Gage's next debate

[Thunder]

Showing how many architects or engineers exist in NY and NJ shows little more than the fact that most people haven't even heard of WTC 7.

and yet....

There are homeless people who know about the collapse of building 7.

 

[chrismohr]

Chris7,

Thanks for comments. RG misquote re iron-rich corrected.

" Nano-thermite has the advantage of cutting with 4500oF molten iron as well as explosive pressure so the explosion would not have to be as large or as loud." Putting aside nastiness for awhile, and my disbelief in the use of nanothermites, let me just ask, not rhetorically, if you or anyone has any knowledge of nanothermites and if they are indeed both explosive and quieter than traditional CD products. I did that research on my own a few months ago and hit a dead end. Not much info of ANY kind there. I did get that the nano-size would make it an explosive version of thermite due to tiny surface area. If low noise is also true, it would change some of what I say. BTW I don't understand why grinding thermite into nano-size is so difficult and rare, and I have never really bought that as an argument against nanothermites. I mean, is it that hard to just leave the blender running longer? On the other hand, Ryan Mackey may be saying that ANY explosive that is quieter is also less powerful? Or did I misinterpret?

"You are free to form your own opinion based on your lack of knowledge of the possible ways nano-thermite could be engineered and your profound desire to think up reasons why it could not have been explosive." OUCH.

Me: A more likely source goes back to the 1970s, when workers welded thousands of steel beams and splattered microspheres everywhere.
C7: You have no knowledge of construction. Dust is cleaned up periodically. Floor slabs must be vacuumed before flooring can be installed. There would not be billions of iron microspheres from the construction.
Me: True, I have no knowledge of construction. This argument was brought up before, but are you saying that 1) when iron-rich microspheres solidify as they make contact with the steel beams, they can't stick to the steel beams in such a way that these micro-particles can't be swept up with a broom or vacuum? 2) that the spheres can't hide in corners and be missed?

"Furthermore you are ignoring the clear and unambiguous statement in the RJ Lee report that the spheres were created during the event." This is why I gave up arguing in circles around Floor 12 and NIST. I acknowledged the RJ Lee hypothesis and added two others: pre-existing fly ash from the concrete, and pre-existing spheres from the welders in the 70s. I don't take either NIST or RJ Lee as some kind of rigid gospel. Other hypotheses exist and I can only argue with you so far when you harp at me about bringing up a hypothesis that is not in your one and only definitive source.

Still, thanks for the feedback on some of the other stuff.

 

[Christopher7]

I see Chris refuses to change his tune, even after all these years. I see that non-ferrous metals are either extremely rare, or hardly ever melt, and that any piping, HVAC ducting, wiring, other metal furniture and fittings, or the aluminium cladding over the outside of the WTC either didn't actually exist, are very unlikely to have melted despite experiencing temperatures well above their melting points, or can't have been seen after melting by any witnesses. Given another ten years, maybe he'll be able to explain why this is so unlikely. Those of us with mere science degrees and no carpentry experience just aren't clever enough to figure it out, I suppose.

Indeed. For me it's the little things like people reporting steel beams dripping steel from the end as they are being pulled out of the pile or firefighters saying they saw molten steel running down the channel rail and it was like you were in a foundry or Leslie Robertson saying he saw a little river of steel. But scientists need to hear from a metallurgist who just happened to have his molten metal test kit with him or they will insist it was aluminum or some other metal that melts a temperature that can be attained in a oxygen starved debris pile where the combustibles are mixed up with a much greater amount of non combustibles.

 

[Dave Rogers]

Putting aside nastiness for awhile, and my disbelief in the use of nanothermites, let me just ask, not rhetorically, if you or anyone has any knowledge of nanothermites and if they are indeed both explosive and quieter than traditional CD products.

Nanothermites are still more or less in the laboratory. On their own, they're not explosive. They can't possibly be, because the thermite reaction starts with iron oxide and aluminium, and produces aluminium oxide and iron, so it doesn't produce any gases. Without gases being produced, there's no source for a shockwave, hence no explosion. It's possible to mix other materials with the nanothermite to produce a reaction that evolves gas, but the energy density is already lower than conventional high explosives, and adding more material that consumes rather than produces energy will make it even worse. And, in the end, it will always run into the problem that the creation of sound and the cutting of steel are both results of the same process; make an explosive quieter and you will, in exact proportion, make it less good at cutting steel. So you'll need more explosive, which makes it louder.

Summary: It doesn't matter what explosive you use to cut it, it'll make pretty much the same amount of noise to cut a piece of steel of a certain size.

BTW I don't understand why grinding thermite into nano-size is so difficult and rare, and I have never really bought that as an argument against nanothermites. I mean, is it that hard to just leave the blender running longer?

Yes, it is. You simply can't get stuff that small just by grinding it. You have to make the particles that small to start with.

The other thing about nanothermite that truthers hate to be reminded of is that it has even less energy in it than coarse grained thermite. Aluminium has the interesting property that it reacts incredibly strongly with oxygen, so any piece of exposed aluminium surface immediately forms a layer of aluminium oxide a few nanometres thick; that's why aluminium is durable and resistant to corrosion. For large grains of aluminium, the surface layer is negligibly small, but when the grains get to nanometre dimensions then the surface oxide layer - which won't take part in the thermite reaction because it's already at the finishing point of the reaction - becomes a big part of the whole. Nanothermites have been shown to give energy yields less than 40% of larger grained thermite. That means that, whatever amount the truthers say must have been there to produce the amount of heat they've dreamed up, there would have to be two and a half times that much nanothermite.

This is also a fatal flaw for the Harrit et al analysis of energetic particles in the WTC dust. Their samples contain too much energy even to be large grained thermite. They're too energetic, by two and a half times that, to be nanothermite.

"You are free to form your own opinion based on your lack of knowledge of the possible ways nano-thermite could be engineered and your profound desire to think up reasons why it could not have been explosive." OUCH.

This is what we call the appeal to magic. Christopher7 is quite simply claiming that nanothermite can have any powers his beliefs require it to have, and if those powers are physically impossible he'll handwave away the impossibility by invoking imaginary government-sponsored weapons research programs in secret laboratories that result in US military technology being decades ahead of the scientific understanding available to civilians. This view of all-powerful secret army research is common to conspiracy theorists, and - as far as I can tell - quite unfathomable to anyone who actually knows anything about the US Army.

Dave

 

[Oystein]

...I did get that the nano-size would make it an explosive version of thermite due to tiny surface area...

No, that is incorrect, or at least imprecise.

First of all, with nanothermite, the surface area (between Fe2O3-particles and Al-particles) is tiny per individual particle, but that is not the reason why nano-thermite reacts faster. Quite the opposite: It reacts faster because the surface area per volume or mass unit increases greatly as particle size decreases: Since surface area decreases only to the second power of particle diameter, but volume to the third power, the surface-volume-ratio increases as particle diameter decreases.

Secondly, nano-thermite as such does not become explosive - it only reacts much faster. Very fast reaction (measured by propagation speed of reaction front through the material; unit: m/s) is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for a substance to be an explosive; reaction must progress much faster than the speed of sound in the surrounding environement (for example, air or steel), or you would not get a shockwave.
But there is a second condition: The reaction products must have a very much larger volume than the source products. This, in explosives, is achieved when the reaction products are hot gasses. This is not the case in the thermite reaction: Its products are hot liquids. There quite probably is an increase in volume, but very much less so than if the products were gaseous.

In order to tailor an "explosive" from nano-thermite, you'd have to mix it with other stuff that becomes a gas and thus increases very rapidly in volume. This however would decrease the energy density of your material, and also provide an energy sink that is not available for destrictive work.
Now, nano-thermite already has a significantly lower energy density than micro-thermite (on acount of the increased surface of Al to form inert oxides before you use the stuff), which in turn has a lower energy density than the high explosives used by demolition companies, such as RDX. For these reasons, any "explosives" tailored with nano-thermite would, on principle, be a very poor choice to cut steel. I am not saying there are no uses for this, but truthers should acknowledge these difficulties and also that no precedent exists for this kind of use that would demonstrate feasibility.


ETA: Dave reacted faster. Maybe he is a nano-Dave. But he did not explode

 

[Dave Rogers]

Indeed. For me it's the little things like people reporting steel beams dripping steel from the end as they are being pulled out of the pile or firefighters saying they saw molten steel running down the channel rail

Which, if you actually think about it for a moment, makes no sense at all. If the pipe was being pulled out of the pile, then it was cooling; how could steel still be melting off the end? How could molten steel be running down a channel rail made of steel, without melting the channel rail? Both these accounts are simply impossible if the molten metal was steel. However, if the molten metal is something that melts at a much lower temperature than steel, either one of them is trivially simple.

and it was like you were in a foundry

In other words, it was *********** hot. No ****, Sherlock.

or Leslie Robertson saying he saw a little river of steel.

Which, as Chris Mohr pointed out, Robertson claims he never said.

But scientists need to hear from a metallurgist who just happened to have his molten metal test kit with him or they will insist it was aluminum or some other metal that melts a temperature that can be attained in a oxygen starved debris pile where the combustibles are mixed up with a much greater amount of non combustibles.

Whereas truthers are happy with a garbled witness account or a quote that turns out to have been made up, and will happily argue that the rubble pile wasn't hot enough to melt stuff with a lower melting point than steel, therefore there must have been molten steel present.

I mean, really, it's a mystery to me how you can believe this garbage and still function well enough to turn a computer on. It doesn't even begin to make sense. You're saying that a rubble pile that was too cold to melt aluminium was also hot enough to melt iron, but that the melted iron wasn't hot enough to melt iron. This is lunatic-on-the-bus-ranting-at-imaginary-aliens stuff.

Dave

 

[ElMondoHummus]

The other thing about nanothermite that truthers hate to be reminded of is that it has even less energy in it than coarse grained thermite. Aluminium has the interesting property that it reacts incredibly strongly with oxygen, so any piece of exposed aluminium surface immediately forms a layer of aluminium oxide a few nanometres thick; that's why aluminium is durable and resistant to corrosion. For large grains of aluminium, the surface layer is negligibly small, but when the grains get to nanometre dimensions then the surface oxide layer - which won't take part in the thermite reaction because it's already at the finishing point of the reaction - becomes a big part of the whole. Nanothermites have been shown to give energy yields less than 40% of larger grained thermite. That means that, whatever amount the truthers say must have been there to produce the amount of heat they've dreamed up, there would have to be two and a half times that much nanothermite.

If you're interested, Chris, what Dave is referring to here is the result of experiments by Lawrence Livermore researcher T.M.Tillotson, along with a few others. The paper is titled "Nanostructured energetic materials using sol-gel methodologies", and was publised in the Journal of Non-Crystalline Solids in May 2001. I don't know if the link I'm providing will be free for you, but it's free for me. You can almost certainly dig it up somewhere else with only a modicum of effort. At any rate, that is indeed what Tillotson's group discovered: Shrink the size of the aluminum particles, and you actually lose reaction energy output compared to larger particle size.

 

[Dave Rogers]

ETA: Dave was faster. Maybe he is a nano-Dave. But he did not explode

I see that, rather than proving 9/11 was an inside job by disagreeing with me, so exposing the fundamental contradictions in the Official Conspiracy Theory, you've chosen to prove that 9/11 was an inside job by agreeing with me in every detail, thus showing that debunkers do nothing but parrot the party line.

Dave

 

[ElMondoHummus]

Maybe he is a nano-Dave. But he did not explode

Dude... Oystein just insulted your manhood.

 

[Oystein]

If you're interested, Chris, what Dave is referring to here is the result of experiments by Lawrence Livermore researcher T.M.Tillotson, along with a few others. The paper is titled "Nanostructured energetic materials using sol-gel methodologies", and was publised in the Journal of Non-Crystalline Solids in May 2001. I don't know if the link I'm providing will be free for you, but it's free for me. You can almost certainly dig it up somewhere else with only a modicum of effort. At any rate, that is indeed what Tillotson's group discovered: Shrink the size of the aluminum particles, and you actually lose reaction energy output compared to larger particle size.

Here is another link to the same paper:
http://www.doeal.gov/FOIADOCS/DOC00329.pdf


It's the paper that Harrit, Jones e.al. refer to in their infamous Bentham paper when they claim that their red-grey chips react the same way as Tillotson's real nano-thermite, even though their ignition point was about 100K off, and power output off by a factor of 2 to 10.

 

[NoahFence]

Why don't you write RJ Lee and tell him he got it wrong?

BS deleted. Give it up please. You are talking trash and you know it.

The RJ Lee statement could not be more clear or more absolute.

Iron melted during the WTC event.

Iron melts at 2800^oF

What does that prove?

Explosives don't melt Iron, either.

 

[chrismohr]

C7: Leslie Robertson saying he saw a little river of steel.

I just checked that out yesterday before seeing this, because this quote always made me cringe. In an email Leslie said he didn't remember saying it, and he is not qualified to say it in any event. The original handwritten notes of the reporter who quoted him said "molten metal," but in the article he wrote molten steel. I mention this is my rebuttal.

 

[Christopher7]

Chris7,

Thanks for comments. RG misquote re iron-rich corrected.

" Nano-thermite has the advantage of cutting with 4500oF molten iron as well as explosive pressure so the explosion would not have to be as large or as loud." Putting aside nastiness for awhile, and my disbelief in the use of nanothermites, let me just ask, not rhetorically, if you or anyone has any knowledge of nanothermites and if they are indeed both explosive and quieter than traditional CD products. I did that research on my own a few months ago and hit a dead end. Not much info of ANY kind there. I did get that the nano-size would make it an explosive version of thermite due to tiny surface area. If low noise is also true, it would change some of what I say.

Prof. Jones posted a bunch of stuff at 911Blogger a while back. There's some interesting stuff here:
http://www.patentstorm.us/search.html?q=thermite+demolition&s.x=0&s.y=0&s=s
and here
file:///C:/Users/Chris%20Sarns/Documents/9-11/Thermite/Nano/RSimpson.html

I'll post more as i find it.

BTW I don't understand why grinding thermite into nano-size is so difficult and rare, and I have never really bought that as an argument against nanothermites. I mean, is it that hard to just leave the blender running longer?

You cannot grind iron or aluminum that small. The aluminum is vaporized and freeze dried to get the nano particles. The article above talks about sol-gels which involve dissolving iron in a chemical solution and building a matrix one molecule at a time. This can only be done in a very specialized hi tech lab. The red/gray chips could not happen buy chance. The nano-particles of iron and aluminum oxide they are made of could only be produced in a high tech lab. The particles are consistent in size and evenly mixed. Whatever criticisms detractors may have, certain basic elements cannot be denied. The red/gray chips contained the ingredients of nano-thermite.

On the other hand, Ryan Mackey may be saying that ANY explosive that is quieter is also less powerful? Or did I misinterpret?

Although that is generally true, it ain't necessarily always so.
"There are over a thousand different types of explosives." [at 18:00] "We control noise levels" [at 18:20]
[FONT=&quot]http://www.weloo.com/videos/66410/dc---911-mysteries-part-1-demolitions-2of3wmv.html[/FONT]

"You are free to form your own opinion based on your lack of knowledge of the possible ways nano-thermite could be engineered and your profound desire to think up reasons why it could not have been explosive." OUCH.

Thank you. I am a devout sarcasimist and I'll take that as an acknowledgement of a job well done.

Me: A more likely source goes back to the 1970s, when workers welded thousands of steel beams and splattered microspheres everywhere.

Unless you had an electron microscope you could not know if you were producing any.

C7: You have no knowledge of construction. Dust is cleaned up periodically. Floor slabs must be vacuumed before flooring can be installed. There would not be billions of iron microspheres from the construction.
Me: True, I have no knowledge of construction. This argument was brought up before, but are you saying that 1) when iron-rich microspheres solidify as they make contact with the steel beams, they can't stick to the steel beams in such a way that these micro-particles can't be swept up with a broom or vacuum? 2) that the spheres can't hide in corners and be missed?

I have not seen any conformation that welding produces large amounts of microspheres. I have done a little welding and there are a lot of spheres but they tend to be in the 1/8" - 1/64"range.

Yes, some would stick to things and not be cleaned up but the vast majority would fall to the floor I would think. In any case the RJ Lee report is very clear that the microspheres were created during the WTC event. They did not go into detail as to how they made that determination but RJ Lee is THE expert in the field of forensic particle analysis.
http://www.nyenvirolaw.org/WTC/130 ...DustSignature_ExpertReport.051304.1646.mp.pdf

"Furthermore you are ignoring the clear and unambiguous statement in the RJ Lee report that the spheres were created during the event." This is why I gave up arguing in circles around Floor 12 and NIST. I acknowledged the RJ Lee hypothesis and added two others: pre-existing fly ash from the concrete, and pre-existing spheres from the welders in the 70s. I don't take either NIST or RJ Lee as some kind of rigid gospel.

NIST is garbage and RJ Lee, although he is not gospel, he wrote the friggin gospel on particle analysis.

As for the fire burning out on floor 12 before 4 p.m., that's so easy a carpenter or even a pastor can understand it.

Other hypotheses exist and I can only argue with you so far when you harp at me about bringing up a hypothesis that is not in your one and only definitive source.

I don't deal with hypotheses, just simple but critical facts like the ones we discussing.

Still, thanks for the feedback on some of the other stuff.

Thank you for getting us back to a civil discussion.

 

[Christopher7]

C7: Leslie Robertson saying he saw a little river of steel.

I just checked that out yesterday before seeing this, because this quote always made me cringe. In an email Leslie said he didn't remember saying it, and he is not qualified to say it in any event. The original handwritten notes of the reporter who quoted him said "molten metal," but in the article he wrote molten steel. I mention this is my rebuttal.

This was posted recently:
9/11 Contradictions: Leslie Robertson and Molten Metal
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLCwq3-RzZs

0:26 "But molten means flowing. I've never run across anyone who said that they have seen molten metal."
1:19 "The project was on fire for months. So when we were down at the B1 Level (Basement LEVEL 1) one of the Firefighters said I think you will be interested in this ... and they pulled out the big block of concrete and there was like a little river of steel ... ah flowing

Full video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzu1ODWrXo0&feature=player_embedded#at=3601

I appears to me that like Van Romero who was very open about the towers looking like a CD and then doing a 180, Leslie was very open about molten steel until someone told him to STFU or else.

 

[R.Mackey]

" Nano-thermite has the advantage of cutting with 4500oF molten iron as well as explosive pressure so the explosion would not have to be as large or as loud." Putting aside nastiness for awhile, and my disbelief in the use of nanothermites, let me just ask, not rhetorically, if you or anyone has any knowledge of nanothermites and if they are indeed both explosive and quieter than traditional CD products.

We had this discussion (again) not long ago. The bottom line is that nanothermite is not and cannot be an explosive.

The only way to make it an explosive is to add it, as a contaminant, to a genuine explosive material. But this would be like claiming that chocolate is an explosive, just because somewhere someone might have added chocolate chips to a batch of TNT.

Furthermore, you cannot do work on steel through blast and melting at the same time. The two effects are not compatible. Melting requires heat transfer, and blast will sweep away the materials before this can happen.

As Dave Rogers says, these claims are merely an "appeal to magic." Simply because the claimant doesn't understand how something works, he assumes that nobody knows how it works, and therefore he can make up whatever fantastic nonsense he wants about it. It would be funny if it wasn't so paranoid.

 

[Dave Rogers]

It appears to me that like Van Romero who was very open about the towers looking like a CD and then doing a 180, Leslie was very open about molten steel until someone told him to STFU or else.

There is, of course, the unspoken implication here that Van Romero was forced to retract his earlier opinion, a claim for which no vestige of evidence has ever been offered. This is one side of a classic example of truther confirmation bias; if a respected figure changes his opinion from one opposing to one supporting the truth movement, it's seen as evidence that the movement's arguments have merit, but if a respected figure changes his opinion from one supporting (or capable of being misrepresented as supporting) the truth movement to one opposing it, truthers will frequently claim, without evidence, that the retraction was coerced.

Dave

 

[dc1971]

Strawman...

Good job answering my questions, christopher7!!!

Are stundie awards issued for incoherency?

 

[dc1971]

NIST is garbage...

So why do you keep quoting them?

 

[chrismohr]

Hi Oystein,

I read the nano report but honestly I'm running out of time and as you all know, I absorb new science info slowly. I think I'll have to give up fully understanding this paper within the next 6 days and get back to writing up Building 7.

But you wrote, "their infamous Bentham paper when they claim that their red-grey chips react the same way as Tillotson's real nano-thermite, even though their ignition point was about 100K off, and power output off by a factor of 2 to 10."

Is there an easy way to explain what this means to Rev. Layman here?

 

[Jono]

That is ridiculous.

No, it's a fact. There's nothing suggesting iron experienced that kind of temperature.

That is utter BS. Show a source or cut the crap.

A source for what exactly? That metal like iron can shed off iron-rich spherules below the classical point of melting (i.e during the loooong process of melting)? What have we been doing for eons here Chris, you should have a handy back-catalog of that, at least, being a demonstrable fact by now. I mean come on?!

The number is not exact. So what? It is the accepted temperature for iron melting and it's far above what office fire can attain so the variation is not significant.

Technically no, not at all. It's the accepted temperature for when iron transforms into a liquid uniformly. The process of melting is different, at least in the world of industrial smithing, which is what I worked with for years. I've gone through this already Chris. It's impossible for me to view it any other way when my past profession dictated these realities by the virtue of its own context, so either I accept what you say and pretend my years as a smithy was all bs, or I accept what I learned and approximated... and think of your arguments as uneducated ignorance.

Please, you clarified what RJ Lee reported? Go to Phoenix.

I don't understand.