WTC Dust Study Feb 29, 2012 by Dr. James Millette

[Gamolon]

im glad your finally understanding the importance of reproducibility!!

You have no clue what reproducible means. If you did, you wouldn't support Harrit's paper. See below.

Q: Did Harrit replicate the DSC test on any chips from the Delassio sample?
A: He did not per the image below.

Q: Did harrit replicate the resitivity test on all his chips in the paper?
A: No, he did not. He tested ONE chip per the quote below stating "red chip".

7. Could the Red Chip Material be Ordinary Paint?

We measured the resistivity of the red material (with very
little gray adhering to one side) using a Fluke 8842A multimeter
in order to compare with ordinary paints, using the
formula:

Specific resistivity = RA / L
where R = resistance (ohms); A = cross-sectional area (m2); L
= thickness (m).

Given the small size of the red chip, about 0.5 mm x 0.5
mm, we used two probes and obtained a rough value of approximately
10 ohm-m. This is several orders of magnitude
less than paint coatings we found tabulated which are typically
over 1010 ohm-m [31].

Q: Did Harrit replicate DSC tests on chips tested with the torch/ignition test?
A: No he did not because the DSC and torch tests would have destroyed the chip before the other test could have been performed. This means you did either a torch test or DSC test. This means any chips tested with the torch test is invalidated because we aren't sure if Harrit had the right chips.

So Senenmut, based on those few examples above, can you point to a specific chip in the Bentham paper that Harrit "replicated" all the tests upon? No? Having problems finding that information?

If HArrit did not "replicate" all the tests on any one chips to confirm results, why do you expect Millette to do so?

 

[Gamolon]

Yes.

Thermitists still have an 'out' though, by admitting that Harrit's selection procedure wasn't rigorous but that he still found thermite.

Whether they think he found thermite or not is not the issue at this point. Harrit's paper is proven incorrect based on the fact that the paper's conclusion is the following...

If one extracts red/gray chips with a magnet, those chips will be thermtic material

...and Millette found other types of chips.

What happens if Harrit comes out and says, "Yes, I found other types of red/gray chips that were extracted by a magnet."? This admission will bring out many questions such as:

1. Which test results showed what differences in the chips?
2. Why weren't the above test results published in your paper?
3. Why did you conclude that all the red/gray chips attracted by a magnet were all thermitic material when you had other red/gray chips?
4. Did you find red/gray paint chips?

These are just a few. These are the questions I started to ask Harrit and Jones in emails and they refused to answer. Why? Because it shows they didn't do a very good job.

 

[Miragememories]

"1. How did Dr. Harrit know he had the right chips when they did the torch ignition test?"

The visible dramatic ignition.

The iron-rich micro spheroid residue left behind by the ignited chips provided proof that the selected red chips were "the right red chips".

Physically comparable steel primer paint chips were reduced to innocent ash when combusted.

"2. They didn't do a DSC test on ANY chips from the Delassio sample, yet Dr. Harrit claims that ALL the samples contained thermitic material.

How did he know they had the right chips when no DSC test was preformed on the Delassio sample?"

What evidence supports your claim that DSC testing was not performed on all four 9/11 WTC dust samples?

Even if your point had any validity, 3 out of 4 carries more weight than 1 out of 4.

Gamolon you seem to have developed the absurd notion that published scientific papers include every test, every note, every comment etc.

"It's simple really. Youye the one who's "confuded". You keep saying that the DSC test is the test that will determine id one has the right chips or not. The problem is, Dr. Harrit didn't even do the DSC test on all the chips in his paper. It was random."

Your point?

Among other things, the DSC provides a heat source and a measurable ignition temperature.

Dr. Millette's muffle furnace can do this.

But at what point do you move beyond all your irrelevant DSC posturing and start asking about the results, "the chips"?

Hundreds of these chips igniting and producing a residue of iron-rich micro spheroids?

Regardless of any argument that the rules of identification weren't clear enough, Dr. Millette had the easy means at his disposal to 'put that puppy to bed'.

All Millette had to do was; heat some of his chips, or halves of his chips, the chips he was finished non-destructive testing, to ~430C and take another look at the residue with his microscope.

And then look at the ~430C residue for the highlighted chips in the 2009 Bentham paper.

MM

 

[Gamolon]

The visible dramatic ignition.

The iron-rich micro spheroid residue left behind by the ignited chips provided proof that the selected red chips were "the right red chips".

Physically comparable steel primer paint chips were reduced to innocent ash when combusted.



What evidence supports your claim that DSC testing was not performed on all four 9/11 WTC dust samples?

Even if your point had any validity, 3 out of 4 carries more weight than 1 out of 4.

Gamolon you seem to have developed the absurd notion that published scientific papers include every test, every note, every comment etc.



Your point?

Among other things, the DSC provides a heat source and a measurable ignition temperature.

Dr. Millette's muffle furnace can do this.

But at what point do you move beyond all your irrelevant DSC posturing and start asking about the results, "the chips"?

Hundreds of these chips igniting and producing a residue of iron-rich micro spheroids?

Regardless of any argument that the rules of identification weren't clear enough, Dr. Millette had the easy means at his disposal to 'put that puppy to bed'.

All Millette had to do was; heat some of his chips, or halves of his chips, the chips he was finished non-destructive testing, to ~430C and take another look at the residue with his microscope.

And then look at the ~430C residue for the highlighted chips in the 2009 Bentham paper.

MM

You and others claim that Millette has had the wrong chips because he didn't replicate certain tests in the Bentham paper to ensure he had the right chips.

Based on the above, you have been asked time and time again to tell us which of Harrit's tests were performed on the chips to ensure that they were the right chips.

You have continuously balked at that question just like Senenmut.

So once again.

In addition to the red/gray layer and magnetically attracted criteria, what other test/tests should be performed on a chip in order to know you have the right one?

Will you answer this or balk at it yet again?

 

[Gamolon]

What evidence supports your claim that DSC testing was not performed on all four 9/11 WTC dust samples?

Do you see the Delassio sample results below? I don't. Not done. Period.

 

[Gamolon]

Gamolon you seem to have developed the absurd notion that published scientific papers include every test, every note, every comment etc.

Really?

So NOT including data for red/gray, magnetically attracted chips that WEREN'T thermitic is scientific? It would only have furthered Harrit's point right? Unless he found something that went against his views...


The point is that Harrit's conclusion was proven wrong when Millette found different chips. Until that is addressed, Harrit's paper is garbage.

 

[Gamolon]

But at what point do you move beyond all your irrelevant DSC posturing and start asking about the results, "the chips"?

Irrelevant? Is that why Senenmut keeps hammering away that Millette had the wrong chips and that he should have done a DSC to make sure he had the right ones?

Is that why you put a heavy emphasis on the fact that Millette should have done the resistivity test to make sure he had the right chips? That is until it was shown that Harrit only tested one chip in his paper.

I guess it's only important to hold someone to something until you're proven wrong eh MM? Then it becomes "irrelevant"...

 

[GlennB]

I covered that case. The fact that Harrit et al. may have "gotten lucky" and tested all thermite chips does not mean that their conclusions are valid, because in the paper, the conclusions are based on the premise that ALL chips are the same, and according to this scenario, such is not the case.

Absolutely, and I could have expressed myself better.

I was trying to say that you nailed it from the pov of good scientific principles, but that won't stop Truthers just taking a different path through the swamp of bad science.

And, lo and behold, MM begins to make that point up in #4343

 

[thedopefishlives]

Absolutely, and I could have expressed myself better.

I was trying to say that you nailed it from the pov of good scientific principles, but that won't stop Truthers just taking a different path through the swamp of bad science.

And, lo and behold, MM begins to make that point up in #4343

You're absolutely right, and they have to, as a matter of course. To give up on the Bentham paper is to give up on the only veneer of scientific credibility that Trutherism has, and by extension, resign themselves to forever being crackpots. Alas, poor Yorick.

 

[pgimeno]

Let's see if I can boil all this down to something simple and logical. Truthers contend that Millette must have gotten the wrong chips. (They have to say this, because to admit he had the right chips is tantamount to admitting that there was no thermite at the WTC.) What we have, then, are two distinct and mutually exclusive possibilities:

1) Harrit et al. performed some additional selection criteria beyond "red and gray color" and "attracted to a magnet", and performed the DSC test and others only on those selected chips.
2) Harrit et al. performed tests randomly on all red/gray chips attracted to a magnet, under the assumption that they were the same material.

In the case of 1), this invalidates the Bentham paper because it is now not reproducible. Senenmut argues that the defining selection criterion is the DSC; Miragememories claims it is the resistivity test. (Harrit himself has explicitly said several times that no such further test was used, but we will ignore this point for the time being.) The fact is, the lack of explicit documentation as to what further criteria are needed to select the "correct" chips now works against the Truthers, because now their paper has no hope of being correctly reproduced; it is a junk paper. It has no reflection on Millette's work.

In the case of 2), the Bentham paper is reproducible, but this also means that the paper's conclusions are necessarily invalid. Harrit et al. performed tests and made claims based on all chips they found being the same material. Based both on the paper's published data (as revealed by Sunstealer et al.) and on supplementary data gathered by Dr. Millette, it can no longer be said that all the chips isolated by the selection criteria are the same material, no matter what the material happens to be. Even if Harrit et al. did find thermite in the dust, this necessarily invalidates their conclusions, because the selection criteria is insufficient to correctly isolate the thermite; they just "got lucky" with testing the correct chips in the correct tests.

That's the same problem I exposed in page 88 of this very thread:

Excellent questions. I doubt you'll get an answer, because they raise one more and they won't like any of the options.

There are only two possibilities as I see it:

a) The chip selection criteria include a protocol not mentioned in the paper's isolation section, like looking for a specific shade of red they don't specify, as Miragememories advocates. As GlennB noted, that would make the paper unreproducible and therefore bad science.

b) The chip selection criteria are as specified in the isolation section of the paper and don't include separation of chips considered thermitic from those which are not, but instead consider all chips thermitic without distinguishing them. Given that there's no effort of characterizing each kind of chip on which an analysis is performed because all are considered the same thing, that makes the paper bad science.

Which is it?

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?p=9437079#post9437079

 

[Gamolon]

You're absolutely right, and they have to, as a matter of course. To give up on the Bentham paper is to give up on the only veneer of scientific credibility that Trutherism has, and by extension, resign themselves to forever being crackpots. Alas, poor Yorick.

It's quite funny actually.

When the truthers claim Millette had the wrong chips and you ask them what the criteria was to get the right chips, they shift the conversation to talk about the test results because they can.t answer.

When you show the truthers the test results refuting the findings of Harrit, they swing back to the testing criteria Millette should have followed, but again, can't point to specific criteria.

It's a never ending marry-go-round...

 

[Gamolon]

Excellent questions. I doubt you'll get an answer, because they raise one more and they won't like any of the options.

There are only two possibilities as I see it:

a) The chip selection criteria include a protocol not mentioned in the paper's isolation section, like looking for a specific shade of red they don't specify, as Miragememories advocates. As GlennB noted, that would make the paper unreproducible and therefore bad science.

b) The chip selection criteria are as specified in the isolation section of the paper and don't include separation of chips considered thermitic from those which are not, but instead consider all chips thermitic without distinguishing them. Given that there's no effort of characterizing each kind of chip on which an analysis is performed because all are considered the same thing, that makes the paper bad science.

Which is it?

The above is why MM, Senenmut, Harrit, and Jones don't want to discuss it. Including ALL the details (which MM wants us to believe SHOULD be left out of a scientific paper ) would bring more scrutiny. Something they don't want.

 

[Gamolon]

The Bentham 2009 Report that was authored by Dr. Harrit et al, describes the finding of a nanothermitic substance. in all their dust samples the nanothermite material they described had an ignition temperature always around 430C.

Care to retract the sentence in red above MM?

ALL their dust samples?!

I can quote parts in the paper that PROVE not all their dust samples were tested in a DSC.

Oh wait. The DSC is "irrelevent" now right?

 

[thedopefishlives]

That's the same problem I exposed in page 88 of this very thread:

​

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?p=9437079#post9437079

A question which we have spent the next 21 pages studiously avoiding answering, I note. Even after I repeated it (and my apologies for not noting that you had raised the point previously).

 

[Gamolon]

Dr. Harrit and his fellow scientists performed testing on the red chips from the WTC dust that amongst other things, revealed that when a cleaned red-chip sample was gradually warmed in its electrically heated crucible, a powerful exothermic ignition always occurred around the same crucible temperature.

The same testing on available WTC primer paint samples showed no similarity in appearance or in residue.

Are you going to retract the above statement in red also MM? Per the paper, they tested no WTC primer paint. They had to test paint obtained from OUTSIDE SOURCES. They also used resistivity results from an OUTSIDE SOURCE.

Unless of course, you want to cite something from the Bentham paper that says otherwise.

 

[Gamolon]

If Millette is correct in his belief, than it should be easy to put this matter to rest by showing the original Bentham Paper findings are not reproducible.

Didn't Millette do this?

He didn't perform all the tests in Harrit's paper and you admit Millette found different chips. Harrit's paper concludes that they should all be thermitic.

What happened?

 

[pgimeno]

A question which we have spent the next 21 pages studiously avoiding answering, I note. Even after I repeated it (and my apologies for not noting that you had raised the point previously).

There's nothing to apologize about. You've explained in thorough detail why it's bad science, which is also important to note.

It's the reason why attacking the Millette paper for analyzing the wrong chips is also implicitly an attack on the Harrit et al. paper for basing their conclusions on heterogeneous material, thus rendering them invalid.

The alternative would have been to NOT attack Millette for analyzing the wrong chips, and admit that the paper did not state all separation criteria. That didn't happen: the authors DID attack Millette for having the wrong chips, and since he followed the separation procedure stated in the paper, your case (2) (or (b) in my message) is the correct one.

 

[Gamolon]

Could someone with zero qualifications and equipment for performing such research, someone like yourself, could they successfully know when they had obtained the right red chips for DSC testing?
No.

Question MM.

If it's impossible for anyone with zero equipment and qualifications to know they have the right red chips, can you explain something to me? Why, in the linked video below, does Harrit pass around a plastic bag with WTC dust in it and a magnet and tell people to collect a line of particles with the magnet. Then he says that with a little bit of luck, they will see the red/gray chips that they are going to talk about.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I51fDKsuJ_I

No DSC tests. No torch tests. No resistivity tests.

How did the audience do that?!How did Harrit know that got the right chips?

 

[DGM]

If Millette is correct in his belief, than it should be easy to put this matter to rest by showing the original Bentham Paper findings are not reproducible.

MM

Interesting that you ask. So far two people have tried to duplicate the study and failed. One had chips supplied by one of the authors.

So, the paper is 0 for 2 in being reproducible. Does not look good for a paper that claims very simple and specific separation criteria.

 

[Miragememories]

REPRODUCED HUNDREDS OF TIMES

Interesting that you ask. So far two people have tried to duplicate the study and failed. One had chips supplied by one of the authors.

So, the paper is 0 for 2 in being reproducible. Does not look good for a paper that claims very simple and specific separation criteria.

Tell that to independent researcher Mark Basile.

MM