A critique of Dr Steven Jones' new 9/11 paper

[Micpsi]

Dr Steven E. Jones has surveyed his 9/11 research in his new paper entitled "Revisiting 9/11/2001 - Applying the Scientific Method".
http://www.nineeleven.co.uk/board/viewtopic.php?t=9092
This is my critique of it.

He spends as many as the first five pages of a 28-page paper on a topic that is irrelevant to 9/11 investigations, namely, his early research into muon-catalyzed fusion. No doubt, he does this to establish his scientific credentials, so that those (particularly scientists) who have not heard of him will take seriously his research paper on such a controversial topic as government involvement in 9/11. Jones then discusses his understanding of the scientific method, a version that Dr Jim Fetzer, a former professor of the history and philosophy of science, has heavily criticized in his weekly broadcasts at Genesis Communications Network. According to Jones, you gather observations and propose a hypothesis to explain them, then perform experiments to test it. However, critics of Jones like Fetzer and Dr Judy Wood accuse him of cherry-picking just the evidence that can be easily (they would say ‘naively’) explained in terms of explosives and thermite/thermate and of ignoring anomalous evidence (burnt or melted cars, cooky-cutter holes in WTC 5 and WTC 6, etc), which Fetzer, Wood and others judge cannot be so simply explained. It is not good enough, they say, for experiments to appear to support a theory if it cannot account for all the other things needing explanation. Indeed, put simply, that objection is the crux of the current rift between these two co-founders of the Scholars for 9/11 Truth organisation, as well as between their supporters.

Jones then goes through arguments well-known to 9/11 truthers for WTC 7 being a controlled demolition and for the Law of Conservation of Momentum not allowing WTC 1 and WTC 2 to collapse at near free-fall speed if their floors had been dropping on top of one another like dominoes. So far, so good. Jones expresses the pious hope that NIST will re-examine whether planted explosives brought down WTC 7. I have news for him. They already knew that when they made their investigation! So did some fire fighters and police at the scene. I find it difficult to believe that NIST could have been kept in the dark. NIST investigators are hardly going to consider as a new hypothesis what was common knowledge to some on the ground, when it implies a level of conspiracy far beyond the capacity of 19 Arabs to carry out!

It is when Jones moves away from the well-trodden territory of criticisms of the NIST investigation and the 9/11 Commission Report and returns to his beloved thermate that he starts to display the weaknesses of his own work. Speaking about the molten metal that poured out of the South Tower shortly before it collapsed, Jones says: “The reason why hot flowing aluminum appears silvery is very understandable. Simple metals incandesce when you heat them up, and orange hot represents a temperature of about 1000 °C. Aluminum alloy melts at roughly 600 °C. We heated the steel pan and saw the pan glow yellow-orange. However, the melted aluminum contains many free electrons and will therefore reflect more light. Aluminum also has a low emissivity, meaning that the aluminum is glowing/incandescing but only very faintly. In daylight conditions, the liquid appears silvery due to the high reflectivity particularly when poured out. The glowing liquid flowing from the South Tower could not be aluminum because it does not appear silvery - rather, it has an “orange glow” (in NIST’s words and by observation also).” However, Dr Judy Wood claims
http://janedoe0911.tripod.com/Aluminum_Glows.html
that her laboratory work, backed by photos, has proved Jones wrong. According to Wood, aluminium can glow at high temperatures. Jones does not even mention this contrary observation by a former assistant professor of mechanical engineering, much less refute it. He points out that aluminium has low emissivity but fails to mention (because it hurts his case) that its emissivity increases with temperature, becoming comparable to that of iron at high temperatures. Omission of discussion of such a crucial issue as the identification of the molten metal flowing out of the South Tower was not a good idea. Rightly or wrongly, it suggests to anyone who has followed the arguments between Jones and Wood that he knows he is wrong but does not want to admit it because it weakens his case (and thus his scientific reputation) for the use of thermate at WTC. So he has to ignore Wood's criticism in the hope that no one will notice that he has not addressed this pertinent question! Whatever his opinion of Wood, Jones had this opportunity to prove her wrong. But he failed to use it. Indeed, amazingly, he does not refer at all to the scathing criticisms of his work by Wood and Morgan Reynolds:
http://nomoregames.net/index.php?page=911&subpage1=jones_scientific_me thod
http://nomoregames.net/index.php?page=911&subpage1=helping_jones
http://nomoregames.net/index.php?page=911&subpage1=trouble_with_jones
Why no response to his critics in order to prove them wrong? His apparent disdain can only make readers suspect that he cannot answer them because he knows he made a faux pas on this particular issue. This is ironic, for even if Wood is correct, it is not necessarily fatal to his cause. She would still have a hard time explaining what (if not thermate) heated aluminium to the 1000 degrees Centigrade or more needed to increase its emissivity enough for it to glow like the molten metal that flowed out of the corner of the South Tower. A temperature as high as this is rarely seen even in momentary flashovers in building fires.

Jones claims (although no other scientist has replicated his analysis) that he has found evidence for thermate in iron-rich particles that he extracted from a sample of dust taken from an apartment about 100 metres from the South Tower. He argues that it could not have been contaminated by thermate possibly used by workers during clean-up of Ground Zero for the following reasons:
1. the dust was collected a week later, before much clean-up began. However, even though it was in its early stages, Jones cannot deny that such work was going on before this dust was collected, so what makes him think that workers would not have used linear thermate cutting charges at Ground Zero even a week after 9/11? How can he be sure that iron-rich particles produced by thermate torches cutting through steel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wn-MCCZ3O1M
and carried on the wind from Ground Zero could not have passed through the two broken windows of a room only 100 metres away and settled in dust from the two towers? The simple truth is that he cannot admit this possibility because it would destroy his claim.

2. Jones says that there is no documentation that thermate was used by the workers and tells those who argue for its use to provide it. Well, they can offer something just as good. These photos
http://i18.photobucket.com/albums/b108/janedoe444/trouble/44_thermite1 _0033.jpg
http://i18.photobucket.com/albums/b108/janedoe444/trouble/45_thermite2 _2960.jpg
strongly indicate that thermate was being used at Ground Zero. Those sparks are not coming from an oxyacetylene cutter! There is no operator in the photos. Nor are they just natural fires. The evidence for workers using thermate is therefore better than Jones wants to admit. Presumably, he has seen these photos appearing in papers written by Wood and Reynolds, so why did he not dismiss them in his new paper? Because he cannot.

3. Jones says: “Furthermore, Janette MacKinlay collected the dust inside her apartment just a few days after the buildings collapsed, so there was very little time for any molten-metal spheres created somehow by the clean-up itself to have made its way into her 4th-floor to be mingled in with the dust up there.” Well, actually, the collection was not a few days later but a whole week later, which did give sufficient time. Smoke and dust carried in the air from thermate torches at Ground Zero could easily have reached an apartment with broken windows merely 100 metres away and settled inside it. After all, dust from the falling South Tower did. Jones' arguments against contamination are weak. But he has, of course, to make them, otherwise, his strongest piece of evidence for thermate collapses.

4. Jones also claims: “In addition, the distance to the apartment from the clean-up operation is about 100 meters (about a football-field length), while in our experiments with thermite/thermate, the glowing sparks (metallic droplets) are seen to travel only a few meters or yards. The holes formed in the two broken windows of this apartment were about two feet by three feet, increasing the unlikelihood that any metallic spheres from the (improbable) use of thermate at GZ could have entered the apartment during the few days before the dust was collected.” I am unconvinced by this argument. The 2’x3’ holes were quite large enough for smoke created by clean-up activity at Ground Zero to have passed through them. Moreover, the particles created by the more violent explosions in the towers could have been far smaller than those Jones created in his simplistic lab experiment. This means that they could have travelled much further than a few metres. His experiment therefore does not rule out the possibility that thermate residues in smoke generated by thermate cutters used in the clean-up reached a house 100 metres away.

Jones concludes: “This is a compelling argument against “accidental” contamination of the dust she collected in her apartment even if thermate had been used during clean-up (which is highly unlikely due to safety/liability issues.)”

Hardly compelling. In fact, Jones' argument is full of gaping holes. It is almost certain that Janette MacKinlay would have brought dust into her apartment on the soles of her shoes every time she entered it, after walking in the dust-filled vicinity of Ground Zero 100 metres away. Perhaps iron-rich particles in this dust got dislodged and mixed with the rest of the dust in her apartment from the South Tower, becoming part of Jones’ sample. Perhaps other people brought dust into the house as well. Perhaps these particles mostly came through the windows. My point is this: the contamination problem in Jones’ sample is far more serious than he wants to admit. The fact that he felt he had to make so many arguments against it shows that he considers it a serious issue. Unfortunately, he can dismiss the possibility only with highly contestable arguments, not with scientific rigour.

Here are my rebuttals of other points in Jones’ paper:
“(On the other hand, the fast-moving dust clouds on 9/11/2001 travelled for many blocks and certainly would have carried small residues with them, for example, residues from thermite cutter-charges used to help destroy the Towers.)”

Why would those who destroyed the towers even risk using thermite cutter charges that would leave traces all over the WTC and elsewhere for curious physicists to detect eventually, thus exposing their fiendish plot? Because they wanted to quicken the cleaning up of Ground Zero by making girder fragments small enough to fit trucks? Heck, that's taking a huge risk just to assist the clean-up workers. Not really credible, I would say. Perhaps, however, the plotters did not anticipate thermate ever being detected, in which case this argument is not particularly persuasive.

“Furthermore, ironrich spheres were found in the WTC dust several blocks away from GZ in large numbers which essentially eliminates the possibility that these spherules could be due to thermite used at ground zero.”

Who is claiming that all the ‘ironrich (sic) spheres’ had to come from the clean-up site? That is a self-serving, straw-man argument. If the iron spherules had been, created by tons of high-explosives blasting steel and heating up fine iron fragments until they melted and became spherical through surface tension in the liquid, why should we not expect to find them in WTC dust several blocks away from Ground Zero? Given an alternative cause for these iron spherules, Jones' argument turns into dust.

“Iron melts at 1538 C, so the presence of these numerous iron-rich spheres implies a very high temperature. Too hot in fact for the fires in the WTC buildings since jet fuel (kerosene), paper and wood furniture – and other office materials – cannot reach the temperatures needed to melt iron or steel.”

Yes. But not too hot for the temperatures created by high-explosives in the immediate vicinity of steel girders. According to one authoritative source: “The split second of a high-explosive detonation may produce temperatures as high as 5,500 kelvin and pressures up to half a million times that of Earth's atmosphere.”
http://www.llnl.gov/str/Yoo.html

“In addition, if one adds other oxidizers to the mix such as copper oxide, potassium permanganate, zinc nitrate, and/or barium nitrate, then copper, potassium, manganese, zinc and/or barium will show strong peaks in the thermite-produced metallic spherules. Thus, one can determine by X-EDS analysis just what elements were used in the originating aluminothermic mixture. It is quite possible that different formulations of thermite analogs were used in the destruction of the WTC Towers and WTC 7.”

Whoops! WTC 7? Who has suggested that thermate was used for WTC 7? It was a classic controlled demolition. There is no video evidence for thermate burning away before, during or after the demolition itself. Indeed, there is no evidence for any controlled demolition prior to 9/11 ever being carried out with thermate! He assumes this merely because he knows molten steel was found under the rubble of WTC 7. This is an example of how obsessed Jones is in invoking thermate as a causative factor for the collapse of every building in the WTC. Jones argues that the presence of various elements such as copper, potassium, zinc and barium in the iron-rich particles is due to oxidisers having been added to the thermate. He regards their presence as confirmation that thermate was used to melt the iron spheres. He ignores the fact that these elements are commonly found in the everyday world, so that their presence in his dust sample could easily be accounted for as contaminants from the cocktail of metals from the towers that were dispersed into the air over a wide area. To pick out only one explanation of their presence in the particles because it suits his theory and to ignore others amounts to inexcusable bias. A proper scientific approach should consider all possibilities. Jones can only argue against contamination with contentious hand-waving. He cannot rigorously disprove it.

Jones ends his discussion by saying:
"We consider the information borne by these previously-molten microspheres found in large numbers in the WTC dust, for they tell us much about what took place that remarkable day in history."

The trouble is that they don't tell us anything that is certain because the information is ambiguous. We would hope scientists could give us the truth, not just something based upon a particular interpretation of the material evidence. The best that can be said of Jones’ claim to have detected thermate is that it may be evidence that thermate was used on 9/11. Unfortunately, that is certainly not strong enough to convict in a court of law. His claim is based on evidence that is flawed because (despite his denial) his sample might have been contaminated. It is also not good enough for the 9/11 truth movement seeking re-investigation of the events. When forced by public pressure to respond to evidence of thermate at WTC, the American government will no doubt say that it was, indeed, used during the clean-up – whether it was or not! Who, then, will be able to prove that the government is lying? Where’s your big smoking gun, then, Dr Jones?

I don’t deny that there is evidence suggestive of thermate present at WTC. For example, FEMA reported without explanation that steel samples taken from the rubble showed evidence of “oxidation and sulfidation with subsequent intergranular melting”
http://www.fema.gov/library/wtcstudy.shtm FEMA, Appendix C, http://www.fema.gov/pdf/library/fema403_apc.pdf
Also, there are photos of red-hot metal at Ground Zero:
http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2006/WTC-Jones19mar0601.jpg
Steeling the thunder from Wood, Jones now refers to the corroded, sometimes partly melted cars in a car park near the towers as evidence supporting his theory (not hers!), namely, that the dust clouds that swept over them contained thermate that caused them to ignite. Finally, Jones sees the pools of molten metal reported in the rubble and under WTC 7 by Peter Tully of Tully Construction of Flushing, N.Y., and Mark Loizeaux of Controlled Demolition, Inc. of Phoenix, Md., as evidence of thermate. This would be a plausible explanation but for the fact that they said that molten metal was seen three, four and five weeks later. Any left-over thermate would surely have been consumed by that time and any steel kept molten by it should have cooled and solidified into slag long before then. It suggests that the molten metal was being heated continually by something other than thermate. My point is that all this supposed evidence for thermate is indirect and inconclusive. Other kinds of physics may have been at work, causing these unusual features. Fetzer and Wood criticize Jones for not considering other possibilities before promoting his particular explanation. Thermate is assumed by default without an iota of supporting evidence merely because no one has yet thought of an alternative cause of the molten pools - or so Jones judges (others will disagree). Such anomalies are not even prima facie evidence of thermate, let alone irrefutable proof, if problems exist in their explanation, as is the case for the molten pools.

We should be wary of confronting believers in the official story of 9/11 with evidence for 'an inside job' that may have alternative, perhaps even prosaic, explanations. Those in the US government who will resist all attempts to re-examine the events of 9/11 will no doubt have their experts come up with all sorts of explanations for these anomalies when the challenge finally comes. If we need it at all, we need physical evidence that cannot be refuted or explained away. The signature of thermate that Jones found in iron particles taken from a dust sample near WTC can be possibly explained in terms of contamination. Whether that explanation is implausible (as Jones thinks) or not (as I think) IS BESIDE THE POINT. Like it or not, it provides a measure of doubt for critics of 9/11 truth to seize on. Jones’ finding is not the conclusive, smoking gun evidence for a high-level conspiracy that many want to believe it is. It is wrong to ascribe to his discovery the same significance as that attached to many damning pieces of evidence uncovered by less well-known people years before Jones appeared on the scene. In my opinion, persisting to promote possibly flawed evidence can only damage the cause of the 9/11 truth movement. It does not need endorsement by mainstream scientists if their microscopic evidence for one of the causes of the collapse of the towers is refutable.

[Ian]

Cheers Micpsi

My thoughts are that Jones' intial (and subsequently updated) paper is far superior to his latest offering. I skim read much of the paper, particularly the sections not to do with 9/11 as it didn't engage me in the way his previous paper did.

Steven Jones seems to have done some great work, but I don't think people should forward / link to this article on his reputation alone. It just doesn't hang together well as a paper.

Finally, do many scientific papers have lines such as this in them?

"Many of us sense a higher Source guiding our research and peace efforts." (from the conclusion, pg. 81)

Ian

[John White]