http://existentialistcowboy.blogspot.com/Tuesday, August 26, 2008
The NIST Tries to 'Repeal' the Laws of Entropy and the First & Second Laws of Thermodynamics
Len Hart "The Existentialist Cowboy August 26, 2008

The NIST's latest theory ignores satellite thermal photos of ground zero indicating abnormally high temperatures for months after 911. The NIST theory du jour ignores this data and fails to explain it!

Under-estimating the intelligence of the American people, the NIST persists in papering over the endless holes in Bush's official conspiracy theories of 911. Openly declaring that its new 'report' will finish off critics of Bush's official conspiracy theory of 911, NIST has presumed to repeal laws of physics --the laws of entropy as well as the First & the Second Laws of Thermodynamics. Are we to expect Bush will now try repeal the equations of Galileo and Newton which describe precisely the free fall of sabotaged towers in New York? Perhaps Bush and his NEOCON co-conspirators will re-design the universe itself!

GAITHERSBURG, Md.—The fall of the 47-story World Trade Center building 7 (WTC 7) in New York City late in the afternoon of Sept. 11, 2001, was primarily due to fires, the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) announced today following an extensive, three-year scientific and technical building and fire safety investigation. This was the first known instance of fire causing the total collapse of a tall building, the agency stated as it released for public comment its WTC investigation report and 13 recommendations for improving building and fire safety.

“Our study found that the fires in WTC 7, which were uncontrolled but otherwise similar to fires experienced in other tall buildings, caused an extraordinary event,” said NIST WTC Lead Investigator Shyam Sunder. “Heating of floor beams and girders caused a critical support column to fail, initiating a fire-induced progressive collapse that brought the building down.”

--NIST WTC 7 Investigation Finds Building Fires Caused Collapse

NIST states as fact a baseless assumption. NIST fails to address the temperatures required to melt steel and, thus, cause the collapse! The question then is not whether but when the building was prepped for demolition!

NIST ignores the fact that WTC 7 had not been struck by airliners; the fires were secondary and comparatively cool. It has never been demonstrated that WTC 7 fires were ever hot enough to have melted steel at any time. Moreover, fires cool over time. They do not get hotter when left alone. According to the First Law of Thermodynamics, an increase in the internal energy of any 'system is equal to the amount of energy added by heating the system, minus the amount lost as a result of the work done by the system on its surroundings'.

The second law is a straightforward law of physics with the consequence that, in a closed system, you can't finish any real physical process with as much useful energy as you had to start with — some is always wasted. This means that a perpetual motion machine is impossible. The second law was formulated after nineteenth century engineers noticed that heat cannot pass from a colder body to a warmer body by itself.

According to philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn, the second law was first put into words by two scientists, Rudolph Clausius and William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), using different examples, in 1850-51 (2). American quantum physicist Richard P. Feynman, however, says the French physicist Sadi Carnot discovered the second law 25 years earlier (3). That would have been before the first law, conservation of energy, was discovered! In any case, modern scientists completely agree about the above principles.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics

The second law of thermodynamics is associated with increasing entropy, i.e, disorder. It states that in an isolated system, entropy will, over time, increase, reaching its maximum value at equilibrium. The fires inside the twin towers were never hot enough to have melted steel. The fires themselves cooled over time, never reaching or approaching temperatures required to melt steel. Something happened that should not have. Entropy was interfered with! Something was added to the equation. Giving the game away and exposing the official lie is the fact that unnatural heat persisted long after the buildings had long collapsed.

"This is how it's been since day one...and this is six weeks later. As we get closer to the center of this it gets hotter and hotter - it's probably 1500 degrees."

-- WMV video download (616kB)

There is no reason to suppose that anything supernatural happened at WTC 7; there is no reason to suppose that laws of physics discovered and described by William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin, Newton, Galileo et al need revision. There is reason to suspect that something highly illegal happened at WTC 7. Persistent heat patterns, observed from space are big holes in Bush's official theory which cannot explain them innocently. If 'thermal expansion' is to be implicated, the source of additional heat MUST be considered.

The best explanation for the collapse of WTC 7 is still the simplest --Silverstein's simple statement that the building had been 'pulled' following his discussion and agreement with firefighters. Silverstein is on video tape confirming that within minutes of his discussion with firefighters, in which it was agreed that the building be pulled, Building 7 was in fact 'pulled'. That's irrefutable.

'Thermal expansion' differs among various materials. The 'thermal expansion' co-efficient of steel can be looked up here for free! If you are willing to pay a small yearly subscription fee, you can plug that coefficient (for steel) into an 'online' calculator that will tell you precisely how much 'expansion' can be expected per degree of heat in various scales. The coefficients are one thing. Of more interest are the exponents which, as I recall, are always negative, as in negative 6. Any positive number to the power of negative six, for example, is very, very, very small. Any coefficient to a negative power is very, very, very small.

I dare say, the amount of steel expansion is microscopic if at all. It is doubtful that the miniscule expansion would have collapsed a building in a precise and symmetrical fashion which --even if it were true --assumes that the heat is evenly distributed.It is even questionable whether or not the 'expansion' would have militated against collapse rather than causing it.

Entropy is most simply a 'running down', an increase in 'disorder'. If by the use of the term 'heat expansion', the NIST implies that fires not enough to melt steel somehow got hot enough over time, the NIST is lying! Entropy is, technically, the very 'randomness of molecules' and the tendency of things to simply 'run down'. Unless energy is added, fires will cool. Perhaps energy was added. Perhaps fires were assisted.

Entropy is essential to the Second Law of Thermodynamics the second law of thermodynamics and the fundamental thermodynamic relation, which deal with physical processes and whether they occur spontaneously. Spontaneous changes, in isolated systems, occur with an increase in entropy. Spontaneous changes tend to smooth out differences in temperature, pressure, density, and chemical potential that may exist in a system, and entropy is thus a measure of how far this smoothing-out process has progressed.

'Thermal [heat] expansion' is fallaciously exploited for the purpose of explaining away with scientific sounding gobbledegook the fact that Building 7 looks like a controlled demolition. Building 7 looks like a controlled demolition because it was a controlled demolition.

NIST admitted that it hoped its 'findings' would finish off critiques of the official conspiracy theory! Guess again, NIST! The fight has not yet begun!

Just as I would not go to a doctor who tells me to keep on doing whatever it is that makes me sick, I would not patronize one who 'invents' a new disease because he doesn't know what it is that ails me. If NIST has not invented 'thermal expansion', it has, at least, applied it dubiously in order to paper over better and simpler explanations. For logical and scientific reasons, I like 'controlled demolition' because that's what the evidence proves happened.

Reports of molten steel in the foundations of the Twin Towers and Building 7 have been noted in the literature of skeptics of the official account of the building collapses. None of the official government reports have commented on these reports, although FEMA's Report contained an appendix disclosing evidence of mysterious high temperature corrosion of steel due to a combination of oxidation and sulfidation.

--911 Research

'Thermal expansion' does not explain the persistence of 'thermal hot spots' seen in satellite photos taken five days after the event!

Results of Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS) remote sensing data and interpretations show the distribution and intensity of thermal hot spots in the area in and around the World Trade Center on September 16 and 23, 2001. Data collected on the 16th were processed, interpreted and released to emergency response teams on the 18th of September, 2001. The September 23 data were processed, interpreted and the results released on October 12, 2001. The images of the World Trade Center site show significant thermal hot spots on Sept. 16, 2001. By Sept. 23, 2001, most of the hot spots had cooled or the fires had been put out.

The AVIRIS instrument is a National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) remote sensing instrument that measures upwelling spectral radiance in the visible through short-wavelength infrared. The instrument has 224 spectral channels (bands) with wavelengths from 0.37 to 2.5 microns (micrometers).

--

Heated objects may expand in miniscule amounts but heat itself runs down, cools, ice will melt. Disorder, i.e, entropy increases.

In perfect conditions the maximum temperature that can be reached by hydrocarbons such as jet fuel burning in air is 1520 F (825 C). When the World Trade Center collapsed the deeply buried fires would have been deprived of oxygen and their temperatures would have significantly decreased.

Why was the temperature at the core of "the pile" nearly 5000 F hotter than the maximum burning temperature of jet fuel a full seven days after the collapses? There were no infernos in either of the twin towers before they collapsed, so what caused the hot spots deep in their wreckage?
Dr. Frank Gayle, Metals Expert, on the jet fuel fires which burned in the WTC buildings:

"Your gut reaction would be the jet fuel is what made the fire so very intense, a lot of people figured that's what melted the steel. Indeed it didn't, the steel did not melt." [Firehouse.com]

Molten steel did not exist in the WTC buildings prior to the collapses, but...

Molten steel was found "three, four, and five weeks later, when the rubble was being removed [from WTCs 1 & 2]," Loizeaux said. He said molten steel was also found at 7 WTC, which collapsed mysteriously in the late afternoon.

What caused the steel to melt? How did it stay molten for months after the collapses?

--What Really Happened

'Thermal expansion' of itself does not explain or support the idea that WTC 7 collapsed as a result of fire. If anything, 'thermal expansion' raises the question: what additional source of heat was required to bring about the observed collapse? Perhaps the NIST should have perused the satellite photos of ground zero. How will the NIST respond if it should be proven that airliner fires alone could not have caused both the collapse as well as the persistent thermal patterns that were observed to have persisted for weeks, perhaps months after the towers' collapse? Will the NIST, by trying to shore up the official conspiracy theory, be proven to have shot itself in the foot?

Note: The letter 'A' in the pic above denotes the site of WTC 7. The warmer the color the higher the residual temperature. Clearly--these heat patterns are not only NOT explained by the officia conspiracy theory, they are ignored by the NIST's latest attempt to 'paper over' yet another fatal hole in officialdom.

Additional resources:

* John Kerry: Building 7 Was Deliberately Demolished
* Second Law: Entropy
* The Second Law of Thermodynamics