posts around here, i wonder why ive been accused of being you?!? ive noticed a tactic around here of ignoring evidence by proclaiming "sock puppet" and jabbering on about rule violations,bans and whatnot-- keep up the good work-- its time to wake up this forum

I asked if you were turbonium from the Unexplained Myseteries Discussion Forum because you cut a portion of one of turbonium's posts from there and pasted it here in a plagiaristic manner. It was a rhetorical question, my dear SynKronoS. We both know that you are Sonofone on the other board.

[turbonium]

Well, now, isn’t that interesting. If you read the top half of the page you link to, it shows that Romero retracted that claim.

And you said exactly the same thing on the Apollohoax Board a month or so ago.

Now isn’t it a little disingenuous to make a claim which you already know the claimant has withdrawn?

Read the article a little more carefully, Peter.(Article extracts in quotes & italics) Romero retracts his view that "explosives were needed to collapse the towers". However, Romero does not retract his statement that to collapse the towers "...a relatively small amount of explosives placed in strategic points," would be sufficient to cause their collapse. In fact, he makes no reversal or statement of any kind on the point he made about the amount of explosives needed to cause the collapse (regardless of his reversal of opinion that they were actually used).

[Alan G. Archer]

A) In this case to which you refer, it was a sock puppet, which was also promptly banned for violating the forum rules.

B) No one will ever mistake anyone who can spell, punctuate, and capitalize as being your sock puppet.

Is there sock puppetry occuring here?

[turbonium]

I've no idea what the puppet stuff talk is about here - I just joined this forum today.......

[Alan G. Archer]

I've no idea what the puppet stuff talk is about here - I just joined this forum today.......

Welcome to the board, turbonium.

[Peter B]

Turbonium

The first sentence in the later articles says: "A New Mexico explosives expert says he now believes there were no explosives in the World Trade Center towers, contrary to comments he made the day of the Sept. 11 terrorist attack."

He clearly changed his mind over whether explosives were used.

Yes, he didn't specifically retract each statement he made on September 11. But in the later report: "...he said he now believes explosives would not have been needed to create the collapse seen in video images."

1. He believes no explosives were used; and
2. He believes no explosives were necessary.

You say that "...a relatively small amount of explosives placed in strategic points would be sufficient to cause their collapse..." So what? There are several ways of knocking over the building - plane impact followed by fire, or explosives in strategic locations. Romero considers the buildings collapsed due to plane impact followed by fire.

I suspect a lot of people would agree that strategically placed explosives could knock the building down. I suppose I agree with the idea too. But just because I agree with it doesn't mean I think it happened.

[SynKronoS]

I asked if you were turbonium from the Unexplained Myseteries Discussion Forum because you cut a portion of one of turbonium's posts from there and pasted it here in a plagiaristic manner.

wow thats a bold claim!:surprised please let me know "where" that has occurred so i can go back and list turbo as the source if you are correct--

[SynKronoS]

A) In this case to which you refer, it was
B) No one will ever mistake anyone who can spell, punctuate, and capitalize as being your sock puppet.

ooooooooooohhhh tssssssssssss burn!! hah nah i just like giving weak minds a chain to yank -- NO REALLY...I LIKE IT

[Alan G. Archer]

wow thats a bold claim!:surprised please let me know "where" that has occurred so i can go back and list turbo as the source if you are correct--

On page five, post #129, you wrote:

no im stating that at the wtc on 9/11 the fires that have been associated with causing the structure to fail were not enough to induce the sudden integrity failure and rapid free fall collapse witnessed on that date-- recordings of radio transmissions between highly experienced firefighters have been released and reveal eye witness testimony of fires that were going out and not in need of full resources--images of a woman waving from the hole produced by the impact also lend credence to the firefighters testimony of weak fires
IMAGE
The fire was never nearly hot enough to weaken the steel, that is beyond doubt. The Cardington fire tests proved that conclusively - the steel was not even protected. They concluded ''A steel building survived fires in experiments with extreme temperatures beyond the range possible with jet fuel.” Look at the link Cardington
http://www.corusconstruction.com/leg..._section15.pdf
A hot, vigorous fire would have blown out many windows in the building and would have burned a red or white color. This was not what happened. The fire in the World Trade Center was an ordinary smoldering office fire.

At the Unexplained Mysteries Forum, turbonium wrote:

The fire was never nearly hot enough to weaken the steel, that is beyond doubt. The Cardington fire tests proved that conclusively - the steel was not even protected. They concluded ''A steel building survived fires in experiments with extreme temperatures beyond the range possible with jet fuel.” Look at the link Cardington

A hot, vigorous fire would have blown out many windows in the building and would have burned a red or white color. This was not what happened. The fire in the World Trade Center was an ordinary smoldering office fire.

[Alan G. Archer]

It looks like turbonium lifted this paragraph from Dr. Jerry Russell's piece, "Explosive demolition? A response to Bazant and Zhou":

A hot, vigorous fire would have blown out many windows in the building and would have burned a red or white color. This was not what happened. The fire in the World Trade Center was an ordinary smoldering office fire.

[akirabakabaka]

People *heard* explosions, but they had no way of telling whether those explosions were caused by bombs or other means.

When you suggest that explosives could have been planted in the basement, when do you suggest they were detonated?

Is there any evidence of explosives being detonated at any time? I understand there's evidence that some fuel from one of the initial impacts travelled down a lift shaft to the basement, and this may be the basis for some ideas of explosions in the basement. But this was at the time of the impacts, not around the time of the building collapses.

Has the WTC janitor William Rodriguez been discussed on this board before? He is the best eyewitness to whatever explosions occurred in the basements because he was down there when it happened and dragged a few people out, and was also perhaps the last person out of the towers alive, so I'd suggest the explosions happened whenever he says they did. He claims it was just before the first plane hit. There's also been evidence of smoke coming from the railway underneath the towers before the first attack. (I'll look up sources later tonight when I have some time)

[gwiz]

Explosives were detonated before the planes hit the towers? So why were the towers still standing when the planes hit? Or are you saying the planes brought down the towers after all?

[sfarq1]

On a physics forum the calculation for the building collapsing was worked out ;

“So basically, the algorithm is as follows (Assuming collapse initiation at floor 73):

Take the mass of floors 73 through 111 (call this m(Sum(39)), and calculate the downward momentum after falling through a single floor. You certainly can easily calculate the downward velocity at impact and the time interval required for this first impact to occur. Call them v0 and t0

At height = 72 floors, by conservation of momentum, the total downward momentum a split second before impact:

p(m(Sum(39))) ( p is standard nomenclature for momentum )

must equal the total downward momentum after impact:

p(m(Sum(39))) + p(m(Floor 72))

But this is just

p(m(Sum(40))) (i.e, the momentum of the top 40 floors)

Since you know p(m(Sum(40))), and since you know m(Sum(40)), you very easily can determine the new downward velocity of the combined mass right after this first impact (of course, it will be less than the downward velocity of m(Sum(39)) just before impact)

Using these values, you basically iterate the process sketched out above.

You end up with a set of time intervals, t0, t1, t2, ... t71 such that when you add them up, you get the total time of collapse.

Does anyone see a problem with the math or applications. What it implies is that the building offered no resistance.

http://forum.physorg.com/index.php?s...c=3108&st=1080

[JayUtah]

That is incorrect, Jay - which you should be well aware of from the AH thread on 9/11. The "shopping list" of steel samples was outlined in the link and excerpt below...

Yes, thanks; you are correct. The latter items in the list were the ones that stuck in my memory. I gathered from the two documents written on steel harvesting -- the one you cited and the other that I cited some months ago at AH -- that a variety of criteria were to be used. In retrospect it would be silly not to look for heat-damaged steel, but there were three distinct events or processes that would need to be investigated: the impacts, the fire, and the collapse. That means you don't necessarily look only for fire damage.

We know that their working hypothesis was to show how the plane impacts and fires caused the collapses.

Well, yes. But it doesn't have to sound so conspiratorial. It's not like they made up their minds ahead of time what caused everything and embarked on a course of action designed to support only that hypothesis and make it sound credible. Even in purely unbiased science you start with a specific hypothesis and try to prove it wrong. The various investigations culminating with NIST's failed to falsify the impact-fire-collapse hypothesis. That doesn't mean it's God's truth, but it means it's the prevailing theory.

Investigation isn't a matter of throwing all the evidence you can find in some room and walking around it to see what congeals from it. It's a matter of testing specific candidate conclusions.

- Badly burnt pieces from WTC 7.

This is still a point of some confusion. NIST set out to recover steel from WTC 7, but it was mixed with steel from other buildings. NIST, I believe, recovered steel that they think might be from WTC 7, but they can't be sure. This seems to contradict the WPI analysis of WTC 7 steel. That is, if WPI got WTC 7 steel, where did they get it from? We have to keep in mind that NIST's steel harvesting wasn't the only steel harvesting that was going on. On the surface it would seem better to throw all the surviving steel into one pot and let people study what the want. But real investigations often have to maintain a chain of evidence. If I am asked to draw conclusions based on someone else's evidence, I can't necessarily affirm my belief in that conclusion because it's contingent upon the validity and proper characterization of the evidence. Thus I am motivated to do my own data collection even if other data sets already exist. I may not get all the data that is possible to get, but I know for sure where it came from and how I got it.

# Connections from WTC 1, 2, and 7, such as seat connections, single shear plates, and column splices.
# Bolts from WTC 1, 2, and 7 that were exposed to fire, fractured, and/or that appeared undamaged.

These were the items that stuck out in my mind. Normally you can determine more about what happened in a collapse by looking at the joints than by looking at the individual members. "Composed" (i.e., put together out of constituent elements) are more likely to fail at joints than in members, and the final disposition of the joint can tell you a great deal about how the structure failed locally at that point.

Only ones that had fire / impact damage were to be sought out.

No, I don't think so. I think the laundry list of criteria is an or-connected list, not an and-connected list. So if you found one with fire damage but no impact damage, that was okay; and if you found one with impact damage but no fire damage, that was okay too. And if you found fractured bolts with no heat damage, that was okay. I've done this sort of thing before; you typically only need to match one criteria, not all of them, in order to make a good specimen.

Say you are part of the recovery team. You find almost all the core columns from the affected floors. So you go back and proudly tell the head honchos of your excellent work. What do they do? They tell you to forget about all of them, unless they have any damage or were exposed to fire!

I don't see any evidence whatsoever that this is what happened. Are you speaking hypothetically, or are you actually claiming that heat-damaged steel from WTC 1 and 2 were rejected because the criteria were too artificially limiting?

With 2 core columns, they can create a fictional model that will support their hypothesis.

You do yourself and the industry a great disservice by ignorantly labeling these models "fictional". These are state of the art models, and the modeling techniques have been used for more than 25 years in nearly every branch of engineering with great success. This is not just something that was made up in order to study the WTC collapse. These are standard industry techniques that all engineers learn. (Physicists, by the way, do not.) The car you drive had a mechanical design that was validated using a computational structural dynamics model -- in fact, the same exact algorithms that were used to model the WTC failure!

You don't really need a mathematical model if you can recover all the empirical evidence. You yourself admitted that it wasn't practical to recover all the steel that might have been affected by impact or fire. So you already accept that some degree of guesswork is necessary and appropriate. So given that a model is necessary and acceptable practice, why not use the techniques that have been used for this sort of thing for many years? You can't credibly trash those methods just because you're unfamiliar with them.

You can't try to make professional engineers and investigators submit to your homespun methods of analysis. It appeals to common sense to work empirically strictly from tangible evidence, but in the past 20 years or so simulation and modeling has actually become more predictive than empirical tests. I know we started talking about this at AH and I never really got into the details. In short, we learn more these days from the mathematical models than we do from physical models.

You can't build a physical scale model of the WTC structure that behaves the same way as the real thing. Similarly you can't build a portion of the structure to scale and expect it to exhibit all the behavior of the entire structure. And if your plan is to test any of these models to failure, you have the obvious problem of being able to conduct only one test with each model. And you may discover that you instrumented the model wrong.

With a digital model we can stop the process under investigation at any point and "query" the model for its dynamic characteristics. These models produce gargantuan data sets (many terabytes) that can be used to test new ideas that come up later. For example, I just assisted in analyzing a computational fluid dynamics model that produced roughly 500 gigabytes of data each at time steps of 0.0001 second. You just can't get that kind of data from physical models. Boeing does not even build wind-tunnel models anymore. When the 787 Dreamliner flies for the first time, it will be the first time any of it has ever been subjected to real airflow, and its pilot will have been trained on a fully-faithful digital model of its behavior.

So the notion that full understanding can only come from physical modeling is very naive.

But the actual evidence doesn't support it, in fact it completely contradicts it!

No, you're trying to have your cake and eat it too. If you say that 1% of the steel is insufficient to validate a claim of 600 C or any other high temperature, then how can you turn around and say that 1% of steel, showing effects of only 250 C, is proof that all steel was at or below that temperature? Your assumption that the small number of recovered samples represents the maximum temperature is far less credible than the "official" story because it's only an assumption: you have no supportable basis from which to extrapolate. But when you tell me that 1% of steel with a 250 C hot point "completely" contradicts some other theory, that unfounded extrapolation is exactly what you're doing.

You're doing your best to try to throw mud all over a certain technique, but you don't realize that in the process you're proposing a far less tenable one to replace it.