On the day of 9/11, I knew that it was very unlikely that I would personally be the one who discovered what destroyed the WTC because, my background is in pharmacology, but to be truthful, I only studied pharmacology for five years. I studied chemistry for eleven years. My background is chemistry. Yeah, I specialized in the chemistry of biological processes, but whoopdeedoo. What I was doing every day was chemistry. Where I lacked a bit was physics, but I knew that my chemistry could play a role.
My knowledge of chemistry, especially, was a key aspect of my instant recognition that something was wrong about the plane crash story. What I see in the 9/11 videos as a chemist is a large amount of steel standing still...and then a large amount of various colors of gray material coming from the building. I've performed enough chemical reactions to know how things generally go, and things don't generally go like this in the laboratory.
In the laboratory, if you add any amount of jet fuel at atmospheric pressure to any amount of steel, and if you then light the jet fuel on fire, what you would get is a short lived fire and warmed, solid steel, with most of its strength. Yes, heating the steel up to the maximum combustion temperature would have resulted in some decrease in material strength of the steel, but not much.
But that is not the first thought I had. The first thought I had was, "Where did all this dust come from?" I was not on Manhattan on the day of 9/11. I was traveling back to Manhattan from a road trip. When I got to Delaware, I did not expect to see the black horizon coming from very near the place where I lived on Bleecker Street. When I got out of the truck after ditching it in a parking garage near midtown, I did not expect to smell this particular smell.
Smell is chemistry. As a biologist I know about smells. I know how smells happen and what makes a smell. This particular smell was more than a smell. It was a painful feeling, and the smell that was attached to this painful feeling was unlike anything I'd ever smelled before. It didn't fit any of my smell categories. I now know that I was inhaling particles of iron, which caused the weird smell and the pain, but I didn't know that then. All I knew was that it wasn't a biological smell and that I could also smell the decaying human bodies. That was harsh. I'll never forget the smell of those bodies. That means that bits and pieces of the people that died entered my body, as did the powdered remains of the WTC.
The day I got home, I talked to two people who were caught up in the dust cloud. Neither one was burned.
Then 100 days later, I could still smell the unique WTC stench, so I had an additional data point. Whatever happened on 9/11/2001 didn't end on 9/11/2001. I could still smell it on 12/21/2001, 100 days later, as strong as in the first few days.
I swore I'd never stop searching for the correct answer to what happened on 9/11. I swore that nobody could ever change my mind that what I was smelling on day 100 was a normal office fire. But I didn't know that I'd eventually make real discoveries that ranked with the best in the world, which happened a few years ago when I discovered a large cache of WTC dust. That was somewhat lucky (if you consider 8 years of searching to be lucky).
On 9/11, I didn't think that I would make any important discoveries related to discovering the real weapon. But I knew I would recognize the correct answer if I ever encountered it. I had a rubric that would identify correct and even partially correct answers.
Whatever destroyed the WTC it:
1. was not an extremely hot process, and
2. produced fumes that were resistant to fire fighting efforts and occasionally heavy rain for at least 100 days.
Anyone who suggested a mechanism of WTC destruction had to fulfill these criteria, or they were wrong. Which is why I knew Steven Jones was wrong as soon as I read about his thermite theory, and why I'm not convinced that Judy Wood is wrong (because her mechanism doesn't require heat). She has not yet explained the long lasting nature of the WTC fumes, but I can't fault her for that, because neither have I. My work continues.
