I wrote:
PROBLEM: How do you know what airplane is going to hit? That is
impossible to predict!
Some other problems, equally severe, equally obvious:
How do you make the thermite work when there are thousands of gallons
of flaming kerosene around it, collapsing walls, no remaining
telephone connections, and so on? NIST supposes it would be "remotely
ignited and somehow held in direct contact." Imagine trying to do
this on the floor of a building that has been struck by airplane.
Suppose it is not done remotely, but by extra suicide volunteers
standing by ready to ignite the stuff and hold it next to the
pillars. They would be killed instantly, before they could operate
the equipment.
As I said, installing thermite in the lower floors would contribute
nothing to the destruction, and serve no purpose. But let us pretend
that the conspirators were extremely stupid and they thought you need
to cut more than one floor. (We are talking about someone in the Bush
administration, which includes some fairly stupid people, and for
that matter bin Laden himself did not think the building would fall
down even though he is an engineer.) Okay, so even though it is hard
to imagine an engineer who thinks the building could survive one
floor dropping onto a lower floor, let's say they put several
thousand pounds of thermite on a lower floor. How do they coordinate
the thermite cutting with the collapse? Two problems:
1. No one could predict the exact moment when the building would
start to fall. You cannot coordinate. If you cut too soon your
section of the building starts to fall first -- and everyone see
that; if you cut too late you are crushed by the falling building and
you contribute nothing.
2. It takes a long time to cut a steel beam with thermite. Hours,
actually, but let's pretend it is 20 minutes. Suppose they magically
know exactly when the building is going to fall; they still have to
start cutting 20 minutes earlier. People would notice a new raging
fire in progress on a lower floor as thousands of pounds of thermite
went off. You could not hide that, especially with hundreds of
television cameras pointed to the building, and hundreds of police
and firemen swarming through the place.
I could probably think of several other equally compelling
common-sense reasons to reject this hypothesis, but the whole notion
is so outlandish it is a waste of time to consider it. I am sure the
people at NIST felt that way, and they were right. It is, as I said,
like spending your time looking for a chemical reaction to explain
cold fusion. You should dismiss that hypothesis from the get-go.
- Jed
