WTC Dust
Illuminator
- Joined
- Oct 22, 2010
- Messages
- 3,529
So when you post something "as an authority" you are using yourself as that "authority", correct?
Relatively unpopulated fields of study are like that. It's not a rare thing. For example, take my PhD thesis. In my twenties, there were (perhaps) a few dozen people who performed this particular kind of experiment called the GTP shift. Among them, after a few years, I judged myself an expert in the technique. So did my committee. They knew I had developed an insight into the value of this experiment in the field of pharmacodynamics, and awarded me a PhD as a result. Also, they praised my technical innovations that had already been adopted by the whole pharmacology department.
It takes a lot to become a world wide expert in something, but it can be done, and I've done it before. Millette has become an expert in the WTC dust, and so has Steven Jones. Being an expert doesn't mean that every one of your conclusions is fully correct, though.
Millette didn't make a mistake in terms of the techniques that he used, but rather in a failure to incorporate his results into the larger picture of the WTC attacks. Jones is a horrible failure, but I can't say that 100% of his results are wrong. What he has done is detected iron oxide and concluded thermite.
To a certain extent, authority isn't bestowed by committee. Authority is taken by those who grab at it. I know the GTP shift better than anyone who tunes into this forum, and I know the WTC dust better than anyone who tunes into this forum. I know it better than Millette, Jones, and Wood, even. There might be somebody out there who knows the WTC dust better than me, but I don't know who that person is. Don't give me the lead authors of the USGA surveys, either, because their work suffers from the same problem that plague's Millette: it doesn't give a likely mechanism for the production of the dust from a set of steel framed buildings.
Calling the two colors of WTC dust "smoke" and "ash" based on pictures alone doesn't rise to the level of an expert opinion, just in case you were wondering.


