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slow burning jet fuel fires are more than sufficient to cut through steel beams.
You understand that the experiment in the video was a concentrated burn, yes? I'm not even going to go into how the video, itself, outlines a host of other points that weren't even explored. But, while I was watching it, the most obvious oversight was that it was not a vat of jet fuel, that the towers' beams were roasting over. When the planes entered the towers, the concentration of fuel was
splashed, in succession, throughout the buildings, as the wings ripped through them and disintegrated. Logically, this thins out the layer of jet fuel considerably. Take a look at the videos, yourself. The massive fireball, from the second impact? (
1,
2) Where do you think that comes from? That is jet fuel exploding - a lot of it - dissipating into the air. I hope you're not suggesting (and I hate to say this, as much as I love NatGeo) that the experiment shown was a "perfect" representation of what happened inside the towers - in relation to the actual damage to the buildings caused by the burning fuel, itself. It would have been more precise, if they'd taken the jet fuel and splashed it over a pile of wood, concrete, plastic and other metals - you know; the stuff that was
actually burning, for all that time - and then roasted some beams over it. And, no, not just some random I-beams, but something to the scale of the service core columns.
Speaking of those core columns - what is being said by the official story is that
these core columns - which you can also see in
this awesome picture - were severed by the fuselage and fuel-filled wings and/or weakened by fire, at the point of impact. Then, at collapse, that compromised section of core column fell an awkwardly angled (diagonal, judging by the accounts of the entry of the first plane) one or two floors, and created a pile driver from the 20 floors above it. That pile driver was so heavy, and attained such velocity (again, at a "uniform" drop from maybe 2 stories) that it systematically pulverized the
entire network of vertical columns beneath it - without resistance. It did not follow the path of least resistance, which would have likely shifted from center mass, from the tons upon tons of support columns - still holding at full strength - beneath it. I'm not a physics expert, so of course this is speculative, but I have a hard time believing that. Apparently, I'm not alone in my skepticism.
The second video is definitely something to be considered, but is in no way conclusive, most of all for the fact that they were using a completely different type of thermite. They actually concluded that, since that (normal) type of thermite couldn't melt steel,
no form of thermite could melt steel - yet they offered nothing to back that up. That there were other, legitimate, unanswered questions at the end of the video shows that - while possibly the most likely answers - the explanations given were not conclusive.
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Originally Posted by caprisun
I also have another point which is just my own personal musing and not a part of any official debunking effort. If thermite was used in the world trade center buildings, why didn't any of the thousands of people who escaped from the lower floors see it burning? Surely fire fighters would have been alert enough to see it. Also, how did they light it? I don't think you can light thermite remotely, and all accounts I've heard say thermite is still hard to light unremotely in a controlled environment. You can't say that the thermite was placed only around the scene of the crash, because then how would they know exactly where the plane was going to crash? It seems to me that even if it was theoretically possible to take a building down with thermite, it still just seems like such a stupid idea. There must be a better way, right?
So, you've discredited the eye-witness accounts of all of those "stressed" witnesses, who allegedly saw something conspiratorial, and yet you debunk the thermite possibility because people didn't come out saying "Yeah, I saw thermite burning in a back hallway somewhere"?
And I honestly don't know that using thermite to take down a building would be a "stupid" idea. I've never seen ones taken down with what I've known to be thermite. I have heard that thermite is used in such cutter charges, so I don't know that it would be such a stupid idea, if it's something that's already being done in other cases. You say you don't think thermite can be lit by remote? Where is this idea coming from? Do you have a source for the claim, or are you simply
assuming?