New: theory of conspiracy theories:

Originally posted by sonhouse
It couldn't have been just the explosion going south in air ducts or some such path? That's what it looked like to me. I don't see a vast conspiracy there.

Building demolitionists should use air ducts to get a perfect demolition. They could save a bunch of money and effort by not having to get to the columns and carefully plan out the timing.

Originally posted by joe shmo
And yet the explosive demolition of (at least) WTC 7 is still concealed?

I think you're wearing your tin foil hat a little too tightly.

Originally posted by joe shmo
They DO NOT fall from normal office fires.

Evidently they sometimes do, especially when the building has also been damaged due to a massive building collapsing nearby. But do you really want me to look up instances of buildings collapsing due to fires engulfing them? Hint: it's not very rare.

This is really ridiculous, at least with a conspiracy like JFK, while there is diddly squat in terms of evidence for a conspiracy, there is at least a possible motive - one could imagine certain people or groups standing to benefit from the death of a US president. But here you can't even come up with a reason why someone would want to come up with an elaborate - and doomed to fail - conspiracy to destroy an empty, insignificant building. How do you imagine the conversation between these masterminds would go? Maybe something like this:

Evil Mastermind A: hey, you know about those two planes that terrorists will crash into the Twin Towers in a couple of months, right?
Evil Mastermind B: sure!
Evil Mastermind A: alright, let's put a bunch of explosives in a building nearby, then after the planes crash into the towers, we wait a while until it is evacuated and then we blow it up!
Evil Mastermind B: amazing plan! Muhahahaha!

Originally posted by KazetNagorra
...
Evil Mastermind A: hey, you know about those two planes that terrorists will crash into the Twin Towers in a couple of months, right?
Evil Mastermind B: sure!......!

I am curious to know how Evil Mastermind A&B knew the terrorists will do that two months before they did ........... oh; ... wait; ... that would require yet another conspiracy theory.
It is just amazing how many mega-conspiracies there are out there! (feeble sarcasm, in case anyone conspiracy theorist wondering)

Originally posted by KazetNagorra
Evidently they sometimes do, especially when the building has also been damaged due to a massive building collapsing nearby. But do you really want me to look up instances of buildings collapsing due to fires engulfing them? Hint: it's not very rare.

This is really ridiculous, at least with a conspiracy like JFK, while there is diddly squat in terms ...[text shortened]... hile until it is evacuated and then we blow it up!
Evil Mastermind B: amazing plan! Muhahahaha!

Maybe the Evil Masterminds absent-mindedly dropped a flash drive containing their plans for world domination somewhere in the building, and so decided to demolish the building to ensure that the flash drive was rendered unreadable...

Or maybe WTC 7 was the real target of the terrorists, who somehow missed the building...twice...so a clandestine demolition was their Plan B...

Or! The Illuminati in their secret Star Chamber upon Olympus Mons on Mars determined, with their mighty, throbbing brains, that it would be the destruction of WTC 7 -- and not the felling of the Twin Towers as previous thought -- that would set in motion the chain of events that would carry to fruition their nefarious plot to bring hemlines down two centimeters in springtime of the year 2037.

Originally posted by KazetNagorra
Evidently they sometimes do, especially when the building has also been damaged due to a massive building collapsing nearby. But do you really want me to look up instances of buildings collapsing due to fires engulfing them? Hint: it's not very rare.

This is really ridiculous, at least with a conspiracy like JFK, while there is diddly squat in terms ...[text shortened]... hile until it is evacuated and then we blow it up!
Evil Mastermind B: amazing plan! Muhahahaha!

I'd prefer you read this yourself:

http://www.civil.northwestern.edu/people/bazant/PDFs/Backup%20of%20Papers/466.pdf

But if I must, directly from the analysis.

"No experienced structural engineer watching the attack expected
the WTC towers to collapse. No skyscraper has ever before collapsed
due to fire. The fact that the WTC towers did, beckons
deep examination"

I added the bold for emphasis.

This is really ridiculous, at least with a conspiracy like JFK, while there is diddly squat in terms of evidence for a conspiracy, there is at least a possible motive - one could imagine certain people or groups standing to benefit from the death of a US president. But here you can't even come up with a reason why someone would want to come up with an elaborate - and doomed to fail - conspiracy to destroy an empty, insignificant building. How do you imagine the conversation between these masterminds would go? Maybe something like this:

The only ridiculous notion is to demand motive in the science forum, in loo of reading peer reviewed analysis from a scientific journal. I assumed dealing with "professionals", this name calling and poor attempt at attacking my character with wild and sarcastic speculations about my beliefs would be minimal. That is... I expected you to act as respectable scientist, I was apparently wrong.

Originally posted by joe shmo
I'd prefer you read this yourself:

http://www.civil.northwestern.edu/people/bazant/PDFs/Backup%20of%20Papers/466.pdf

But if I must, directly from the analysis.

"No experienced structural engineer watching the attack expected
the WTC towers to collapse. [b]No skyscraper has ever before collapsed
due to fire. The fact that the WTC towers did, becko ...[text shortened]... be minimal. That is... I expected you to act as respectable scientist, I was apparently wrong.

Did you read that paper? It is not even about WTC tower 7, but about the two main towers. And it doesn't conclude that there was a conspiracy, nor that a fire couldn't have caused it to collapse of building 7.

A great number of buildings have collapsed after fires but there are not that many "skyscrapers" so what the authors wrote might be true depending on how strictly they define "skyscraper." By the way, the "journal of engineering mechanics" is a poorly rated journal (impact factor: 1.3) and getting a publication in this journal doesn't say much about the quality of the paper.

To me, a building collapsing after having been damaged and having been on fire for many hours sounds plausible. No alternative plausible explanation is given by you so I have no reason to doubt that the damage from the collapsing towers and the subsequent fires caused building 7 to collapse.

Originally posted by KazetNagorra
Did you read that paper? It is not even about WTC tower 7, but about the two main towers. And it doesn't conclude that there was a conspiracy, nor that a fire couldn't have caused it to collapse of building 7.

A great number of buildings have collapsed after fires but there are not that many "skyscrapers" so what the authors wrote might be true depen ...[text shortened]... at the damage from the collapsing towers and the subsequent fires caused building 7 to collapse.

Yes I read the paper. I am quite aware that it does not explicitly analyze WTC 7. Are you aware that it is not solely a report on WTC, but instead is a generalized solution to the 1D Mechanics of Progressive Collapse (The sited failure mode of WTC 7 by NIST). And only sites the Twin Towers for Example. The following are the conditions for progressive collapse to be satisfied within the Example.

"Review of Causes of WTC Collapse
Although the structural damage inflicted by aircraft was severe, it
was only local. Without stripping of a significant portion of the
steel insulation during impact, the subsequent fire would likely
not have led to overall collapse
Bažant and Zhou 2002a; NIST
2005. As generally accepted by the community of specialists in
structural mechanics and structural engineering
though not by a
few outsiders claiming a conspiracy with planted explosives, the
failure scenario was as follows:
1. About 60% of the 60 columns of the impacted face of framed
tube
and about 13% of the total of 287 columns were severed,
and many more were significantly deflected. This
caused stress redistribution, which significantly increased the
load of some columns, attaining or nearing the load capacity
for some of them.
2. Because a significant amount of steel insulation was stripped,
many structural steel members heated up to 600°C, as con-
firmed by annealing studies of steel debris
NIST 2005 the
structural steel used loses about 20% of its yield strength
already at 300°C, and about 85% at 600°C
NIST 2005;
and exhibits significant viscoplasticity, or creep, above
450°C
e.g., Cottrell 1964, p. 299, especially in the columns
overstressed due to load redistribution; the press reports right
after September 11, 2001 indicating temperature in excess of
800°C, turned out to be groundless, but Bažant and Zhou’s
analysis did not depend on that.
3. Differential thermal expansion, combined with heat-induced
viscoplastic deformation, caused the floor trusses to sag. The
catenary action of the sagging trusses pulled many perimeter
columns inward
by about 1 m, NIST 2005. The bowing of
these columns served as a huge imperfection inducing multistory
out-of-plane buckling of framed tube wall. The lateral
deflections of some columns due to aircraft impact, the differential
thermal expansion, and overstress due to load redistribution
also diminished buckling strength.
4. The combination of seven effects—
1 Overstress of some
columns due to initial load redistribution;
2 overheating
due to loss of steel insulation;
3 drastic lowering of yield
limit and creep threshold by heat;
4 lateral deflections of
many columns due to thermal strains and sagging floor
trusses;
5 weakened lateral support due to reduced in-plane
stiffness of sagging floors;
6 multistory bowing of some
columns
for which the critical load is an order of magnitude
less than it is for one-story buckling; and
7 local plastic
buckling of heated column webs—finally led to buckling of
columns Fig. 1
b. As a result, the upper part of the tower
fell, with little resistance, through at least one floor height,
impacting the lower part of the tower. This triggered progressive
collapse because the kinetic energy of the falling upper
part exceeded
by an order of magnitude the energy that
could be absorbed by limited plastic deformations and fracturing
in the lower part of the tower.
In broad terms, "

So...none of the 4 conditions are satisfied in WTC 7( a skyscraper in general), and not only that, but was designed by the same Engineer as the Twin Towers, and yet you have no modocom of doubt that the collapse of WTC 7 is justifiable, even though the author explicitly states what I highlighted in bold above under "Review of Causes of WTC Collapse"

A great number of buildings have collapsed after fires but there are not that many "skyscrapers" so what the authors wrote might be true depending on how strictly they define "skyscraper." By the way, the "journal of engineering mechanics" is a poorly rated journal (impact factor: 1.3) and getting a publication in this journal doesn't say much about the quality of the paper.

A little humility could have went a long way here. Below is the Authors Wikipedia Page ( where is yours?)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zden%C4%9Bk_Ba%C5%BEant

I'll spotlight a particularly relevant piece of text from it. (Since you seem to have trouble thinking for yourself)

"Bažant, who is generally regarded as the world leader in research on scaling in the mechanics of solids,[1] is the author of six books dealing with concrete creep, stability of structures, fracture and size effect, inelastic analysis and scaling of structural strength. He is an Illinois registered Structural Engineer, and is one of the original top 100 ISI highly cited researchers in engineering (of all fields, worldwide). By June 2015, his H-index is 103, i10 is 496, and total citations 46,000 (on Google, minus self-citations).

Bažant, with his disciples, has made groundbreaking contributions to four areas of solid and structural mechanics"

This really puts a wrench into your, he could be just some fool that published a paper. For a PhD you seem to have a lot to learn yourself.

Originally posted by joe shmo
I'd prefer you read this yourself:

http://www.civil.northwestern.edu/people/bazant/PDFs/Backup%20of%20Papers/466.pdf

But if I must, directly from the analysis.

"No experienced structural engineer watching the attack expected
the WTC towers to collapse. [b]No skyscraper has ever before collapsed
due to fire. The fact that the WTC towers did, becko ...[text shortened]... be minimal. That is... I expected you to act as respectable scientist, I was apparently wrong.

Well, since we're talking about conspiracy theories questions of motive become relevant. It seems strange that a conspiracy would develop to piggyback the destruction of WTC 7 on the back of a conspiracy to destroy the twin towers, there is no apparently good motive. Clearly there was opportunity. I doubt that you can show there was the means, as you need a way of collapsing a building neatly when you know it will be empty to collect on the insurance (or whatever purpose the conspiracy was for).

All you can establish with the pdf you referenced is that the collapse of WTC 7 was unexpected. You need a credible explanation for the collapse which is compatible with a conspiracy and enough evidence of the sort that a judge wouldn't immediately rule out as speculation to start considering a conspiracy as a serious possibility.

Having said all that there's no reason to dismiss it utterly, because had you told me that someone would fly a plane into the ground to get their name in the paper I'd have thought you were making it up, until it happened. It's worth doing reality checks every now and again.

Originally posted by DeepThought
Well, since we're talking about conspiracy theories questions of motive become relevant. It seems strange that a conspiracy would develop to piggyback the destruction of WTC 7 on the back of a conspiracy to destroy the twin towers, there is no apparently good motive. Clearly there was opportunity. I doubt that you can show there was the means, as you ...[text shortened]... you were making it up, until it happened. It's worth doing reality checks every now and again.

Well,...if I had opened with what I actually speculate to be a motive I would have been immediately dismissed as a crank conspiracy nut. As you can see by the posts, even though I tried to suggest a more scientific approach they desperately tried to get me to spout a motive. Some of the others on here joined together in mocking me with ridiculous scenarios (implying that is obliviously how unintelligent I am).

If you are actually interested in what I believe could be a possible motive ( even though I don't think its relevant to my point in here); I don't believe WTC 7 was a stand alone conspiracy. I believe it was apart of a much larger one. How were the fires lit? None of the other surrounding buildings in the vicinity had the same problem. It wasn't even the nearest building to ground zero. Why bother to destroy a building that wasn't attacked? Perhaps it was assurance not insurance that was the issue, but who knows? I have heard WTC 7 was mostly office space for the CIA ( I do not know, nor have checked the validity of that information) I honestly believe the entire thing was perpetrated for much simpler economic purposes, that is... the economics of war. What better way to get the American people to have almost unanimous support for a war on foreign soil? Like I said, I'm not going to pretend to be capable of understanding the daily dealings of the people who play with countries, but I know that smaller conspiracies exist in every facet of our day to day lives, so why shouldn't they exist in the highest levels of government? Everything in the universe that we know of is like that, repeatable structure from the largest to the smallest. I also don't claim to believe that any of what I just stated would hold up in court. Just some thoughts.

Originally posted by joe shmo
Yes I read the paper. I am quite aware that it does not explicitly analyze WTC 7. Are you aware that it is not solely a report on WTC, but instead is a generalized solution to the 1D Mechanics of Progressive Collapse (The sited failure mode of WTC 7 by NIST). And only sites the Twin Towers for Example. The following are the conditions for progressive col ...[text shortened]... d be just some fool that published a paper. For a PhD you seem to have a lot to learn yourself.

Ohh, a "generalized solution to the 1D mechanics of progressive collapse." You got me now, no way I can debunk fancy mathematics.

Nothing in your copy and paste implies that the damage from the collapsing buildings and the subsequent fire could not have conceivably caused WTC7 to collapse. It remains the most likely explanation and you have not provided an alternative one. No evidence of a conspiracy, planted explosives, etc. etc. exists. No motive for a supposed conspiracy has been brought forward.

I did not write my own Wikipedia article like this guy apparently did (it happens more often than you think) but to be fair he does have a few more citations than I do. I wasn't saying that the article was wrong (I haven't read it in detail), just that you shouldn't attach too much weight to peer review. Peer review just means one or several colleagues browsed through the paper and couldn't find obvious mistakes immediately. Low-ranked journals tend to have less rigourous peer review; for instance the reviewers might have been PhD students or junior post-docs.

Originally posted by joe shmo
Well,...if I had opened with what I actually speculate to be a motive I would have been immediately dismissed as a crank conspiracy nut. As you can see by the posts, even though I tried to suggest a more scientific approach they desperately tried to get me to spout a motive. Some of the others on here joined together in mocking me with ridiculous scenario ...[text shortened]... on't claim to believe that any of what I just stated would hold up in court. Just some thoughts.

One thing maybe you haven't considered: any explosive device leaves traces. They went through everything with a fine tooth comb and no trace of such explosives were found. It would have been obvious to the inspectors if explosives were present.

All the conspiracy theories in the world wouldn't cover up traces of c4 or whatever.

I would also think if the fires were set inside, there would be traces of accelerant found.

That is one thing fire marshals and their investigators look for. If it had been there, they would have found it. But why would you have to resort to conspiracy theories for fire? I frigging building fell on 7 and half tore up one face.

You don't think among all that destruction there were no heavy electrical wires floating around just waiting to be cut in two by the debris? Some of the wiring has to be 440 or so maybe even 900 volts and heavy wires. You cut through that stuff you will have a satisfying explosion. I know from direct experience. Even 220 volts can cause a big bang when it gets shorted. A 400+ volt line with heavy wires can bring temperatures up so high in an instant that anything like aluminum or wall board or cloth or chairs in a building would catch quickly. I'm sure the elevators had heavy duty wiring and there had to be wiring around the perifery of the building inside at least for lights.

I think the key reason behind the existence of WTC7 conspiracy theories is that if we accept that there was no conspiracy behind WTC7, then perhaps there is no conspiracy behind the two main towers either. Perhaps, just perhaps, terrorists did in fact fly some planes into those buildings causing them to collapse, and just maybe the US government intelligence services were simply too incompetent to see it coming. Apparently this latter possibility is more scary to some than the possibility of a secret society controlling the entire world through sinister plots.

Originally posted by sonhouse
One thing maybe you haven't considered: any explosive device leaves traces. They went through everything with a fine tooth comb and no trace of such explosives were found. It would have been obvious to the inspectors if explosives were present.

All the conspiracy theories in the world wouldn't cover up traces of c4 or whatever.

I would also think if ...[text shortened]... iring and there had to be wiring around the perifery of the building inside at least for lights.

It has been considered and there is documented evidence in the NIST report of NanoThermite ( A Military grade Incendiary). Also, FEMA and the Structural Engineer of the WTC himself cited Rivers of Molten Iron flowing from the tower. FEMA aslo documents partially evaporated Steel beams, requiring temperatures in excess of 4000F to achieve with hot sulfur corrosion.

I'm not going to go over the entire video with you. Please, just watch the first five minutes...There are plenty of actual citations taken directly from the official NIST report throughout the video backing his claims. Its an Interview on CSPAN! It seems as though you are avoiding watching it? You are not going to become a raving conspiracy lunatic, but you may come out with some doubt.

Ill post it for you again, please give it at least a few minutes then I wont have to answer all these questions as if I alone have done all the research (I haven't), but there are professionals in the field who have done significant research.

YouTube