mikemc wrote:On the flip side of the argument, I think the viscoelastic supports aka big rubbery antisway washers may have not withstood the heat and may have even caught fire. That would leave the floors with only a portion of their support. Add the weight of some collapsed floors on top of a poorly supported lower floor, and you could see how it might happen on it's own.
The viscoelastic dampers are basically rubber, so I think they probably melted fairly quickly. They don't provide any structural support at all - two slabs of rubber sandwiched around a large plate that's welded to the bottom chord of the truss. The plate and dampers sit within a very large C-Channel. Like a male/female connection. If they melted, the support is still very much there - just not as cushy, lol.
*shrug* I like talking about this - even if it is years later and things get heated. If folks think this thread is long, they need to go to some of the Truther or MatSci forums. Holy Shit. There's a thread in a MatSci forum that got to be 40 pages long in 2 1/2 days; with epic chem composition discussions that were all but lost on me. Basically a bunch of serious geeks discussing the pros and cons of the Jones report. Most comments are cons and get savage. Dudes that actually DO have the expertise to review every aspect of the report and have found numerous problems. Here's an example.
Perhaps you could pass this on to Steven Jones:
One of the corner stones of Harrit et al’s “Active Thermite” paper is the assertion that the bi-layered chips contain elemental aluminum. The basis for this claim is the XEDS spectrum presented in Figure 17 of the paper. Figure 17 shows the X-ray fluorescence spectrum of an area located within the red side of a WTC red/gray chip after exposure to methyl ethyl ketone for 55 hours.
The most important features of the Figure 17 spectrum are a large Al peak at 1.49 keV and a much smaller O peak at 0.52 keV. (The additional C peak at 0.28 keV is probably organic carbon contamination and is not relevant to the present discussion).
On page 18 of the “Active Thermitic” paper Harrit et al. have this to say about the XEDS spectrum in Figure 17:
“Using a conventional quantification routine, it was found that the aluminium significantly exceeded the oxygen present (approximately a 3:1 ratio). Thus while some of the aluminium may be oxidized, there is insufficient oxygen present to account for all the aluminium; some of the aluminium must therefore exist in elemental form in the red material. This is an important result.”
The “conventional quantification routine” referred to by Harrit et al would be a computer program based on X-ray attenuation coefficients that are used to correct for the variable yields of X-rays emitted at different energies in different materials. The characteristic X-ray emissions of oxygen and aluminium are, as we have seen, ~ 1 keV. At this energy, the linear attenuation coefficient of X-rays passing through O is about four times that of the same X-rays in Al. This means that the oxygen peaks in XRF-spectra emitted by materials with equal concentrations of Al and O, are about ¼ the intensity of the aluminum peaks.
This 1:4 O/Al peak intensity ratio is in fact observed in published spectra of alumina, Al2O3, which is very nearly 50 % O and 50 % Al (by weight!). Thus I would refer the reader to the XEDS spectrum of nano-Al2O3 in the paper by Xi Jin Xu published in Materials Letters 60, 2331, (2006), and the spectrum of Al203 particles produced by a thermite reaction reported by N. Ilic in Materials Characterization 42, 243, (1999). These spectra have an O/Al peak ratio of 0.25 +/- 0.05; Harrit et al’s “aluminium rich” area of the red chip has an O/Al ratio of 0.2 +/- 0.01. Thus the observed level of aluminium “enrichment” in the red chips, above and beyond the level of Al in pure Al2O3, is very small ( ~ 5 % !!!) and shows that the red chips contain far more Al2O3 than elemental Al.
Thus it can hardly be said that the red chips are a "thermitic material" when the necessary 50 %metallic aluminum component is sadly lacking .....
A MatScientist, talking not from a position of emotion but a position of knowledge. There are dozen upon dozens more posts like that. There's a few of em who are supporting the Jones report, but they are waaaay in the minority. Like us, they swear at each other as well, but generally do it using chemical intensity ratios, lol.
No XRD analysis is absolutely the most common complaint, however. Again, it's the difference between looking at a photo of fried chicken and actually TESTing the shit to make sure it's fried chicken.
better yet cite any credible source that there were bombs used
