September 5th, 2010, by Shawn Hamilton, theswillbucket.com

Most observers consider the informal Coast to Coast “debate” between architect Richard Gage, chemist and scholar Niels Harrit, and physicists Dave Thomas and Kim Johnson to have been a success although who “won” depends largely on who you ask. The August 21st event, which was more of a conversation than a formal debate, explored what caused the destruction of the three World Trade Center buildings on September 11, 2001. Gage and Harrit argued that explosives destroyed the buildings while Thomas and Johnson reaffirmed the official explanation that office fires ultimately led to collapses.

A few days after the debate I asked Thomas to give me his impressions. “I think Kim and I did OK. We certainly could have handled some of the questions better, but being on Coast to Coast is a bit like being in a pressure cooker,” he said. “There were several questions I had ready answers for, but never got a chance to squeeze them in.” Thomas said he doesn’t think he and Johnson swayed many committed “truthers,” but he also doubts that Gage and Harrit made many new converts either. “We gave people new to the debate a lot to think about,” he said.
I asked Thomas what he considered to be among his strongest points delivered during the debate. He responded, “The collapses themselves, captured on so many films, and without the sounds of explosions going off. Plus, physics insights from the models and experiments I did helped me describe the collapses. Yes, they happened quickly (12 to 15 seconds), but were certainly not ‘free-fall.’ There was resistance as each floor was hit by the growing mass of the upper section. I think the descriptions of WTC7?s long burning times and complicated and long collapses were productive also. In the final moments of the show, a caller really thought he had me with his statement that the cores should have remained after the Twin Towers collapsed, and I was able to inform him that they did, and that these briefly-tottering columns are called “SPIRES,” and that they’re well-known, and discussed on the NMSR website.” Thomas added that these spires would not have existed if thermite had been used to cut columns.

Architect Richard Gage accuses Thomas and Johnson of “hand waving,” saying they simply dismiss inconvenient facts. “They just don’t deal with the evidence,” Gage said. “I thought that on several points Mr. Thomas avoided facing very clear sets of facts including the free-fall of Building 7. He tried to explain that because the inside of the building caved out first, there was just nothing left so the rest of the building came down, denying that over fifty very rigid columns of the perimeter gave absolutely no resistance to the collapse of this building up above that—in this case the perimeter of the building is falling at free-fall acceleration. This is one example of a direct denial of reality, Gage said adding. “At this point I’m doubting his sincerity.”

http://stj911.org/blog/?p=774&preview=true