The last great 9/11 mystery - for chemists & metallurgists

Hi all,

I hope the mods will forgive the cross-post here, but another user alerted me to this forum and suggested I provide a link here.

Anyway, there is a bit of a puzzle regarding some of the steel that was recovered from the World Trade Center after the 9/11/2001 attacks. Evidence of sulfur contamination and severe erosion was noted on some of that steel.

Conspiracy theorists have leapt to the conclusion that this contamination is evidence of controlled demolition via an incendiary compound called thermate, which is a mixture of thermite and sulfur (among other things).

Other, more sane minds, are looking at less exotic sources for the sulfur, which include gypsum wallboard (pure hydrous calcium disulfate), various types of fuel oils, and possibly acid rain.

In any event, if any of the lab rats here would like to engage in a bit of conspiracy-debunking and exercise your chemistry & metallurgy chops, an interesting thread on all this is developing here:

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=58851

Isn't it rather odd that the planes flew into the buildings at the exact spot where demolitions were planted? Very odd.

Far odder still is that the demolitions didn't go off on impact, or shortly thereafter with the raging, jet fuel-driven infernos.

If only there were, at best, only blurry films of the planes hitting them, then we could claim they were missles, too!

Although why one would use two separate methods to attack buildings, I don't know. If you take control of planes for the WTC, why wouldn't you use a plane for the Pentagon, too? Isn't launching a missle at it an extremely idiotic thing, given the number of eyes and cameras that would be watching? Wouldn't you have shut off the security cameras? You couldn't possibly know the "missle" would hit in-between security camera frames.

And you couldn't possibly know there wouldn't be tourists happening to film somewhere near the Pentagon, who would catch the whole thing on film. It turns out there weren't, but as a planner you couldn't possibly know that, and rely on it to keep your story secure.

Beerina said:

Isn't it rather odd that the planes flew into the buildings at the exact spot where demolitions were planted? Very odd.

Far odder still is that the demolitions didn't go off on impact, or shortly thereafter with the raging, jet fuel-driven infernos.

If only there were, at best, only blurry films of the planes hitting them, then we could claim they were missles, too!

Although why one would use two separate methods to attack buildings, I don't know. If you take control of planes for the WTC, why wouldn't you use a plane for the Pentagon, too? Isn't launching a missle at it an extremely idiotic thing, given the number of eyes and cameras that would be watching? Wouldn't you have shut off the security cameras? You couldn't possibly know the "missle" would hit in-between security camera frames.

And you couldn't possibly know there wouldn't be tourists happening to film somewhere near the Pentagon, who would catch the whole thing on film. It turns out there weren't, but as a planner you couldn't possibly know that, and rely on it to keep your story secure.

Click to expand...

Yea, but maybe it was the CIA, and they used some of the knowledge gained from their psychic research to make sure all of the above improbabilities would be true!!

It's true!

[nitpick]I don't think demolition charges were likely to go off by plane strikes and fire. Those modern explosives are very stable, and you can hit them with a hammer, shoot at them, or take a blowtorch to them, and the worst thing that will happen is that they burn with a steady flame.[/nitpick]

What IS odd, however, is that the carfully laid out demolition scheme was not in any way interrupted by the impact and fire damages. If you don't fire them things in the exacly planned sequence, you won't get a nice planned collapse.

Hans

Beerina said:

Isn't it rather odd that the planes flew into the buildings at the exact spot where demolitions were planted? Very odd.

Far odder still is that the demolitions didn't go off on impact, or shortly thereafter with the raging, jet fuel-driven infernos.

If only there were, at best, only blurry films of the planes hitting them, then we could claim they were missles, too!

Although why one would use two separate methods to attack buildings, I don't know. If you take control of planes for the WTC, why wouldn't you use a plane for the Pentagon, too? Isn't launching a missle at it an extremely idiotic thing, given the number of eyes and cameras that would be watching? Wouldn't you have shut off the security cameras? You couldn't possibly know the "missle" would hit in-between security camera frames.

And you couldn't possibly know there wouldn't be tourists happening to film somewhere near the Pentagon, who would catch the whole thing on film. It turns out there weren't, but as a planner you couldn't possibly know that, and rely on it to keep your story secure.

Click to expand...

Conspiracy theorists reroute around all obstacles. Facts, reason, logic, physical evidence, Occam's Razor...none of this is ever acknowledged by a CT. If you debunk a claim or challenge a tenet of their belief, they simply ignore you and run off in search of the next unexplained anomaly and the most convoluted chain of reasoning and events that could only be explained by the existence of an evil group behind the scenes, controlling everything.

In this case, there's a legitimate mystery behind the source and mechanism for this sulfur contamination. CTs see that and -- BAM! -- therefore, thermite!

The rest of us enjoy merely using science and reason to point out the more rational alternative. It's like solving brain teasers, this business of debunking conspiracies. It's a nice mental workout.

i think your subject for the thread is a bit misleading...it should be "the last great 9/11 mystery this week..."

The problem with all of this is that we really don't have a good model of what we should expect. Would you not find any sulfur in something that fell without controlled demolition? How do you establish that? Show me a building that was constructed with the same materials as the WTC and was subject to the same exposures as the WTC (including the fires that were known) and does not have any sulfur, and I will pay attention. Lacking that, there are way too many possibilities here.

This assessment lacks controls.

It's no different from the claims that explosions were heard, and that means CD. In order to draw that conclusion, you have to establish that a building falling without CD would NOT have explosions.

Everyone should remind themselves of the cognitive fallacy of looking for confirmatory evidence. Recall the old exercise of "which cards should you turn over if you want to test the hypothesis that all even cards have red backs" or whatever that was. Most people will making the mistake of turning over cards that will only re-establish what is already known, but not the right ones to establish the hypothesis.

See Tom Gilovich's book "How We Know What Isn't So" for a description. CTers are making the same mistake here.