Creative Speculation
In reply to the discussion: 2335! update: 2416, update: 2444! new update: 2613 and growing! [View all]William Seger
(11,258 posts)You seem like a reasonable person, so let's take it one issue at a time, please.
The truck bomb that was used in the 1993 WTC bombing was a complex bomb made with several types of high- and low-explosives and even included three tanks of hydrogen gas to increase the thermobaric effect. The intent was to cause the north tower to fall into the south tower. When it went off, it was not only heard but felt all over lower Manhattan and even on Ellis Island. It made a huge hole, taking out floors and walls on several levels, but it didn't destroy any columns.
At the level that the north tower collapse began, the total cross-sectional area of the columns was over 6000 square inches of structural-grade steel, and to trigger a collapse you'd need to take out at least something over half of the columns, maybe two-thirds. A conventional demolition would of course use high-explosive cutter charges which have a distinctive sound that can be heard on virtually every YouTube demolition video. And they are not like the explosions reported in wildbill's video: they're not small explosions that you would need to be inside the building to hear, and they certainly do not happen randomly all over the building minutes or even hours before the collapse begins. Cutting through over 3000 square inches of steel would require a serious amount of explosives, and it that's what had happened, almost everyone in Manhattan would have immediately known it, and we would too from the videos. Furthermore, no explosively cut steel was found in the rubble, even though the clean-up crew were experienced in CD, and dozens of experts, both government and independent, looked through the rubble for "interesting" pieces to save. So, there is simply no evidence of explosives, even magical silent ones.
But this is not like the famous aphorism, "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." That is a statement about trying to infer without having any information. However, if there are things that really should be observed if the hypothesis were correct but they are not observed, that is positive evidence of absence and the hypothesis is disproved. Ergo, explosives did not bring down any of the buildings.
If you agree with that, then we can discuss the "thermite hypothsis," which Jones invented solely to cover the truck-bomb-sized hole in the "explosives hypothesis."