"Of course in the Bentham paper, the value of the observations was not so much about the temperature at which the curve spiked.
Knowing that ignition occurred around 430C was certainly useful, but the intensity and brief duration of the spike was a behavior that made those 9/11 WTC dust chips 'stand out from the crowd'.
The strong thermitic evidence provided by the ignited chips' iron-rich microsphere residue has not been reported anywhere as an expected consequence of heating primer paint of any formulation to those temperatures and much higher."
Unfortunately just about everyone here would rather skirt around any evidence that fails to support their frozen belief.
"
. . .Besides them saying so, what is the evidence? 
"
The 'them', are accredited scientists with long careers in advanced research and have published many peer-reviewed papers.
DGM repeats his baseless claim that there is no evidence of thermitic material in the 9/11 WTC dust.
But unless he is deliberately lying, or over confident in his knowledge,
DGM should have valid proof that the Bentham paper evidence finding the existence of thermitic material in the 9/11 WTC dust is wrong? Please explain how their proof has been misinterpreted?
Dr. Millette, a man very familiar with 9/11 WTC dust, having explored it for the government; in his unpublished paper 'skirted' debunking the Bentham paper by 'minimizing' how closely he followed it.
He minimized to the point that the comparability of his isolated and selected samples to those of the Bentham paper scientists was also very minimal.
Then
Oystein enters the fray.
He has a good mind so maybe he will address my concerns with some possible alternative explanations?
"
- Is this why you demand that some tests be done to precisely 430 °C?
Can you detail the why and how knowing this is value useful? For example, what difference does this make vs. a spike at, say, 480 °C, or 380 °C?
Can you cite anything that shows that "The strong thermitic evidence provided by the ignited chips' iron-rich microsphere residue has been reported anywhere as an expected consequence of heating nanothermite of any formulation to those temperatures and much higher"?
For example, do you have any reports of nanothermite igniting/peaking near 430 °C like the red-gray chips did?
Do you have any reports of nanothermite burning at peak values of 10-24 W/g in a DSC experiment like the red-gray chips did?
Do you have any reports of nanothermite giving off 4.5 or 7.5 kJ/g like two of the red-gray chips did?
Do you have any reports of nanothermite residue still having lots of red iron oxide left over visibly after the reaction, as shown in Fig. 20, 23 and 26 of the Bentham paper?
"
Unfortunately, Oystein prefers skirting and misinforming as well.
I asked that Dr. Millette, who only tested his samples to 400C, test proper samples (remove any that had high resistance readings as would steel primer paint), and take his oven as high as 450C.
My understanding is that most of the red chips ignited around 430C.
As Oystein knows, and the Bentham paper clearly states, the temperature of 430C was approximate and not precise for individually ignited chips.
The rest is a barrage of previously addressed points that represents additional skirting of my original post.
He ignores the
smoking gun.
Where none existed prior to ignition,
iron-rich microspheres existed afterwards in the 9/11 WTC dust chip residue.
Proof of an iron-melting temperature.
What question eliminates that finding?
Next.
". . .
As a retired industrial chemist, I can assure truthers that chemists would be very interested in a result like this.
Could paint resins be undergoing some kind of heretofore unknown exotic reaction, perhaps akin to peroxide formation in ethers? We'd want to know! I guarantee you that others would do follow-up experiments! (I've seen some odd reactions in my own career.)
OK, back to reality: This will never happen, as Jones and Harrit are charlatans. They know damn well what their results will be. The null hypothesis will be supported - it's paint.
Truthers, you've been played. You've been punked. It's your own fault. Even if you're ignorant of chemistry, you swallowed their bunkum and never bothered to solicit the opinions of knowledgeable people in the field of analytical chemistry."
You totally lose when without any justification you address distinguished scientists such as Dr. Jones and Dr. Harrit as "charlatans".
Next.
"MM ignored the last 100 pages of thermite threads and still going on about "higher peak = better thermite" fallacy?
And yes, thanks Ivan, that is what I was looking for. So suffice to say, short of finding a paint chip from WTC and burning it, these are the best we have so far for comparing the Bentham DSC of "thermite"?"
No, you are ignoring the thermitic residue.
Next.
"Excellent post Redwood. As a non-chemist I had no choice but to ask for feedback re the Jones/Harrit paper. Even I can understand, with help, many of the objections raised by this paper. And you are right that chemists would find such a paper as you suggested VERY interesting. Millette himself was VERY interested in what he would find before he found it, and he got a LOT of interest from forensic scientists at two conventions where he made his public presentations about the WTC dust. There is a lot of interest in all forensic questions re 9/11, and an unexplained legitimate strong exothermic reaction w/o oxygen would indeed be powerful stuff!"
Yes, "
Millette himself was VERY interested".
Yes, so interested, that even though he has access to 9/11 WTC dust and owns his own lab, he wasn't curious enough to use the Bentham paper simple Resistivity test to further match his samples, and he was unwilling to observe the effect of heating his oven a further 30C-50C from the 400C he stopped at.
Classic skirting as previously noted.
Next.
"One thing that has struck me when I read this study for the first time and when I re-read it again yesterday is the attempt to dissolve the "epoxy resin" with various solvents over various lengths of time. The really couldn't dislodge the red layer, no matter how strong the solvent was or how long the chips were in the solvent. Maybe they couldn't dissolve the red layer because it wasn't epoxy resin. Techniques that are normally used to dissolve expoxy resin should dissolve expoxy resin.
Overall this paper suffers from the same problem as almost every other paper written from about the WTC dust. There's no attempt at context. There is no explanation for the existence of these iron fragments. I understand that this was a narrow paper, meant only to address the issue of thermite. Not finding thermite was a reasonable result.
But from a scientific point of view, this paper doesn't break new ground. The thermite theory was very weak from the beginning. The thermite hypothesis debunks itself. What is missing from the paper is something along the lines of "We started out with tall steel buildings and ended up with iron fragments. Here's why this happened."
Finally, the paper pre-isolates magnetic portions of the dust, and tests those. It doesn't test the other components."
This scientific paper wants the reader to seek the context.
The Bentham paper represents the peer-reviewed work of scientists with many years of experience.
Those scientists tested 9/11 WTC dust samples from 4 separate NYC locations near the WTC.
They found similar evidence of thermitic material in all the samples.
Thermitic material, and especially nano-thermitic material, should not have existed anywhere outside of a U.S. military site or some other government-sanctioned facility. For it to permeate all the 9/11 WTC dust, at the very least means there was too much at that location to be explained away as a travelling sample.
The context created by a finding of
nano-thermite gets quite clear when you have so much of this special military-grade munition stored in a civilian office tower.
Next.
"Hi WTCDust, What you read in Millette's preliminary study is his answer to the question I hired him to research: is there thermitic material in the red-grey chips from WTC dust as claimed by Jones/Harrit et al? His answer was no. He pre-isolated the red-grey chips to test using the same criteria as described in the Harrit/Jones paper. He charged us $1000 for work that would have been 6 to 10 times more expensive just for these specific red-grey chips. . ."
Yes, Dr. Millette's answer to the question.
An answer based on the question as Dr. Millette chose to interpret it.
For many, such as myself, we contributed to the $1,000 because we felt an honest attempt by a reputable scientist was going to be made to replicate the findings of the Bentham paper scientists.
It was only after we spent our money that it became clear that the money was subsidizing a convention paper that Dr. Millette was already working on, and, that he would
not be conducting any of the tests that lead to the key findings published in the 2009 Bentham paper.
Pity.
MM
military-grade nanothermite
