Harrit @2:21: "We got the opportunity to read, actually, the footnote in the NIST report on the twin towers -- this is a footnote which I hold in very high esteem -- I love it (Interviewer: 'Maybe you should mention it.') Yeah, I'll tell you what it is -- it is -- whoever interested, if you go into the NIST report on the twin towers to page number 82, and at the bottom you will find the footnote number 13 in which the NIST investigators, in kind of cryptic language, they admit that the 9/11 report on the twin towers does not cover the collapse. This is, in my opinion, the most important footnote since second world war, because it means that there is no technical account of the collapse of the twin towers."
[font size="1"]13[/font] The focus of the Investigation was on the sequence of events from the instant of aircraft impact to the initiation of collapse for each tower. For brevity in this report, this sequence is referred to as the "probable collapse sequence," although it does not actually include the structural behavior of the tower after the conditions for collapse initiation were reached and collapse became inevitable.
So, Harrit claims that "there is no technical account of the collapse of the twin towers" but that's not what footnote 13 actually says. It may be "cryptic" to Harrit, but footnote 13 says that NIST studied the sequence of events that
caused the buildings to begin to collapse, and after that point global collapse was inevitable. Harrit simply demonstrates that his conspiracy belief system is based on personal incredulity, which itself is ultimately based on stubborn ignorance. You are impressed that Harrit has a PhD (and ignore that crackpot PhDs certainly exist), but his degree is in chemistry, not structural mechanics. If he had even a bachelors degree in structural mechanics, he could calculate for himself, as many have, the magnitude of the
dynamic forces that were unleashed when the collapse began and compare them to the magnitude of the stresses that the structure could possibly absorb and see that there was at least an order of magnitude of difference. The "technical account" of what happened is that some columns were buckled but in most cases, floor structures were simply ripped from columns because that required less energy than column buckling. After 13 years, it should be clear to any intellectually honest person that this is perfectly obvious to the vast majority of people who actually have training in structural mechanic, many of whom have provided detailed technical analyses, while the few dozen such supposedly-trained engineers who have signed Gage's petition have manifestly failed to come up with anything other than their own personal incredulity as a rebuttal, which is laughably inadequate.
QED, Harrit
is a crackpot, without even going into his pseudo-scientific nanothermite paint claptrap, and his suit has no merit. If you want to bet that Harrit wins this suit, I do hope you get very, very long odds.
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