Part 8: Mano Thermites in the dust
Sorry for continuing the "pun" thread on manothermites...
Anyway, here is part 8. I want to know if any of you are willing to receive acknolwedgements by name in my video. I've gotten so much help from chemists, metallurgists, engineers, physicists, you name it. This is a treasure. As you can see, I sometimes credit you anonymously but attaching a name gives more credibility. I've put Ryan Mackey's name in because he already ahs his name on the white paper.
Anyway, here we go, for what was a tough section but I think it's pretty clear now.
Thanks,
Chris Mohr
8. Nanothermites in Dust and
Conclusion for Twin Towers Rebuttal
Slide: There are two scientific reasons I am not 100% convinced Richard Gage’s controlled demolition theory is wrong. First, I am not a scientist, I can’t study complex formulas, so my understanding of the arguments is limited by the fact that I have to rely on a narrative explanation. Second, the thermitic materials allegedly found in the World Trade Center dust in 2008 is the strongest argument I have seen yet, and I hope we all have a chance to see this matter resolved. In our March 6, 2011 debate, Richard threw down the gauntlet and demanded I explain “The red-gray chips of advanced energetic nanothermite composite material found in the WTC dust. or the debate is over." Here’s what he’s talking about.
In 2008, an allegedly peer-reviewed scientific article appeared in Bentham’s Open Chemical Physics Journal purporting to have found that about 0.1% of the WTC dust had nanothermite explosives in it. That’s tons of high-grade explosives. The article is called “Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe” by Niels H. Harrit, Jeffrey Farrer, Steven E. Jones, Kevin R. Ryan, Frank M. Legge, Daniel Farnsworth, Gregg Roberts, James R. Gourley, and Bradley R. Larsen. The experiments included spectographic analysis of the chemical compounds, measuring the energy released in the burning of the chips, various chemical processes to isolate the chemical compounds in the dust, and more. The four dust sources were received from individuals who had collected the World Trade Center Dust near the collapse zone shortly after 911, and their locations and times were carefully tracked to establish the best possible chain of custody and to eliminate the possibility of contamination from debris removal processes.
0a.) One of the few articles published about nanothermites, which was quoted and used by Harrit and Jones in their nanothermite experiment, is from Lawrence Livermore researcher
T.M.Tillotson and others. The paper, "Nanostructured energetic materials using sol-gel methodologies", was publised in the Journal of Non-Crystalline Solids in May 2001. Harritt and Jones used the results of this paper to compare their findings with those of a known nanothermite. Tillotson discovered that nanothermites burn faster with an energy density nearly two times as great as thermites, and their higher sensitivity to ignition from heat and static electricity buildup creates hazards. They can be contained in an aqueous medium for safety. Oxidation of the aluminum of up to 70% can decrease the efficiency of nanothermites and limits its potential for mass transportation. The lab experiments from May of 2001 tell me that nanothermites were still in the development stage by 911.
0.) Ryan Mackey claims nanothermite is not really an explosive. Any attempt to make it behave like an explosive will not be powerful by any definition. At best, a nanothermite would be a "low" explosive. The energy content is lower than any known explosive, because the thermite reaction starts with iron oxide and aluminium, and produces aluminium oxide and iron, so it doesn't produce any gases. Without gases being produced, there's no source for a shockwave. So while nanothermites might cut through steel faster than regular thermites, that could not account for the alleged explosive ejections.
But if an experiment could prove the presence of nanothermites in the World Trade Center dust, then the objections above would have no weight. So looking at the experiment itself, here are reasons both for and against accepting the argument for nanothermites, I’ll start by adding the arguments against to my long list of reasons not to believe the controlled demolition theory:
Reason # SLIDE OF NANOCHART 4: Harritt and Jones burned four samples of World Trade Center dust and carefully measured the energy output of each, plotting them on this graph with four different colored lines. The blue line shows the lowest energy output of the four, and the highest temperature for the heat energy to be released.
SECOND SLIDE OF KNOWN NANOTHERMITE. Then they superimposed the blue line, the least energetic dust sample, to the known nanothermite sample from the Tillotson paper, claiming the energy reaction was close to a match. But it is not. The World Trade Center dust sample had to be heated 100 degrees Centigrade higher to generate the reaction, and then the reaction itself was stronger by a factor of two. And this is the closest match of the four samples. One sample released five times as much energy as the known nanothermites.
BOTH SLIDES NEXT TO EACH OTHER I was surprised to discover that Thermite actually produces much less heat than plain old carbon-based burning, even though it produces higher temperatures. Heat and temperature are not the same; heat is the total energy of atomic or molecular motion in matter, and temperature is the average kinetic energy of the particles in a sample of matter. Thermite contains about 4 megajoules of heat energy per kilogram; wood contains about 18, and gasoline over 40, more than ten times as much. So if you could run your car on thermite, you'd need more than ten times as much to go the same distance.
FACE: (Live demonstration) For a real-life example, the temperature of a burning match is around 1100o, but the heat it generates is so small that I can extinguish it with my fingers and not burn my skin. The heat generated by the plane crashes and explosion of 90,000 litres of jet fuel created similar temperatures as those of burning matches, but the conflagration it left behind would have quickly incinerated me.
So the Simple burning of carbon-based materials in air could easily have produced the amount of energy Harrit and Jones measured. The most likely conclusion is that Harrit's samples had some carbon-based material in them that simply burned in the surrounding air, and that there was never a thermite reaction at all.
1.) There are several ways in which the experiment failed to isolate important variables. Those red-gray chips in that experiment were heated in air; thermites burn without oxygen, so they should have created an atmosphere of nitrogen or argon. Any energy released, if he did that, would have to come from some non-carbon based reaction, adding weight to their evidence. 911 researcher Niels Harritt responded directly to my assertion by saying “WTC was not demolished under argon,” but his experiment should have been designed to eliminate variables, not replicate the conditions of 911. One chemist told me “It suggests that he doesn't understand the most basic principles of the experiment he's tried to do.”
1b) Here’s another variable they didn’t isolate. There was a carbon compound in the dust sample; Jones's and Harrit cite it as contributing to the energy output. But in order to properly determine the energy of the thermite itself, you must separate out the carbon combustion from the thermite. By eliminating the possibility of carbon combustion from occurring to begin with, they would have had evidence of a thermite reaction. But they did not do this. Their failure to remove oxygen in the air and carbon from the dust are serious flaws in the experiment.
2.) In our debate and in his video, Gage flashed a “Spectograph of known thermites vs the dust.” He never explains how to read them. The red gray chips are not a match to the known thermites, on the spectograph. Richard flashed them on the screen, they didn’t even look the same, and he never explained why they prove thermites. That’s not debate, that’s obfuscation.
3.) Aluminum and iron oxide were found in the dust in Jones’s original study but not aluminum oxide (aluminum with three oxygen molecules attached to it, so it would have its own supply of oxygen). Aluminum oxide would be evidence of thermitic material since thermate is over one-third aluminum oxide. White smoke coming from the burning buildings is seen by some as evidence of aluminum oxide, but hot fires can emit that color smoke for other reasons and the boiling temperature of aluminum oxide is over 5300 degrees. Thermate also has barium nitrate, but that does not appear in the dust.
6.) Reason # Kevin Ryan personally told me that they had not adequately tested for flourine in the dust, and more experiments are needed to show this element which could have been used to stablize the silicon. This is something that needs more followup.
9. All the ingredients in the dust were also in the towers: The “suspicious” sulfur found in the dust could have been evidence of thermitic material, except for the fact that gypsum (drywall) is 18% sulfur and is found in massive quantities throughout all buildings. Other causes for sulfur could be acid rain and banks of batteries used to back up computer power in offices. The iron can be found in paint and electrical equipment. Manganese is in steel, flourine is found in the 200,000 pounds of freon used to air condition the buildings. Titanium was in the planes and the WTC building itself. Potassium is an ingredient in the 100,000,000 pounds of concrete flooring, and in bananas in the break rooms (OK, just kidding).
Chemists say various element bondings may have occurred naturally in fire, and that these chips come from paint, fire retardant, vermiculite, sound-proofing and rustproofing.
Could the “red/grey chips” that they based their paper on be a rust inhibiting primer paint with a Kaolinite base? They didn’t extract a larger sample of the red and gray chips with a more agressive solvent, such as hot DMF or DMF-DMSO which would allow analysis of individual components.
As a layperson reading the original publication, I wrote in an email to Richard Gage that “I am not convinced this experiment has fully separated out the naturally occurring chemicals in the buildings themselves from the thermitic chemicals.”
Richard got this response from lead experimenter Niels Harritt: “Sorry, I give up. You cannot provide a meaningful answer to a meaningless question... This is a common question, based on ignorance. But most people understand, that you do not have stew because you have meat on one side and potatoes on the other. And you don't have stew, if you have a hamburger (with meat) and toasted onions (from potatos, true!) on the other...
“Another example: Matches are made from wood, sulfur, grounded glass, a little phosphorous and a binder. Imagine you have a camp fire. Imagine, that you into the camp fire throw some wood, sulfur, grounded glass, a little phosphorous and some binder. In the ashes the next morning, would you expect to find a box of matches?”
1a.) If they found unexploded thermitics then where are the unexploded triggering devices?
7.) There is a lot of controversy surrounding the peer-reviewed status of this article. I am told that the Bentham Open Journals are available to anyone who pays the $800 fee to publish their material, and that one graduate student submitted pure gobbledegook and had it accepted for publication. The editor didn’t even know this thermitic article was being published, and when it came out, she resigned in protest saying it should never have been published, period. On the other hand, Steven Jones swears he went through an extensive peer review before this was published. My conclusion: we should let the experiment speak for itself and not dismiss the science because of the politics that surrounded its publication. But I also contest the assertion that the Bentham Open Journals are actually peer reviewed.
Niels Harritt strongly disagreed, saying “ Chris hasn't understood what a scientific publication is.
It is a set of data, a discussion and the best hypothesis of the day. That is all. No more, no less.
It quacks like a duck, it waddles like a duck, it looks like a duck - maybe it IS a duck.
He may question the data, accuse us of falsifying the samples or the data. In that case, there can be no discussion, and we just split. If he accepts the data (e.g. formation of elemental iron in the reaction), he should recognize, that nobody has come up with a better hypothesis for interpretation of the results. That is, if somebody came along, and proved that duck-looking creature was a gene-modified goat, well, then we must be forced to accept that. But is hasn't happened.”
8.) Related to Richard’s claims of thermitic dust is Richard’s assertion that the EPA's Erik Swartz found 1,3-diphenylpropane at levels "that dwarfed all others. We've never observed it in any sampling we've ever done" . But Richard edits out the next sentence in the article from the Times Union where this quote appeared, “He also said it was most likely produced by the plastic of tens of thousands of burning computers.” As Richard said, “sol gel uses 1,3 diphenylpropane,” but the scientific method demands that you look for other possible sources, and you certainly don’t want to edit out the fact that your own source tells you, in the very next sentence, that it was probably used to make a computer!
So why am I holding out the possibility that this experiment has validity? Because it would not be difficult to prove it. I see this experiment as flawed and incomplete so far, and I shared these objections personally with Kevin Ryan. He admits they heated the chips in air and not argon or nitrogen. But he goes on to say, “The energy given off... was shown to be as high as typical high explosives, and the sharp spike in release was an important finding. The experiment gives additional evidence that the chips are nanothermite because the temperature and dynamics of energy release are very close to that of known nanothermite. Our paper gives a number of other reasons why the chips match with nanothermite (e.g. intimate nanoscale mixed aluminum and iron oxide, formation of metallic spheres which match the composition of thermitic spheres).” So while the high energy released in the burning of the chips is used as evidence against nanothermites by other chemists I’ve talked with, Kevin Ryan sees it as evidence in favor of them!
Kevin Ryan has also told me that “The red-gray chips tested do not withstand 650 C, do not have Zinc, and don't dissolve in an organic solvent (but known paint chips do). Other analyses, not yet published, also indicate that the red chips are not paint. I have WTC paint samples and can tell you that, in addition to these facts, the paint looks nothing like the red-gray chips.”
Kevin reminded me that their study claimed to find unignited thermitic material, saying, “aluminum oxide is a product, not a component, of the thermite reaction. If the red-gray chips contained aluminum oxide, instead of aluminum, they would not be thermitic materials. The source of oxygen as a reactant in the thermite reaction is not aluminum oxide as suggested here but iron oxide (typically). Thermate is not "41% aluminum oxide" or any percent aluminum oxide. The products of the thermite reaction are aluminum oxide and (typically) molten iron. This backwards claim is another reason for you to suspect that you are not dealing with real scientists.”
Kevin Ryan has been very patient with me, and I am grateful for the time he has given me to answer my questions. Since I am not a chemist, the best I can do is fairly represent his arguments and admit I am not confident he is wrong.
4.) I am willing for Kevin to be proven right, and these is an established process for this to happen. I can’t judge the merits of his claims as a chemist, but I can say with confidence that the experiment has not been fully vetted by the scientific community. In our debate, Richard Gage said “We need repeatable experiments on the dust.”He is right. Successful experiments can and must be independently replicated, and this one has a poor record of that. At least two 911 activists followed up on the dust. Frédéric Henry-Couannier wrote,"Eventually the presence of nanothermite could not be confirmed.” Mark Basile burned the chips in air, replicating the error of the original experiment and not even measuring the energy released. The original experiment properly used a differential scanning calorimeter to measure how much energy their chips produced when they reacted.. I can’t take seriously fellow controlled demolition advocates who appeared in the acknowledgments of the original study and are now cooking red chips at home without proper measuring tools.
5.) What I would take seriously would be if they would complete the discovery process by scheduling a presentation of their findings to a group of qualified scientists and allowing for educated debate and evaluation of their findings in the public sphere.
And even more importantly, it’s time for them to release their thermitic dust samples to any one of these independent labs for testing: RJ Lee, EMRTC, MACE, or NJIT's ACN group. All of them specialize in chemical analysis of dust. They would be objective and independent. These tests can be done for as little as $2000. It’s not enough to run a magnet over the dust and say look, iron! It’s not enough to give the dust samples to yet another 911 Truth insider. As even the most hardened skeptic has told me, “if the dust tested positive for thermitics, that would get my attention.” To the experimenters Niels Harrit, Jeffrey Farrer, Steven Jones, Kevin Ryan, Frank Legge, Daniel Farnsworth, Gregg Roberts, James Gourley, and Bradley Larsen, this is your chance to live up to the name of 911 Truth. To all of you... why haven’t you done this? This is not a rhetorical question. Niels Harritt responded in a recent email by simply saying, “Two years of silence makes me quite confident. The absence of review is the best review I've got.”
I told Richard, Niels, Gregg, Kevin and others at the top of this movement that I thought they should get an independent analysis and make that a higher priority than collecting petition signatures. They resented me telling them what to do. OK, fair enough. Do what you want. Niels Harritt dismissed me by saying, “This is the true debunker argument. They just ask for more when they are buried in smoking guns. We must constantly remind ourselves and them, that it is not our duty to prove them wrong. It is their duty to prove them right.”
Rather than taking sides, traditional scientific inquiry requires replication of results from independent sources. Niels Harritt, unless you replicate your experiment with truly independent and eminently affordable tests, I won’t accept the results of your initial experiment. NIST will continue to say that there is no “chain of custody” proving that the original samples were not tampered with, but I for one would support the subpoenaing of a NIST dust sample for another $2000 test. Harritt, Jones and the rest did the best they possibly could to maintain the chain of custody with the dust, so I think an independent verification of their experiment would carry real scientific weight. You want the government to give you an independent investigation, but here is an independent investigation you can do on your own. Believe me, I am willing and waiting to be proven wrong.
Conclusion of Twin Towers Portion
This is the eighth and final video rebutting Richard Gage’s claims of controlled demolition of the Twin Towers. I have listed 1000000000000 reasons why natural collapse explains the destruction of the towers better than controlled demolition. I will have many more reasons as we move on to explore the collapse of Building 7. So let’s pause a moment as I offer you something even better than an eyewitness report... a direct confession from the man responsible for these attacks.
Fat Bin Laden Picture Osama Bin Laden said on video he was behind the 911 attacks. I hear about a FAKE, FAT bin Laden video but all we ever see is this photo. Here is the
BIN LADEN video... and this skinny guy with a long beard who is a dead ringer for bin Laden is boasting about what he did. Terrorists attacked the World Trade Center in 1993 and finished the job in 2001. And... there is no physical evidence of the materials that would be used to set off explosives in a building. In this era of WikiLeaks and blogs, not one whistleblower has leaked any smoking-gun insider information. And the scientific evidence strongly points towards the almost universally accepted theory of natural collapse.
If you have watched Blueprint for Truth and all eight of my rebuttal videos so far, something one of us said may have challenged your beliefs. Now, you have a choice. If you believe Richard, his website will reassure you that your beliefs are correct and they will have answers for everything I’ve said. If you came in agreeing with me, you can take my sources home or go to debunkers’ sites and be reassured that I’M right. Use this debate to strengthen your pre-existing beliefs and you will be a statistic confirming the 1979 attitude polarization study. So I challenge you to do independent research, and find original source information not associated with either side.
I try to hold my opinion lightly because I could be wrong, and so can you. I pray we can all have the humility to stop, take a breath, and ask, are we really being truthful at the level of heart? Can we look again, reconsider our entrenched positions, confront our own meanspiritedness, embrace something greater than our own certainties? I hope and pray that whatever we believe, we respect those we disagree with. May our hearts find peace so we can share it with a world so sorely in need of it.
Next, we will visit the claims around the freefal collapse of Building 7... or was that faster than freefall, and how could that be possible? Oh, and more eyewitness reports, and questions about foreknowledge of the destruction, and more.
Fires do not go back on once they have burned out or been put out.
