It does for me, but that's a question for tanabear. I'm perfectly happy with scientific modeling of bounding cases, and in this particular instance, even simulation isn't required, just basic mathematical modeling. This evidently isn't sufficient for him.
I will answer your question and also try to answer the former.
I do not believe testing for chemical residue is even possible in the WTC case, for a variety of reasons:
- If I was running the testing, I would test steel pieces at the initiating event, i.e. the collapse zone. We have exactly zero steel pieces from the core within a floor of the point of failure, from either structure. All of them were so heavily damaged that they could not be identified.
- We would, therefore, have to test a much larger volume of steel. This introduces uncertainties. First, we know we're contaminating our sample, and so the likelihood of false-negative goes up substantially; we thus have to adjust our sensitivity, and this affects false-positive as well. Second, the damage suffered by the core columns that prevents identification also is expected to interfere with the chemical signatures. Third, even if we believe we have a positive result, we cannot uniquely position them and thus cannot confirm it either way. Results are, therefore, almost guaranteed to be inconclusive.
- As if that wasn't bad enough, the fires in particular are expected to destroy such chemical residue. Explosives, with no exceptions that I am aware of, are highly heat sensitive. That goes for their products as well. Even if the chemicals remained intact, most would have been baked off, melted, expressed as volatiles in the plume rather than found on the steel itself.
- The fires also create a confounding signal. Burning plastics create a diversity of aromatic compounds. There are several official reports confirming this.
- As a result, I do not see any possiblity of these tests being conclusive.
The more rational approach is to focus on explosives signatures that are not susceptible to these effects, of which there are several. Perhaps the most acceptable signature, from your perspective, is the characteristic fracture pattern created by explosives. Again, this is not wholly conclusive because not all steel could be identified and much was heavily damaged, but this test was conducted. All of the recovered steel was examined by experts for signs of unusual failure modes. This failure mode was not seen in any piece of steel. That's about as close as we are likely to ever come to proving a negative.
The reason I don't feel there is any hypocrisy here -- my stating a belief that there were no explosives, based on no testing, while rejecting a belief in molten steel, also based on no testing -- is that the two situations are not actually symmetric. As I've described above, there actually have been tests that should have revealed explosives. Chemical tests, no, but tests nonetheless.
Regarding molten steel, on the other hand, if you actually go to the source of the "molten steel" statements, not a single one was made by an expert, and two of the five I know about have been traced to transcription errors and thus never occurred at all. Furthermore, the signature of molten steel, unlike the chemical residue, includes "pigs" of formerly molten steel. It is not nearly so fragile a signature, and it is expected to survive the collapses, fires, and cleanup process. It also would have been found through simple sorting and inspection, and does not require a specialized test. Nonetheless, it was not found. I am therefore more comfortable declaring this negative result. I don't find this to be hypocritical at all.
That is essentially what I'm asking for, yes. It's a tall order, I admit. However, anyone who harbors such beliefs for logical reasons must be able to express this, if she thinks about it hard enough.
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