I suggest asking people questions that are really open in their outcome. This has two big advantages:

• People have to start to think themselves.
• They don't feel manipulated

Example question: "If a highrise burns similar to WTC 7, how likely is a collapse?"

Answer 1: "It is rather likely."

Problems:

• Since there have been over 100 such fires, it is very likely that such a collapse would have been among them.
• Why wasn't there an explanation of the WTC 7 collapse for many years, if it was very likely? This sounds like a hypothesis without proof.
• We live in great danger, because fires happen more often than terror attacks.
• Fire insurances would climb, building codes would have to be drastically changed.

Answer 2: "It was rather unlikely. A coincidence."

Problem: How was it possible to predict the WTC 7 collapse, if it was unlikely? (And why didn't this clever engineer help NIST in explaining the collapse?)

There is a growing number of scientists¹ who believe in conspiracy theories regarding 9/11. They often call the well researched² background of the terror attacks the "official conspiracy theory" and they tend to euphemistically call themselves "skeptics"³ of this theory.

This article presents a promising experiment to use interviews with physics professors to effectively fight the further rise of conspiracy theories among scientists. Additionally, it makes a proposal to derive a professional survey from the initial experiment that would be useful to reach the proposed goals on a broad level of the scientific society.

In march, I talked to one of the engineers that were cited in the online versions of the major german newspapers Spiegel and Süddeutsche Zeitung right on the day of 9/11. Those engineers explained that the towers were doomed to fail – as you all know it. I wanted to learn what kind of people would feel competent enough to tell such things. And I wanted to judge if they indeed are competent.