Taking a Closer Look: Hard Science and the Collapse of the World
Trade Center

by Dave Heller, article originally appeared in Garlic
and Grass

While it may be difficult to awaken everyone from
their state-induced fog of fear, we are at a critical point in history
which requires us to try. We truly must take an objective look at
the facts and evidence surrounding 9-11.

While none of the many 9-11 researchers knows exactly what happened
on that fateful day in September almost 3 years ago, any sensible
person can easily spot dozens of inconsistencies in the official story
that is being forced upon us.

And these inconsistencies are huge. They range from the apparent
stand-down of our immense military arsenal (for over an hour and a
half) to the small hole and lack of debris at the Pentagon. There
was Bush's bizarre, uninterrupted photo op in a Florida elementary
school, and then there is the matter of the remains of Flight 93 being
scattered over eight miles of Pennsylvania farmland, a fact which
suggests the plane may have been shot down. The official story seems
wrong on all of these points.

But the focus of this article is on just one point: the odd collapse
of the three buildings in the World Trade Center complex.

How I First Began to Question: WTC7

The World Trade Center (WTC) contained seven buildings. The Twin
Towers were called buildings One (WTC1) and Two (WTC2). They collapsed
in truly astounding fashion, but the event that caused me first to
question the official story about the events of 9-11 was viewing videos
of the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7 (WTC7).

If you've forgotten, WTC7 was a 47-story building that was not hit
by an airplane or by any significant debris from either WTC1 or WTC2.
Buildings 3, 4, 5, and 6 were struck by massive amounts of debris
from the collapsing Twin Towers, yet none collapsed, despite their
thin-gauge steel supports.

Viewing the Collapse of WTC7 The 9-11 commemorative videos produced by PBS and CNN are best. Both clearly show WTC7's implosion. Lower resolution Internet movies are also available.

6.5 seconds. This is a mere 0.5 seconds more than freefall in a
vacuum. To restate this, a rock dropped from the 47th floor would
have taken at least 6 seconds to hit the ground. WTC7, in its entirety,
fell to the earth in 6.5 seconds. Now, recall, we're supposed to believe
that each floor of the building "pancaked" on the one below. Each
of the 47 floors supposedly pancaked and collapsed, individually.
Yet WTC7 reached the ground in 0.5 seconds longer than freefall. Is
this really possible?

Judge for yourself. Watch WTC7 go down. It takes 6.5 seconds. Take
out your stopwatch.

What About Towers One and Two?

The odd, swift collapse of WTC7 made me reconsider the Twin Towers
and how they fell. As I had with WTC7, I first studied video footage
available on the web. Then I acquired and watched a DVD of the collapses,
frame by frame.

What struck me first was the way the second plane hit WTC2, the
South Tower. I noticed that this plane, United Airlines Flight 175,
which weighed over 160,000 pounds and was traveling at 350 mph, did
not even visibly move the building when it slammed into it. How, I
wondered, could a building that did not visibly move from a heavy
high speed projectile collapse at near freefall speed less than an
hour later?

WTC1, WTC2, and WTC7 are the buildings in gray.

Next, I turned my attention to steel beams that fell in freefall
next to the building as it collapsed. The beams were falling at the
same rate that the towers themselves were descending. Familiar with
elementary physics, including principles of conservation of energy
and momentum, this seemed quite impossible if the towers were indeed
"pancaking," which is the official theory.

The height of the South Tower is 1362 feet. I calculated that from
that height, freefall in a vacuum (read, absolutely no resistance
on earth) is 9.2 seconds. According to testimony provided to the 9-11
Commission, the tower fell in 10 seconds. Other data shows it took
closer to 14 seconds. So the towers fell within 0.8-4.8 seconds of
freefall in a vacuum. Just like WTC7, this speed seemed impossible
if each of the 110 floors had to fail individually.

As I was considering this, another problem arose. There is a principle
in physics called the Law of Conservation of Energy. There is also
the Law of Conservation of Momentum. I'll briefly explain how these
principles work. Let's assume there are two identical Honda Civics
on the freeway. One is sitting in neutral at a standstill (0 mph).
The other is coasting at 60 mph. The second Honda slams into the back
of the first one. The first Honda will then instantaneously be going
much faster than it was, and the second will instantaneously be going
much slower than it was.

This is how the principle works in the horizontal direction, and
it works the same in the vertical direction, with the added constant
force of gravity added to it.
Jim Hoffman, a professional scientist published in several peer-reviewed
scientific journals, took a long look at all of this. He calculated
that even if the structure itself offered no resistance, that is to
say, even if the 110 floors of each tower were hovering in mid-air,
the "pancake" theory would still have taken a minimum of 15.5 seconds
to reach the ground. So, even if the building essentially didn't exist,
if it provided no resistance at all to the collapse, just the floors
hitting each other and causing each other to decelerate would've taken
15.5 seconds to reach the ground.

But of course the buildings did exist. They had stood for over 30
years. The floors weren't hovering in mid-air. So how did the building
provide no resistance?

Yet another observation one makes in watching the collapsing towers
is the huge dust clouds and debris, including steel beams, that were
thrown hundreds of feet out horizontally from the towers as they fell.
If we are to believe the pancake theory, this amount of scattering
debris, fine pulverized concrete dust, and sheetrock powder would
clearly indicate massive resistance to the vertical collapse. So there
is an impossible conflict. You either have a miraculous, historical,
instantaneous, catastrophic failure that occurs within a fraction
of a second of freefall and that kicks out little dust, or you have
a solid, hefty building that remains virtually unaffected after a
massive, speeding projectile hits it. You either have a house of cards
or a house of bricks. The building either resists its collapse or
it doesn't.

And we know the WTC Towers were made of reinforced steel and concrete
that would act much more like bricks than cards.

Thus, put simply, the floors could not have been pancaking. The
buildings fell too quickly. The floors must all have been falling
simultaneously to reach the ground in such a short amount of time.
But how?

What About the Fires?

The official story maintains that fires weakened the buildings. Jet
fuel supposedly burned so hot it began to melt the steel columns supporting
the towers. But steel-framed skyscrapers have never collapsed
from fire, since they're built from steel that doesn't melt below
2750 degrees Fahrenheit. No fuel, not even jet fuel, which is really
just refined kerosene, will burn hotter than 1500 degrees Fahrenheit.

According to the 9-11 report by the Federal Emergency Management
Agency (FEMA), "the specifics of the fires in WTC7 and how they
caused the building to collapse remain unknown at this tim."

Aside from its startling nonchalance, this statement makes a rather
profound assumption. Again, no building prior to 9-11, in the 100-plus
year history of steel frame buildings, had ever collapsed from fire.

The flattened ruins are WTC1 and WTC2 (in the middle), and WTC7 (at the bottom)

Did the FEMA investigators not think to ask the New York City Fire
Department how they thought the fire started, or how the fires could
have caused the astounding, historical collapse? This would seem to
be an elementary step in any investigation about a fire. Instead,
they chose to leave the cause of the collapse "unknown."

Conclusion

So if the science in this article is correct (none of it goes beyond
the tenth grade level), then we know that the floors of the three
WTC buildings were not pancaking but were falling simultaneously.
We
also know that fire is an insufficient explanation for the initiation
of the collapse of the buildings.

Why, then, did the three WTC buildings fall?

There is a method that has been able to consistently get skyscrapers
to fall as fast as the three buildings of the World Trade Center fell
on 9-11. In this method, each floor of a building is destroyed at
just the moment the floor above is about to strike it. Thus, the floors
fall simultaneously ? and in virtual freefall. This method, when precisely
used, has indeed given near-freefall speed to demolitions of buildings
all over the world in the past few decades. This method could have
brought down WTC7 in 6.5 seconds. This method is called controlled
demolition.

A controlled demolition would have exploded debris horizontally
at a rapid rate. A controlled demolition would also explain the fine,
pulverized concrete powder, whereas pancaking floors would leave chunks
of concrete. Controlled demolition would also explain the seismic
evidence recorded nearby of two small earthquakes, each just before
one of the Twin Towers collapsed. And finally, controlled demolition
would explain why three steel skyscrapers, two of which were struck
by planes and one of which wasn't, all collapsed in essentially the
same way.

The massive energy required to pulverize concrete into
microscopic dust

suggests the use of explosives

Ongoing Questions

But having established that all three WTC towers had to have been
assisted in their failures, I asked myself, Who could have planted
the explosives to blow up the buildings in a controlled demolition?
Could fundamentalist Muslim fanatics have gotten the plans for those
buildings, engineered the demolition, and then gotten into them to
plant the explosives?

This seemed improbable. And after learning that WTC7 housed the
FBI, CIA, and the OEM, it seemed impossible. Then I thought, Why
would terrorists engineer a building to implode? Wouldn't they
want to cause even more damage to the surrounding buildings and possibly
create more havoc and destruction from debris exploding away from
the building? And if they'd planted explosives in the buildings, why
would they have bothered hijacking and flying planes into them?
Perhaps WTC7 was demolished to destroy evidence that would answer
these questions. To this day, I don't know. But this is how I began
to question the official story about 9-11.

Recently I learned that President Bush's brother, Marvin Bush, is
a part owner of the company that not only provided security for both
United and American Airlines, but also for the World Trade Center
complex itself. I also discovered that Larry Silverstein, who had
bought the leasing rights for the WTC complex from the NY/NJ Port
Authority in May of 2001 for $200 million, had received a $3.55 billion
insurance settlement right after 9-11 - yet he was suing for an additional
$3.55 billion by claiming the two hits on the towers constituted two
separate terrorist attacks! He stood to make $7 billion dollars on
a four month investment. Talk about motive.

In conclusion, I'll repeat myself. None of the many 9-11 researchers
can definitively say exactly what happened on that fateful day in
September almost 3 years ago. But any sensible person can easily spot
dozens of inconsistencies in the official story that is being forced
upon us. And the fact is, most of the available 9-11 evidence points
to at least some level of government complicity or foreknowledge.

Please, read more for yourself. Don't take my word for it. Most of
all, do not buy the double-speak that visible politicians and the
media use to discount any question about 9-11. Clearly, there are
no "conspiracy theories" surrounding 9-11. The official
story itself affirms that there was obviously some kind of conspiracy.
It's just a question of which conspiracy occurred. We know it wasn't
mere coincidence that several hijackers happened to be on several
different airplanes and happened to hijack them at the exact same
time and happened to pick the World Trade Center as a target. The
real question is, "Who was involved in the conspiracy?"

Dave Heller, who has degrees in physics and architecture, is
a builder and engaged citizen in Berkeley, California.

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