Guest Column by Kevin Ryan — Science Died On 9/11
Money Murdered Science
Paul Craig Roberts
Kevin Ryan, a science/engineering employee of the firm that certified the steel used in the construction of the World Trade Center skyscrapers, realized that the official explanation of the destruction of the three skyscrapers was false. Steel does not, and cannot, behave in the way that the official explanation says.
In the article below, Ryan exposes the NIST account as pseudo-science akin to Lysenko’s temporarily successful attempt in the Soviet Union to substitute ideology for genetic science.
Today pseudo-science has exploded. Monsanto and its GMOs rest upon “science” paid for by agri-business. Honest scientists who dispute the faked evidence cannot get funding.
Ryan’s interest in pseudo-science was sparked by the false account of 9/11. He lists these six characteristics that indicate pseudo-science:
There is a lack of experiments.
The results of experiments are ignored or contradicted in the conclusions.
There is either no peer-review or peer-reviewer concerns are ignored.
The findings cannot be replicated or falsified due to the withholding of data.
False conclusions are supported by marketing or media propaganda.
Hypotheses that are supported by the evidence are ignored.
Ryan concludes that “all six of these characteristics of pseudo-science are exhibited by the U.S. government investigation into what happened at the WTC on September 11th, 2001.”
Ryan then demonstrates that the official story consists not of any facts but of the six pseudo-science characteristics:
The lack of experiment:
NIST performed no physical experiments to support its conclusions on WTC Building 7. Its primary conclusion, that a few steel floor beams experienced linear thermal expansion thereby shearing many structural connections, could have easily been confirmed through physical testing but no such testing was performed. Moreover, other scientists had performed such tests in the past but since the results did not support NIST’s conclusions, those results were ignored(see peer-review comments below)
The results of experiments were ignored or contradicted in the conclusions:
For the Twin Towers, steel temperature tests performed on the steel samples saved suggested that the steel reached only about 500 degrees Fahrenheit. This is more than a thousand degrees below the temperature needed to soften steel and make it malleable—a key requirement of NIST’s hypothesis. NIST responded by exaggerating temperatures in its computer model.
Another key requirement of NIST’s explanation for the Twin Towers was that floor assemblies had sagged severely under thermal stress. Floor model tests conducted by my former company Underwriters Laboratories showed that the floor assemblies would sag only 3 to 4 inches, even after removal of all fireproofing and exposure to much higher temperatures than existed in the buildings. NIST responded by exaggerating the results—claiming up to 42-inches worth of floor assembly sagging in its computer model.
After criticism of its draft report in April 2005, NIST quietly inserted a short description of shotgun tests conducted to evaluate fireproofing loss in the towers. These results also failed to support NIST’s conclusions because the shotgun blasts were not reflective of the distribution or trajectories of the aircraft debris. Additionally, the tests suggested that the energy required to “widely dislodge” fireproofing over five acre-wide floors—required by NIST’s findings—was simply not available.
There was no peer review and public comments from peers were ignored:
NIST published its own WTC reports and therefore its work was not subject to peer-review as is the case for all legitimate science. The people and companies involved in the NIST investigation were either government employees or contractors dependent on government work and were therefore not objective participants.
In terms of indirect peer-review, the international building construction community has made no changes to building construction standards in response to NIST’s officially cited root causes for the WTC destruction. Furthermore, no existing buildings have been retrofitted to ensure that they do not fail from those alleged causes.
NIST provided a period for public comment on its draft reports but the comments provided by those not beholden to government were not supportive of NIST’s findings. In some cases, as with NIST’s linear expansion claim for WTC 7, independent scientists submitted comments about physical tests they had performed (which NIST had not) that directly contradicted NIST’s findings.
There was one important exception to NIST’s ignoring of public comments. After a physics teacher’s well-publicized comments, NIST was forced to admit that WTC 7 was in free-fall for a vertical distance equivalent to at least eight stories of the building. Structural engineers have since noted that many hundreds of high-strength steel bolts and steel welds would have had to vanish instantaneously for an 8-story section of the building to fall without any resistance.
The findings cannot be replicated or falsified due to the withholding of data:
NIST will not share its computer models with the public. A NIST spokesman declared, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, that revealing the computer models would “jeopardize public safety.” Because NIST’s conclusions depend entirely on those computer models, they cannot be verified or falsified by independent scientists.
False conclusions are supported by media or marketing propaganda:
As with the Soviet propaganda machine that supported Lysenkoism, NIST’s pseudoscience was fully and uncritically supported by the mainstream media. Hearst Publications, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), and Skeptic magazine are examples of media that went to great lengths to stifle any questioning of the official account and divert attention from the glaring discrepancies.
NIST depended on that media support as indicated by the timing of its release of reports. NIST’s final report appeared to be scheduled for dual political purposes, to coincide with the seventh anniversary of 9/11 and to give the appearance of finished business at the end of the Bush Administration. The timing of NIST’s other reports coincided with political events as well. These included the draft report on the towers in October 2004—just before the election, the final report on the towers—just before the fourth anniversary of 9/11, and NIST’s first “responses to FAQs”—just before the fifth anniversary. All of them appeared to involve politically motivated release dates.
The report release dates allowed time for the media to quickly present the official story while public interest was high, but did not allow time for critical review. With the report on WTC 7, the public was given just three weeks prior to September 11th, 2008 to comment on a report that was nearly seven years in the making.
Hypotheses that are supported by the evidence were ignored:
Throughout its seven-year investigation, NIST ignored the obvious hypothesis for the destruction of the WTC buildings—demolition. That evidence includes:
Free-fall or near-free fall acceleration of all three buildings (now acknowledged by NIST for WTC 7)
Photographic and video evidence demonstrating the characteristics of demolition for both the Twin Towers and WTC 7
Eyewitness testimony from many people at the scene who witnessed explosions or were warned that a demolition was proceeding
The expert testimony of thousands of licensed engineers and architects who are calling for a new investigation
The peer-reviewed science that supports the demolition theory including fourteen points of agreement between NIST and independent researchers, environmental anomalies that indicate the use of thermitic materials, and analytical results confirming the presence of nanothermite in the WTC dust
The WTC reports produced by NIST represent the most obvious example of politically motivated pseudoscience in history. The physical experiments NIST performed did not support its conclusions. The reports were not peer-reviewed and public comments that challenged the findings were ignored. NIST will not share its computer models—the last supposed evidence that supports its conclusions—with the public and therefore its conclusions are not verifiable.
These glaring facts should be readily recognizable by any scientist and, given the unprecedented impact of the resulting War on Terror, this abuse of science should be the basis for a global outcry from the scientific community.
Original source: http://digwithin.net
Kevin Ryan lost his job for speaking out, as did physicist Steven Jones.
Over the course of my life, I have watched science lose its authority and its independence. There can be no outcry from the scientific community, because scientists are dependent on funding from corporations and government.
Remember the psychologists who helped Vice President Dick Cheney devise the illegal, both under US and international law, torture program.
Remember the anthropologists that helped Washington learn how to disorient and suppress native people’s opposition to Washington’s invasions.
Nothing has happened to these social scientists who helped Washington violate law and human rights, because the professions desire Washington’s funding more than they desire truth, justice, mercy. These torturers and human rights abusers are still honorable, and even envied, members of their professions. If memory serves, two of the psychologists who devised the torture program are $80 million richer.
The same is the situation for physical scientists. The largest part of scientific funding is for military work and for technologies that enhance control over populations. The careers of scientists depend on the money.
As the money comes from the corporations and Washington, scientists serve the money.
A physicist who speaks out against the official 9/11 story jeopardizes not only his career but the career of all his colleagues in his physics department. The university has to buy out his tenure and say good-bye, or the department is cut off from outside funding.
My Oxford University professor, the distinguished physical chemist Michael Polanyi, told me that during his career, during which he produced a number of students who won Nobel Prizes, scientific apparatus was inexpensive. The equipment needed for experiments and discoveries did not require funding beyond the capability of university budgets, and if it did, the donors were interested in discovery for the sake of progress and not conclusions in support of their material interests.
No more. Today money buys result. Today if a soil scientist gets a grant from agribusiness, he knows better than to attest to the dangers of GMOs and Roundup.
Food scientists know not to say anything about the poisoning of the food supply with pesticides, hormones, and antibiotics.
The preposterous official story of 9/11 warned physical scientists to forget all that they know about not only the temperature necessary to melt steel but also the temperature necessary to weaken steel. It taught them to forget the obvious calculations that prove beyond all doubt that there was not enough gravitational energy in the towers to pulverize everything into fine dust, much less to eject steel beams and human bone fragments hundreds of yards away. It taught them to ignore the molten steel still steaming below the rubble in the subfloors of the towers weeks after the towers’ destruction.
The question what produced a temperature so high that molten steel still was present weeks after 9/11 has been officially ignored.
Kevin Ryan is correct. Science died at the World Trade Center. As scientists respect money more than they respect truth, the abuse of science for political and commercial purposes will only get worse.
Just as Gerald Celente has produced the term “presstitutes,” a combination of press and prostitutes, for the media, he will need to come up with a term with the whores in the scientific community. As Karl Marx said, Capitalism turns everything into a commodity that can be bought and sold.
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