Jones is not the first, nor even the second author of the paper. Secondly, in all due respect, it's somewhat transparent and silly of you to call them paint chips when they address specifically why it is not.
You are one of the friendliest and most effective posters on the forum, do you admit you haven't actually read the paper?
Red, they did one single experiment on one single chip and compared it to a paint sample of unknown origin or composition (yes, paints differ
substantially in composition beyond the fact that their pigmentations are different) and broadly extrapolated from that to exclude paint as a possibility. That's plain sloppy. Their exclusion was far from being definitive.
Regarding thermite: I can find flour, yeast, salt, and water in my kitchen, but I differentiate it from cake and bread. I apply that similarly to these findings of "thermitic material". Furthermore, as Mackey pointed out, there are elements of the physical characteristics that rule
out thermite, not the least of which is the potential energy available that Jones made so much out of. On top of that, Jones has not made
any strides towards proving that the materials were there in proper stoichiometric proportions, and that's a significant issue in my mind.
The sad thing is, the more I read this, the more I consign this to the same hole that the microspheres paper resides in. This is shoddy experimentation that makes a whole lot of the spectroscopy and handwaves so much of the conclusions drawn from it. It's a fig leaf for believers, and the sad thing is that people like you
want to believe it. It's keeping you from all rational analysis. People evangelizing that paper, like the effervescently repetative Galileo, seem to want to divorce the paper from the fact that no signs of thermite use was spotted on the recovered steel, yet have no problem saying it "disproves" the NIST collapse scenario. Just how much abuse of logic must one do to reach that conclusion? Even if Jones were somehow miraculously correct, and did indeed identify a highly refined "nano" thermite, the evidence points at it having no effect on the steel, since all of it that was recovered (save for that in the impact/fire zones) showed zero signs of incendiary severance and every possible sign of mechanic distortion and severance.
That paper isn't even confirmation bias. It's a hollow work that allows truthers to continue mistaking cargo-cult science for the real thing. About the only useful thing it does is demonstrate just how willing people are to jettison critical thinking in favor of embracing a position regardless of the lack of support it has. And that's a sad thing to establish.
