The sad case of Niels Harrit

[DGM]

OK, Ergo, as a scientist (polymer chemist) with the necessary equipment at hand, I can write some request (polite enough) for the WTC dust sample addressed to S. Jones, N. Harrit and K. Ryan (their e-mail addresses seem to be available). Or we can write some collective request with Oystein, Sunstealer, Almond and Leftysergeant (with some necessary details about their qualifications in this matter). What do you think, Oystein, Sunstealer and others? I think we can try it, there is basically nothing to loose.

I'm afraid this is not going to work. You will need to invite them with their samples to your place (and pay the way) so they can make sure you do it right. You would need to couch them along at every step allowing them to stay in control. When the results do not come back the way they want, YOU DID SOMETHING WRONG!

All they have to do is convince "truthers" and convince same to keep footing the bill to "spread the word".. Enough said?

 

[Ivan Kminek]

Hi Ivan, I hate to rain on the parade, but you'd have to count me out. While I have access to XRF, LA-ICPMS, SIMS, XRD and a variety of other instruments, including electron microscopes capable of doing SEM-EDX, I would be forced to decline any offer to work on WTC dust samples. For us, the questions are time, money, novelty, and merit, and this project satisfies none of those requirements. For the benefit of non-scientists (i.e. Truthers), this is a conversation that I had with my supervisor in 2009, shortly after the Harrit paper was published.

Me: I would like to run an analysis of the WTC dust

Boss (PhD Physicist with 20+ years of research in thermodynamics, heat transfer, DSC, etc): Why? RJ Lee already did that.

Me: Because an obscure group of researchers practicing far outside of their field of expertise managed to publish a paper in an non peer-reviewed, open access journal that says nano-thermite was found in the paint chips found in the WTC dust. [Hands boss the paper]

Boss: This is idiotic (an actual quote). How long were you planning on spending on this?

Me: 3 days automated SEM-EDX, 3 days XRF/XRD, 4 days of dissolution and mass quantification experiments. 10 days total, about 80 hours of combined instrument time.

Boss: I presume these researchers will be paying you.

Me: No, I was hoping we could do the work for free. Although I'm still expecting to draw my regular salary and have you pay for the power, supplies and maintenance of the equipment.

Boss: Let me get this straight: You want to repeat an experiment that we both agree was done poorly in order to prove false an assertion by an obscure group of non-researchers, which in itself is so patently absurd that they published it in an even more obscure journal. When done correctly, the experiment will prove the superior, carefully controlled RJ Lee study correct, and reaffirm to approximately no one that the twin towers were not demolished by thermite.

Me: Yep.

Boss: And you want me to eat about $50,000 in overhead and operating costs?

Me: Yep.

Boss: [Bad words]

It's paraphrased, but that's about what happens. There is not legitimate scientific reason to do the work. Don't get me wrong, I'd like to shut Jones, Harrit et al up for good, but even a perfectly executed, carefully controlled study won't do that. They're too deep into the woo.

OK, Almond, no problem)
The real scientific importance of Harrit's paper is of course zero, but its political/sociological/ideological impact seems to be still quite considerable.
I see here in Czech Republic that some more qualified truthers (as Peterene) reluctantly (but apparently) abandon all this nanothermite nonsense... Although we cannot convince any fanatic and basically illiterate truther, we can be successful in some other cases. And even without any real experiments (hopefully) (?)

 

[KDLarsen]

Interesting to see the operating cost. I was under the impression that Niels Harrit was the one responsible for the tests (and/or lack thereof), so presumably he was using the equipment at Copenhagen University.

As a taxpayer in Denmark, I wonder if I can phone up the director of the chemistry institute and find out if and how Harrit got permission to run these tests? And if so, what was the reasoning behind letting him spend that kind of time and money on what must surely be regarded as personal matters.

ETA: Or failing that, poke some of the guys I know who graduated from there, surely they must still have some contacs there.

 

[ElMondoHummus]

Hi Ivan, I hate to rain on the parade, but you'd have to count me out. While I have access to XRF, LA-ICPMS, SIMS, XRD and a variety of other instruments, including electron microscopes capable of doing SEM-EDX, I would be forced to decline any offer to work on WTC dust samples. For us, the questions are time, money, novelty, and merit, and this project satisfies none of those requirements. For the benefit of non-scientists (i.e. Truthers), this is a conversation that I had with my supervisor in 2009, shortly after the Harrit paper was published.

Me: I would like to run an analysis of the WTC dust

Boss (PhD Physicist with 20+ years of research in thermodynamics, heat transfer, DSC, etc): Why? RJ Lee already did that.

Me: Because an obscure group of researchers practicing far outside of their field of expertise managed to publish a paper in an non peer-reviewed, open access journal that says nano-thermite was found in the paint chips found in the WTC dust. [Hands boss the paper]

Boss: This is idiotic (an actual quote). How long were you planning on spending on this?

Me: 3 days automated SEM-EDX, 3 days XRF/XRD, 4 days of dissolution and mass quantification experiments. 10 days total, about 80 hours of combined instrument time.

Boss: I presume these researchers will be paying you.

Me: No, I was hoping we could do the work for free. Although I'm still expecting to draw my regular salary and have you pay for the power, supplies and maintenance of the equipment.

Boss: Let me get this straight: You want to repeat an experiment that we both agree was done poorly in order to prove false an assertion by an obscure group of non-researchers, which in itself is so patently absurd that they published it in an even more obscure journal. When done correctly, the experiment will prove the superior, carefully controlled RJ Lee study correct, and reaffirm to approximately no one that the twin towers were not demolished by thermite.

Me: Yep.

Boss: And you want me to eat about $50,000 in overhead and operating costs?

Me: Yep.

Boss: [Bad words]

It's paraphrased, but that's about what happens. There is not legitimate scientific reason to do the work. Don't get me wrong, I'd like to shut Jones, Harrit et al up for good, but even a perfectly executed, carefully controlled study won't do that. They're too deep into the woo.

Would it help if I showed up and batted my eyelashes? Or should we instead find someone who's actually

1. Attractive, and
2. Female

 

[DGM]

OK, Almond, no problem)
The real scientific importance of Harrit's paper is of course zero, but its political/sociological/ideological impact seems to be still quite considerable.

I'm not sure how it is "over-seas" but here in the US the "truthers" mean absolutely nothing. They are ignored. You might have noticed all of their "big goings on" are not in this country.

When is the rest of the world going to ignore them like we do?

 

[ergo]

OK, Ergo, as a scientist (polymer chemist) with the necessary equipment at hand, I can write some request (polite enough) for the WTC dust sample addressed to S. Jones, N. Harrit and K. Ryan (their e-mail addresses seem to be available). Or we can write some collective request with Oystein, Sunstealer, Almond and Leftysergeant (with some necessary details about their qualifications in this matter). What do you think, Oystein, Sunstealer and others? I think we can try it, there is basically nothing to loose.

This thread is now 21 pages long and over two years old. There are, I'm guessing, at least two other major threads here on Niels Harrit or nanothermite. And a dozen minor ones. In all this bedunker blather, maybe you guys could just come up with one coherent, credible argument, copy and paste it into a text document of your choosing, and submit it somewhere. Or publish it online. Or send it to Harrit and Jones. You've had endless time and endless opportunities. If you can't do something as simple as this, well, I think you know what "stfu" stands for. **** or get off the pot. Clear enough for you?

 

[bill smith]

OK, Oystein, no problem.



Bill, how is it with this Harrit's announcement you promised in September 9? I have not found anything by googling.

I didn't catch all of it Ivan. By the time I got the stream working he was talking about carbon nanotubes in the firefighters lungs. There didn't seem to be a great buzz about what he had said so maybe it wasn't so exciting after all. The panel of examining professors seemed quite impressed with him though.

He showed a photo of a 5-gallon jar of WTC dust that somebody had just recently given him. I got the impression that he had not carried out a lot of tests on it yet. He had a large bag with him and he filled and sent a 5g or so bag around the audience with a strong magnet for people to look at. He gave a say 3g sample on screen to a French Television director to be shown in a French TV documentary and about a 12g sample to some scientist for testing.

When zoomed in the large bag dust looked uniformly grey and somewhat fluffy with some small lumps that could easily be crushed with the fiingers and had some contaminents like human hairs and some bits of paper. Harrit mentioned these himself and seemed unconcerned about them

I didn't get so much of it and will wait to see a precis written up by somebody who saw more..

 

[DGM]

This thread is now 21 pages long and over two years old. There are, I'm guessing, at least two other major threads here on Niels Harrit or nanothermite. And a dozen minor ones. In all this bedunker blather, maybe you guys could just come up with one coherent, credible argument, copy and paste it into a text document of your choosing, and submit it somewhere. Or publish it online. Or send it to Harrit and Jones. You've had endless time and endless opportunities. If you can't do something as simple as this, well, I think you know what "stfu" stands for. **** or get off the pot. Clear enough for you?

What do you think will happen if we (he) does nothing? Will this thread go on forever? Will anyone in the real world (outside of this forum) ever notice? So far, they haven't.

 

[ergo]

Doesn't much matter to me. I just hope at some point Chris mohr will answer my question.

 

[sheeplesnshills]

This thread is now 21 pages long and over two years old. There are, I'm guessing, at least two other major threads here on Niels Harrit or nanothermite. And a dozen minor ones. In all this bedunker blather, maybe you guys could just come up with one coherent, credible argument, copy and paste it into a text document of your choosing, and submit it somewhere. Or publish it online. Or send it to Harrit and Jones. You've had endless time and endless opportunities. If you can't do something as simple as this, well, I think you know what "stfu" stands for. **** or get off the pot. Clear enough for you?

Shouldn't Harrit, Jones et al be the ones to do that first?

 

[DGM]

Doesn't much matter to me.

I thought so.

 

[chrismohr]

Doesn't much matter to me. I just hope at some point Chris mohr will answer my question.

Hi Ergo,

Yes, in this case, I am tentatively taking silence to mean refusal. I met Kevin Ryan last winter and we had a good connection. Among other things, he is an accomplished amateur classical guitarist and we have talked about our shared love of classical music etc as well as the 9/11 stuff. He graciously wrote me a series of long emails answering all my 9/11 questions.

I continued to write him, and in several recent emails I told him that in my videos I am strongly advocating that he release dust samples to a recognized lab for independent testing. Silence. I wrote again, saying around a dozen 9/11 Truth activists strongly agree with me and have written me about their frustration that the dust is not being tested in an independent lab. Silence.

So we will see. At some point, in about a week or two, I will write one more time. I am not asking for the dust, I am asserting that they meet their burden of proof by getting independent verification of their claims. This can be done for $2000 or so.

 

[chrismohr]

PS My contact with Niels Harritt was not as friendly. But they both know me as the debater of Richard Gage last March.

 

[ergo]

Hi Ergo,

Yes, in this case, I am tentatively taking silence to mean refusal. I met Kevin Ryan last winter and we had a good connection. Among other things, he is an accomplished amateur classical guitarist and we have talked about our shared love of classical music etc as well as the 9/11 stuff. He graciously wrote me a series of long emails answering all my 9/11 questions.

I continued to write him, and in several recent emails I told him that in my videos I am strongly advocating that he release dust samples to a recognized lab for independent testing. Silence. I wrote again, saying around a dozen 9/11 Truth activists strongly agree with me and have written me about their frustration that the dust is not being tested in an independent lab. Silence.

So we will see. At some point, in about a week or two, I will write one more time. I am not asking for the dust, I am asserting that they meet their burden of proof by getting independent verification of their claims. This can be done for $2000 or so.

Fair enough, Chris.

In one of his e-mails to you, did Kevin address the concerns you raised about Harrit's results? Not being privy to the quality of your connection, I would only say that a shared love of classical guitar does not equate to a meeting of the minds on the chemistry of WTC dust. And silence can mean many other things besides refusal.

But I appreciate your answering my question.

 

[chrismohr]

Fair enough, Chris.

In one of his e-mails to you, did Kevin address the concerns you raised about Harrit's results? Not being privy to the quality of your connection, I would only say that a shared love of classical guitar does not equate to a meeting of the minds on the chemistry of WTC dust. And silence can mean many other things besides refusal.

But I appreciate your answering my question.

True enough. We have no agreement on the dust, but at least he answered many questions and challenges... except the challenge to test the dust. But he may yet answer that question so my answer may be premature.

 

[WTC Dust]

What you say is true about Jones. There's a lot of holes in his story.
The Bentham debacle is shameful, and they reacted to it by attaching
the phrase "peer reviewed" every chance they got to the thermite
paper. It is true that if you repeat something often enough, that it
becomes a kind of truth. Certainly the vast majority of conspiracy
theorists have hung their hat and coat on that paper having withstood
peer review.

Of course, there are a lot of holes in the official story, too.
The thermite sniffers, most of them, wouldn't be questioning if the
official story were solid.

Is it a coincidence that several other 'leaders' of 9/11 truth appear to be ******* crazy? Jim Fetzer and Judy Wood come to mind as prime suspects. Judging from a recent interview with Kevin Ryan he actually believes that several companies which worked on the NIST investigation are actually 9/11 perps! That's fairly standard truther paranoia, though, nothing special.

Steven Jones doesn't seem to know whether he's coming or going: He used to insist on sulphur and zinc being proof of thermite, now he's insisting that their absence is proof of nanothermite, but he still can't figure out how it would have been used in either case - did it melt steel laterally by some unknown but magic process or did it explode exactly like other high explosives but silently and without shockwaves?
Oh yeah, he lately posits that it might have been used merely as a detonator for conventional high explosives, and was painted onto something somehow. OK, sure, whatever....

There's so many holes, contradictions and deadends in his thinking that if he manages not to fade into complete obscurity fairly soon I'd be surprised. But he doesn't seem as loopy as Harrit.

If this is the best leadership 9/11 truth can come up with, I'd say times are very tough indeed.

To add to the misery, Bentham's has just been exposed as having very questionable 'peer review' as well.http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17288-spoof-paper-accepted-by-peerreviewed-journal.html

 

[MIKILLINI]

Of course, there are a lot of holes in the official story, too.
The thermite sniffers, most of them, wouldn't be questioning if the
official story were solid.

The official story is the most solid story out there. So when you question the official story, you're questioning the most obvious one.
If you prefer to keep hanging on to anomolies by attempting to build a story out of them, you're banking on a house of cards.

 

[Oystein]

We have several threads on red-gray chips to choose from for what I am going to post now. I chose this, because it's where Sunstealer first published his finding that the MEK-soaked chip is probably Tnemec (post 536).


On my blog, Ivan Kminek reported an observation about the data on that MEK-soaked chip that I find interesting and worthwhile pursuing:

http://oystein-debate.blogspot.de/2...howComment=1337005281901#c1942663736651428010

BTw, I would like to know, which Al-rich area (poor in oxygen, according to XEDS maps) is recorded on Fig. 17. This is quite normal, to show recorded area, as I know e.g. from Jim Millette's paper.

Note again that the areas especially rich in Al basically coincide with the very left edge of the chip, where the chip surface is not perpendicular with the bombarding electron beam (as we can easily judge from the Fig. 17a). Perhaps XEDS signals (e.g. ratio between Al and O peak) can be somehow influenced by this geometry. But, this is just my unsupported speculation)

The problem he's discussing is the apparent observation that some unspecified region of that chip, after soaking, contains mostly Al, and too little O to have all the Al oxidized:

This finding has always had me wondering, and I admit I didn't have an explanation, and considered that measurement to be somehow erroneous, perhaps even faked. But having any fake data in the paper was not an option I could have been happy with at all.

Now Ivan asks a good question: Could it be a question of probe geometry that made the Al-count so much greater than the O-count in that XEDS measurement?

I can't give a direct, or experimental, answer to this, but there is a good indication that something of that sort is at play here, namely the distribution of oxygen as per the XEDS map, Figure 15:

You will notice that the heavy iron appears pretty ubiquitiously, but C and O do not. O supposedly is associated with Fe as iron oxide, and it is the most common element in that chip as per Fig.14, so it is a bit curious that it would not show more and more ubiquitiously. It seems like for some reason, the K-alpha level of O gets attenuated somehow in that experiment.

Another observation: While there are some scattered dots for all 5 elements outside of the confines of the chip itself, the signal for Al outside of the chips looks pretty significant. Could this come from the crucible of the XEDS device? And the concentrated Al signal on the "southwestern" edge of the chip a reflection from the Al-crucible?

I find it quite conceivabe that the geometry edges of the chip, which are far from being perpendicular to the "line of sight", precludes much of a signal from the probe to reach the detector, and that the strong Al-signal comes not from the probe, but from the crucible!


Any comments from those who know SEM equipment?

 

[Ivan Kminek]

Any comments of experts like Almond are welcome) Not because this is an important issue (MEK chip is simply some paint, very probably Tnemec WTC primer, no matter how exactly XEDS maps look), but I would like to know more about SEM/XEDS.

Oystein: Where did you find info that sample holder of MEK chip was made of aluminium? But if this is true, you may be right and Al signal (or its part) in Fig. 17 may come even from the "crucible" (if this spectrum was taken in area close to the left edge of the chip, which we do not know and will never know).

Btw, looking again at Fig. 15, I would say that areas with strong Al signals somehow coincide with several/most of places which are not perfectly perpendicular with the bombarding electron beam (we see slopes and hills, simply detailed profile, in Fig. 15a). They are basically stronger on several/many "hills" and "slopes" and so on. But they are still the strongest on the left edge, where you just noticed some Al signals even outside of chip itself...
Notably, "carbon map" seems to be somehow similar to "aluminium map": it has similarly stronger signals on some slopes, hills, etc... Perhaps the explanation is quite trivial, but I do not know it

 

[The Almond]

Any comments of experts like Almond are welcome) Not because this is an important issue (MEK chip is simply some paint, very probably Tnemec WTC primer, no matter how exactly XEDS maps look), but I would like to know more about SEM/XEDS.

Oystein: Where did you find info that sample holder of MEK chip was made of aluminium? But if this is true, you may be right and Al signal (or its part) in Fig. 17 may come even from the "crucible" (if this spectrum was taken in area close to the left edge of the chip, which we do not know and will never know).

Btw, looking again at Fig. 15, I would say that areas with strong Al signals somehow coincide with several/most of places which are not perfectly perpendicular with the bombarding electron beam (we see slopes and hills, simply detailed profile, in Fig. 15a). They are basically stronger on several/many "hills" and "slopes" and so on. But they are still the strongest on the left edge, where you just noticed some Al signals even outside of chip itself...
Notably, "carbon map" seems to be somehow similar to "aluminium map": it has similarly stronger signals on some slopes, hills, etc... Perhaps the explanation is quite trivial, but I do not know it

That's a good observation, and it's entirely consistent with x-ray physics. Lower energy x-rays are far more likely to be affected by small changes in topology than the higher energy x-rays. Oxygen at 522 eV is a prime example of a low energy x-ray that acts far more as a measure of the flatness of your sample than as a compositional indicator. Aluminum is a bit better, but not much, since it's energy is about 1.49 keV.

When looking at x-ray maps of rough samples, it's important to remember that the detector acts like a light source in traditional imaging and photography. Any x-ray that you detect must travel along a path exactly parallel to the detector. X-rays that have to travel back through the material, like those on a lower edge of the sample, will likely be absorbed. This effect produces the shadows and bright spots you would see in a normal photograph with a point light source.

Not to harp on this, but truly quantitative x-ray microanalysis must be done on flat, smooth, homogeneous samples. Comparing oxygen levels, finding "excess" oxygen, all of that requires flat, homogeneous samples. Otherwise, you never know if the difference in the x-ray signal comes from the change in topology or a genuine change in the composition.