1000 Architects and Engineers Question Official 9/11 Story - Washington Times Article

[Bruno@MT]

Several of the people on the list are top engineering professors at major universities. They have filed official complaints about the NIST report to the major licensing agencies. They believe that these scientists should have their licenses revoked for putting out these reports with obviously flawed conclusions. We'll see what happens with that...

Again... being a professor does not mean anything. I have had a couple that were fit for the psych ward. I could tell stories but you would not believe I was serious. Among professors and academics you will also find holocaust deniers, moon landing conspiracy theorists, innoculation paranoiacs, bigots, racists, religious fundamentalists,... heck, there are thousands of professionals arguing FOR global warming, and thousands AGAINST.

You assume that because a thousand nutters (of which only a percentage have a qualified opinion) are complaining, their case is automatically proven. Yet there are tens of thousands of subject matter experts who say they are nuts and you refuse to give them the same weight.

What went on at the political and intelligence level I cannot say and I genuinely don't care. But after the hit, the WTC towers went down on their own.

As for building 7: A controlled demolition works by knocking out the main support columns, after which the building falls inwards. The same thing would happen if one of those major supports gets knocked away by thousands of tonnes of debris from a collapsing twin tower. IIRC, building 7 had 4 major supports, which were in the building corners. Video footage shows that corner being knocked away.

At that point, building 7 became like a fully loaded diner table of which one of the legs is kicked away. Remember what I said about symmetrical load. When one column went down, the 2 others in adjoining corners crumbled inwards. And then the last remaining corner opposite the first one went. Voila: inward collapse 'text book demolition example'.

 

[Makalakumu]

Again... being a professor does not mean anything. I have had a couple that were fit for the psych ward. I could tell stories but you would not believe I was serious. Among professors and academics you will also find holocaust deniers, moon landing conspiracy theorists, innoculation paranoiacs, bigots, racists, religious fundamentalists,... heck, there are thousands of professionals arguing FOR global warming, and thousands AGAINST.

After that whole rant, this!!! Hahahahahahahahaha Sorry, but that's funny as hell!!!

Anyway, this argument is an obvious logical fallacy. Why do any of those people have anything to do with the people making this argument? Much less, what does this have to do with the argument being made?

It's a logical fallacy.

You assume that because a thousand nutters (of which only a percentage have a qualified opinion) are complaining, their case is automatically proven. Yet there are tens of thousands of subject matter experts who say they are nuts and you refuse to give them the same weight.

You assume a lot of things. That they are nutters. That only a percentage of the thousand can give an informed opinion. That only people with a certain piece of paper and only when the argument is in my favor, can give an opinion. That 10,000 scientists have looked deeply into the matter and considered all of the evidence. That I wouldn't consider the opinions of bonafide experts who have actually looked at the total available evidence.

This whole paragraph is a wasteland of assumptions that prevent a person from critical thinking about this issue.

What went on at the political and intelligence level I cannot say and I genuinely don't care. But after the hit, the WTC towers went down on their own.

So, in other words, "what went on, I don't care, the towers went down, end of story." Seriously?

As for building 7: A controlled demolition works by knocking out the main support columns, after which the building falls inwards. The same thing would happen if one of those major supports gets knocked away by thousands of tonnes of debris from a collapsing twin tower. IIRC, building 7 had 4 major supports, which were in the building corners. Video footage shows that corner being knocked away.

How much damage do you think those photos actually showed? Did you know that NIST claims that the fire brought down the building? In WTC 1,2,7, they claimed this.

At that point, building 7 became like a fully loaded diner table of which one of the legs is kicked away. Remember what I said about symmetrical load. When one column went down, the 2 others in adjoining corners crumbled inwards. And then the last remaining corner opposite the first one went. Voila: inward collapse 'text book demolition example'.

How do you know that is what would happen? No steel building has ever collapsed from fire in this short of an amount of time before. This is no precedent.

 

[Archangel M]

New Rule: Crazy people who still think the government brought down the Twin Towers in a controlled explosion have to stop pretending that I'm the one that's being naïve. How big a lunatic do you have to be to watch two giant airliners packed with jet fuel slam into buildings on live TV igniting a massive inferno that burned for two hours and then think, "Well, if you believe that was the cause?" Stop asking me to raise this ridiculous topic on this show and start asking your doctor if Paxil is right for you. -Bill Maher

If Bill Maher passes up a chance to lambaste Pres. Bush.....
​

 

[Archangel M]

15 questions 9/11 truthers need to answer.

"What Did and Did not Cause Collapse of WTC Twin Towers in New York"

 

[Archangel M]

Take a look at Randi.Orgs opinion on the subject.

http://forums.randi.org/forumdisplay.php?s=&daysprune=&f=64


Yet another peer reviewed paper from a respected Journal finds the towers were doomed to collapse.

 

[Archangel M]

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This AE 911 founder is so clueless he can't even keep his own BS theories straight...watch this one.

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[Archangel M]

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[Makalakumu]

We'll see if I can get some of these scientists to participate here. I'm a bit busy at the moment, but I'll send an e-mail soon. I'm very curious what they would say here since we have at least three structural engineers participating in this thread.

 

[Makalakumu]

Take a look at Randi.Orgs opinion on the subject.

http://forums.randi.org/forumdisplay.php?s=&daysprune=&f=64


Yet another peer reviewed paper from a respected Journal finds the towers were doomed to collapse.

That's terrifying actually. One column gives way in a steel reinforced concrete building and the whole thing could go down! Talk about an Achilles Heel...

 

[Ken Morgan]

I'm a political science/history/education person so I don't even pretend to know anything about this subject, short of not believing in conspiracies.

However I was a supervisor in a steel plant for almost 10 years, and from my experience I can tell you steel is and can be very fragile. I have seen a piece of cold rolled steel 6"x4"x12' fall three feet onto a rubber mat and cleanly snap in half. I have seen huge pieces of structural steel bend like it was made of pipe cleaners with very little force. Add in jet fuel, plus the physical damage caused by the impact of a 400,000 pound jet hitting structural steel at 300+ miles an hour….

Hell I’m surprised the building stayed up as long as it did.

 

[seasoned]

Hell I don't have a clue about steel but logic I do have. The planes hit the twin towers 3/4 of the way up, leaving 1/4 of the towers above, and a lot of weight to come down once the steel was weaken. As each floor hit the one below it, on it's way down, the force would be comparable to an explosion sending everything outward. It doesn't take rocket science to figure that out.

 

[Makalakumu]

I posted this to point out the fact that now 1000 professionals in engineering and architecture fields are banding together and saying that there is something to question about the official story. We have individuals with in depth highly technical backgrounds directly related to the very fields that would be required to study something like this. That number is growing and it's getting harder to just blow it off. We'll see what happens and we'll see how this grows.

 

[Bruno@MT]

After that whole rant, this!!! Hahahahahahahahaha Sorry, but that's funny as hell!!!

Anyway, this argument is an obvious logical fallacy. Why do any of those people have anything to do with the people making this argument? Much less, what does this have to do with the argument being made?

It's a logical fallacy.

No, it's not.
You argue that the point of a 1000 professionals is a good reason to put any stock in the conspiracy angle.

I cite an example where thousands of professionals take completely opposite views, proving thereby that at least half of them are wrong. Since that is a direct response to your argument, I don't see how that would be a logical fallacy.

This whole paragraph is a wasteland of assumptions that prevent a person from critical thinking about this issue.

No, I don't mind critical thinking. I welcome it.
But as long as the arguments do not get beyond 'steel does not melt like that' and 'see the debris going outwards, it must be an explosion', I don't consider that critical thinking. I consider that grasping at straws.

So, in other words, "what went on, I don't care, the towers went down, end of story." Seriously?

Pretty much. The US were warned by many other countries that something was going to happen. There was also some suspicious stock trading right before the crashes, and some of the evidence presented afterward was rather unlikely.

However, that does not mean I believe for a second that the government organized 9/11. They ****ed up royally, granted, but that is something we'll never get the details of. Organizing 911 would require a lot of people and a lot of secrecy. Even during the manhattan project with draconian securoty measures in place, the soviets were able to get intelligence out of it.

Since I don't see any reason to believe that a conspiracy on this magnitude could be kept secret, I can only conclude they messed up royally, and that is not of any interest at all.

How much damage do you think those photos actually showed? Did you know that NIST claims that the fire brought down the building? In WTC 1,2,7, they claimed this.

1 and 2 are the twin towers right?
Of course it was fire. It was the thousands of gallons of burning kerosene which weakened the structure.

How do you know that is what would happen? No steel building has ever collapsed from fire in this short of an amount of time before. This is no precedent.

Plenty of buildings have been imploded. The techniques used for that are well documented. I've seen plenty of documentaries about them.
Demolition implosion is done by knocking out or weakining the support columns.

But why are we even bringing this up again.
We know that blazing fire weakens steel.
We know that if thousands of tons of building fall on top of an unharmed structure designed to bear only static load, it will crumble.

Also, wiring and preparing a single casino size building for demolition takes days, assuming the building is already stripped of furniture, false walls, etc. It takes drilling thousands of holes in support beams for shoving explosives in. Then everything needs to be wired together with det cord. hundreds of miles of the stuff. And the explosives give off noxious fumes (nitorglycerin) which causes headaches and other symptoms.

If that building was wired in advance, people would have noticed it during the weeks it would have required. And don't forget, people claim it was wired all the way up.

 

[Bruno@MT]

That's terrifying actually. One column gives way in a steel reinforced concrete building and the whole thing could go down! Talk about an Achilles Heel...

It's the only way to build that high.
the physics dictate that load must be distributed evenly or the thing cannot get past a couple of floors. Even the Romans knew this and things like the Colosseum were built accordingly.

The only way you could survive the total loss of a major column is to make sure that all columns can take double their calculated load, and have so many of them that a single one going down does not cause a big balance difference.

This is all but impossible, and it would also mean that your entire building consists of support structure and load transfer structure, and that of course defeats the purpose of building a high building.

 

[jks9199]

How do you know that is what would happen? No steel building has ever collapsed from fire in this short of an amount of time before. This is no precedent.

Nor is there precedent for fully loaded jetliners deliberately flying into a building of that size. Therefore, we have to look at modeling and material dynamics and other fields to understand what may have happened. I think the bigger problem people are having is that NIST didn't share all the details of their modeling process.

And that it is, to me, a legitimate point to question. But they may have had solid reasons for not doing so, too. It may have taken classified data...

 

[Bill Mattocks]

Hey I could join up, I'm an engineering professional. In addition, I can speak and write quite well. Think they'll kick me to the curb for not having the right kind of engineering background?

When I was in high school, I was a 'retail petroleum transfer engineer' (yeah, I pumped gasoline). I'll bet I could get on the list. I know all about stuff falling apart. Story of my frickin' life.

 

[Makalakumu]

I cite an example where thousands of professionals take completely opposite views, proving thereby that at least half of them are wrong. Since that is a direct response to your argument, I don't see how that would be a logical fallacy.

That is not what you said and is not what I was responding to. You essentially said that I had a professor that was stupid or crazy once therefore there is no way these guys can be correct. That's a logical fallacy.

Here's what you said...

Again... being a professor does not mean anything. I have had a couple that were fit for the psych ward. I could tell stories but you would not believe I was serious. Among professors and academics you will also find holocaust deniers, moon landing conspiracy theorists, innoculation paranoiacs, bigots, racists, religious fundamentalists,... heck, there are thousands of professionals arguing FOR global warming, and thousands AGAINST.

That is not a direct response to what is being said. Neither is saying that because I or others have a piece of paper that makes them correct or more correct. Neither is saying that it's too hard and therefore could not happen. Neither is saying a thousand people can agree to anything therefore these guys are wrong. Neither is making any assumption without looking at the data and attempting to pass that off as an explanation. Anyway, I'm not going to use any more of my time rehashing this, but that's a short list of the logical fallacies used in this thread.

You make a very good point about thousands of engineering professionals agreeing that there is nothing wrong with the official story. We have three here with technical knowledge in the matter and have concluded that it seems to make sense. I'm willing to bet if I went around and interviewed a 1000 professionals randomly, most of them would probably agree.

Here's what I am wondering about, however. How many of these professionals have actually looked at the reports, looked at the evidence, and really spent some time trying to understand the issue? In this case or in any case, when you come to a conclusion without doing this, it gives a person "crippled epistemology" where your information is limited and you don't really know about a topic. Yeah, you can make a guess, but in the end, that is all it is, a guess.

In this article's case we have a thousand engineering professionals including people with advanced technical knowledge who have really looked into the matter and have signed their names to a document, verified their credentials, and have put themselves on line.

Can you find a similar independent group that has done the same for NIST? That would be a comparable group and would actually act as a rebuttal for the article.

 

[Makalakumu]

When I was in high school, I was a 'retail petroleum transfer engineer' (yeah, I pumped gasoline). I'll bet I could get on the list. I know all about stuff falling apart. Story of my frickin' life.

They apparently have a vetting process. You could join, but you wouldn't be listed as part of the architects and engineering group.

 

[Makalakumu]

Nor is there precedent for fully loaded jetliners deliberately flying into a building of that size. Therefore, we have to look at modeling and material dynamics and other fields to understand what may have happened. I think the bigger problem people are having is that NIST didn't share all the details of their modeling process.

And that it is, to me, a legitimate point to question. But they may have had solid reasons for not doing so, too. It may have taken classified data...

That could be a legitimate reason to not widely disseminate the details of the modeling process. There could be a lot of reasons why they didn't share the information. The end result is that they obfuscated the "how to" in regards to their results. Since all experiments are supposed to be repeatable, this cripples the scientific process.

 

[Bill Mattocks]

OK, let's look at the possibilities here, ignore the arguments.

First - the buildings fell down. I think we can all agree with that.

Having established that they fell down, they did so for one of the following reasons:

1) Planes flew into them.
2) Planes flew into them and other causes were present as well.
3) Other causes entirely.

For either #2 or #3 to be true, a massive conspiracy and physical intervention must have taken place, necessarily involving many people and much material. I do not believe that such a secret can be kept for any meaningful period of time. I also do not see any logical reason why the US government or any other agency would gain by #2 or #3. Therefore, I reject those as logical possibilities. Yes, they could still be true, but absent actual evidence and a convincing reason why another agency (other than Al Qaida) would have instigated and pre-arranged the attack, I can't support those arguments.