Dr. Frank Legge writes two new papers for the Journal of 9/11 Studies

Announcing two new papers by Dr. Frank Legge (Ph.D., Chemistry):

1) "Controlled Demolition at the WTC: an Historical Examination of the Case" provides a brief history of research related to explosive demolition at the World Trade Center on 9/11/2001, from Dr. Legge's point of view. Cogent and pithy; worth the read.
http://journalof911studies.com/volume/2009/LeggeCDatWTC.pdf

2) "Frank Greening versus Isaac Newton" provides a brief expose of the "lapse" by F. Greening in understanding Newton's Third Law -- and the significance of this gaffe by Greening. Sometimes humorous, certainly enlightening.
http://journalof911studies.com/volume/2009/FGvsNewton.pdf

FYI: small error in "Controlled Demolition at the WTC: (..)"

Page 1:

"David Chalmers, using a different video from the one used above, has done the
analysis of the rate of fall more accurately recently."

Dr. Legge means David Chandler, I presume :-)

This error most likely propagated from gravity32's summary of the case for explosives. He corrected that May 3rd. (see comment section)

Thanks to dr. Legge for these interesting papers.

No article

Second article seems to be missing. Link doesn't work and can't find the article going directly to the Journal of 9/11 Studies either.

Suggestion...

I would suggest to the author a quick description of forensic evidence that was provided by FEMA but ignored by NIST in their studies.

I realize it is linked to via other papers, but if these new publications are for the layman, as it appears, in my opinion, evidence provided by the government itself and discussed in the JOM journal (http://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/JOM/0112/Biederman/Biederman-0112.htm)l of that wasn't examined by NIST would be an excellent talking point. I realize the sample is from WTC 7 allegedly, but the title of the paper mentions the World Trade Center.

Dr. Jones, do you know if anyone has contacted J.R. Barnett at jbarnett@wpi.edu or R.R. Biederman at rrb@wpi.edu to determine what happened to the steel that they examined? If they haven't, I would be more than happy to.

Did they return the sample to FEMA, NIST, or some other agency?

When I contacted NIST during their public comments session about this forensic evidence, they posted my email on-line, but I never received a response from them, although I'm not surprised.

Dr. Griffin contacted me at my place of employment to determine if I had received a response, and of course the answer was no and the question still remains.

"I would imagine that if you took the top expert in that type of work and gave him the assignment of bringing these buildings down with explosives, I would bet that he could do it." -1993-John Skilling, Head Structural Engineer WTC Towers

He does

The WPI team (Dr. Sisson, Dr. Barnett, Dr. Biederman) is only good eneough to give distraction via the BBC.

(47:50) (speaker) "In New England, the claims of the mysterious melted steel from towers seven has been unraveled. It was found by fire protection engineer, professor Jonathan Barnett - in a salvage yard. (Jonathan Barnett, Simpson Gumbertz & Heeger) "It's came from a much larger theme. This was the size of the steel that they used in the construction of towers seven, they didn't use this particular kind of steel in towers one or towers two. So that's why we knell its pedigree." - "It was a surprise to me, because it was so eroded and deformed, and so... uhm... we took it for analysis in the lab." (Professor Richard Sisson, Worcester Polytechnic Institute) "All it was attacked by, what we determined, was a liquid's like. When we did the analysis, we actually identified it as a liquid containing iron, sulfur and oxygen." - "You can see, what it does is, it attacks the grain boundaries, and this bit would eventually have fallen out and it would continue the attack." (speaker) "Professor Sisson says, it didn't melt: It eroded. The cause were those very hot fires in the debris after 9/11. They cooked the steel over weeks. The sulfur came from masses of gypsum wallboard that was pulverised and burnt in the fires." (Prof. Sisson) "I don't find it bring mysteries at all. That if I have steel in this sort of a high temperature atmosphere, that's rich in oxygen and sulfur, this would be the kind of result I would expect." (49:22)

"The Third Tower", BBC, http://www.911blogger.com/node/16541

Now then what did get that liquid so hot? Especially after hard rain falls on 9/14, after poring millions of gallons of water on the debris, as no fire was visible at the surface, and with the known cooling documented by the NASA thermal images? How do you get extracted sulphur from gypsum wallboard, where it is crystallin bound as sulfate.
BTW: A liquid containing (molten) iron, sulfur and oxygen fits to the reaction product of thermate.

And, as far as I know, Dr. Barnett refuses to share his probe for testing with Dr. Jones et al. So what do you expect from these gentlemans?

Sisson, misson

Sisson's argument that fires in the debris pile could produce sufidation falls flat for three reasons:

Firstly sulfur evaporates and burns away in ordinary fire temperatures so would not have been present if the temperature became high enough to produce a molten eutectic.

Secondly it could not have got hot enough in an ordinary fire to reach even the eutectic temperature, and

Thirdly, if some peculiar fire in the debris got hot enough to melt away the steel, the whole beam would have collapsed, heated right through. The only possible way to get the observed "thinning" is to heat the steel on one side so fast, and so violently, that the molten metal is blown away before the other side of the beam melts. The source of heat must then disappear before the remaining metal melts. The only explanation is an explosion. Could the explosive have been nanothermate?

Sisson would have known all that. He gave a rather cryptic clue in the report. I think that is as far as he is prepared to go.

Cogent papers

Wow...these papers are like the inverse of the Bazant et al. paper I read a few months ago. (One of the alii being Frank Greening.) Whereas the Bazant paper is an imposing mass of rhetoric and math, these two papers by Frank Legge are clear and cogent. If the ultimate criterion for science is reproduceability, this has been achieved in an elegant and concrete manner by the formation of the iron-rich spheroids upon exposure to the ignition of the thermitic material recovered from the WTC dust. Glad you mentioned that, as it repeats what occurred, of course, in the 9/11 WTC events.

Also glad you mentioned the possibility of outright deception on the part of Bazant/Greening. That suspicion is warranted. Have not read the complete Bazant paper from Dec 2007 (revised May 2008), for some months now, but just went back and looked it over very cursorily. He makes, for example, what strikes me as a deceptive comment right in the abstract. He says that the energy available from gravity exceeded, by ten times, the energy required to cause comminution of the concrete. Then he states that, by comparison, more than 150 tons of TNT would be required to accomplish this. However, if what Bazant says is true, then a firecracker (in addition to the plane crashes) would have sufficed, or more realistically, a relatively small amount of explosives at key places just to set the demolition into its "gravitational" collapse. Also, I can't help thinking the 150 tons of TNT is a distraction from other potential explosives and/or incendiaries that likely were used. And who knows but that maybe there were 150 tons of explosives in WTC 1, 2, and 7? Not saying they necessarily used that much, but if the right people in charge of security let them bring in the materials, perhaps under guise of something "innocent," like pre-fireproofing substance, then, why not? That would be one hell of a 'sleight of hand.'

Anyway, sorry to go on about that, but the contrast of your lucidity vs what I perceive as deception on their part, is so strong, that it leads me into comparisons. Don't have the exact quote memorized, but I also loved where you said something close to, "Where these people get the time and the funding to develop such complex and convoluted arguments, is a mystery." You said it better than that, and it was beautiful, both from a scientific as well as an ethical standpoint.

It is a complete fallacy for

It is a complete fallacy for any scientist to say there were no explosives used. There are NO forensic chemical tests to prove otherwise. However, the work of Jones et.al. show otherwise. So 150 tons of tnt is a ridiculous distraction. Next time a debunker states that as such, remind them to provide you to the chemical tests proving no explosives were used. That will shut them up.

"I would imagine that if you took the top expert in that type of work and gave him the assignment of bringing these buildings down with explosives, I would bet that he could do it." -1993-John Skilling, Head Structural Engineer WTC Towers

Thank you for comments, passed along to Dr. Legge also...

The second link works fine for me... pls try again.
Yes, "Chalmers" will be changed to "Chandler" (thanks).

Dr. Farrer and I both contacted Dr. Barnett of WPI -- who declines so far to give us a sample of the residue observed on the surface of the steel recovered from WTC. Evidently the WPI scientists are holding onto this steel, and if NYC CAN succeeds, we might be able then to get access to the sample we need for analysis.

The WPI fellows have not (AFAIK, to date) conducted an experiment of heating steel with wallboard to see if the sulfate in the wallboard somehow attacks the steel as observed. But it is highly doubtful that such the sulfidation and corrosion attack observed in the WTC steel would occur due to calcium sulfate (wallboard main component), since the sulfur is bound in the compound and not free sulfur. It is too bad that people seem so reluctant to do actual experiments and to allow others to do scientific tests on existing materials. However, they (WPI) did initially produce useful data on the steel collected from the WTC -- data which were ignored however by NIST in their reports...