So this seems like the most logical thread to bring this up in. There’s now a suggestion that the towers were brought down in part by thermite that was inadvertently created by a combination of the airplane hulls and the water from the sprinkler systems. (Yeah, you probably weren’t expecting that sentence to end as it did...)
This looks wrong to me simply because the quantities seem to be too small unless they happened to be in exactly the right places with near perfect mixtures. But this does worry me in that if this was a major part of what brought down the towers then this indicates a substantial failure of rationality if this was actually necessary. I strongly suspect that this is not going to go anywhere. But if it does, it should worry us that engineers and laypeople looking at this essentially dismissed truthers claims that this looked like a thermite fire.
Ok. Faster than light neutrinos, potential contradiction in Peano Arithmetic, and now the WTC may have been brought down by thermite. Quite an interesting last few days.
The only catch is that aluminium & water isn’t a thermite reaction.
In fact, “thermite” isn’t mentioned anywhere in the AFP story and SINTEF press summary linked in that BoingBoing post. The “thermite” hook seems to be made up from whole cloth.
Hmm, that’s a good point. BoingBoing may have added the word, but I think they are sort of justified. The primary reaction of aluminum thermite is iron oxide and aluminum which seems to be one of the reaction types being talked about here. But you are right, this is only marginally like thermite, especially if the primary reaction is the water and aluminum and the rust reaction is only secondary.
Edit: Also, whether or not this should be termed thermite (you’ve convinced me that BoingBoing’s terminology is unjustified) the idea that there may have been a much hotter reaction than jet fuel and burning paper is still pretty far from the standard story.
So this seems like the most logical thread to bring this up in. There’s now a suggestion that the towers were brought down in part by thermite that was inadvertently created by a combination of the airplane hulls and the water from the sprinkler systems. (Yeah, you probably weren’t expecting that sentence to end as it did...)
This looks wrong to me simply because the quantities seem to be too small unless they happened to be in exactly the right places with near perfect mixtures. But this does worry me in that if this was a major part of what brought down the towers then this indicates a substantial failure of rationality if this was actually necessary. I strongly suspect that this is not going to go anywhere. But if it does, it should worry us that engineers and laypeople looking at this essentially dismissed truthers claims that this looked like a thermite fire.
Ok. Faster than light neutrinos, potential contradiction in Peano Arithmetic, and now the WTC may have been brought down by thermite. Quite an interesting last few days.
The only catch is that aluminium & water isn’t a thermite reaction.
In fact, “thermite” isn’t mentioned anywhere in the AFP story and SINTEF press summary linked in that BoingBoing post. The “thermite” hook seems to be made up from whole cloth.
Hmm, that’s a good point. BoingBoing may have added the word, but I think they are sort of justified. The primary reaction of aluminum thermite is iron oxide and aluminum which seems to be one of the reaction types being talked about here. But you are right, this is only marginally like thermite, especially if the primary reaction is the water and aluminum and the rust reaction is only secondary.
Edit: Also, whether or not this should be termed thermite (you’ve convinced me that BoingBoing’s terminology is unjustified) the idea that there may have been a much hotter reaction than jet fuel and burning paper is still pretty far from the standard story.