Maddenation
Truth in scholarship?
This BYU physics professor is a founding member of Scholars for 9/11 Truth, a group that believes the World Trade Center was not brought down by the planes and subsequent fires, but more likely by controlled explosive charges. Jones has recently resigned from the group and taken an early retirement from BYU, ostensibly to do independent research.
One of the arguments for the controlled demolition theory is that the buildings, especially WTC 7, which was not hit directly, fell too fast and too “cleanly.” Jones argues that the time it took the buildings to fall was only slightly longer than the time it would take an object dropped from the roof to hit the gound, based on Newton’s second law. He says, with some validity, that having to smash up the rest of the building on the way down should have delayed the fall more than it did. The only way to explain the rapid (and seemingly controlled) collapse is to posit that explosive charges were detonated lower in the building to get the rest of the building out of the way. Sounds like something Dave’s physics students can work on.
Jones has other arguments, of course (see “Why Indeed Did the WTC Buildings Completely Collapse?” on the Scholars site), but they are all based on physics and chemistry and, well, assumptions. As far as I know, he doesn’t address the issue of how the conspirators could have pulled it off and kept it a secret. And then there’s the coordination with Al Qaeda, unless you believe the planes hitting the towers was a hoax too.
The reason I don’t support conspiracy theories (with the possible exception of the Kennedy assassination) is that I just don’t believe large numbers of people can keep a secret very long. There may well be some anomalies in the reports explaining 9/11, but suggesting it was a government conspiracy is in the same category as asserting that the holocaust didn’t happen, or we didn’t really land men on the moon. Why is a physics professor lending his name to such folly?
Dad • Conspiracies • 01/03/07 • 0 comments
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