Please see this new site challenging Zdenek Bazant's amazing ability to determine the cause of collapse of the Twin Towers in less than 48 hours.

http://bazantmisconduct.com

A new letter by Tony Szamboti and Richard Johns has just been published in the Journal of 9/11 Studies. The letter shows how difficult it can be to publish simple engineering facts about 9/11 in a top engineering journal, especially one that has previously supported the fire-induced progressive collapse view. Critics of the official accounts of 9/11 have often been dismissed on the grounds that, if they had valid points to make, they could publish their work in top scientific journals. Our letter is a useful case study on this question. A paper published in the Journal of Engineering mechanics contained obvious errors, such as data concerning WTC1 that contradicted the NIST reports. However, our discussion paper correcting these errors was eventually declined for being "out of scope" for the journal, after being under review for more than 2 years.

Our letter includes a brief timeline of events, a summary of our correspondence with the journal, and the various appeals we made. It also includes the two versions of the discussion paper we wrote, and a link to the article we criticized, so that engineers can judge the technical issues for themselves.

My tenacious colleague Dr. Grabbe has succeeded in getting a paper successfully through peer-review with editors of the Journal of Engineering Mechanics. His paper confronts Bazant who previously published a paper supportive of the "official 9/11 narrative" in the same journal.

Sincere congratulations to Crockett for another significant peer-reviewed paper; it was accepted for publication in October 2012 in the Journal of Engineering Mechanics.

Dr. Crockett Grabbe is a physicist who received his PhD from CalTech in 1978. He received a Bachelors of Science with Highest Honors from the University of Texas in 1972.

Dr. Grabbe has also published a notable book providing his scientific analyses of the destruction of the WTC Towers and WTC7. Loaded with photographs, this is his fourth book written for the general public.

"National Swindle on the World Trade Center" challenges the official story of 9/11 with scientific data and analysis. Initial pages are available free here:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0098JOSJS#reader_B0098JOSJS

Anders Bjorkman is a structural engineer from France who became an early member of Richard Gage's AE911Truth. He had previously given speeches in his country to people whose children had seen footage of the Trade Towers’ destruction and were worried that buildings could collapse from the top down. He reassured these parents that this couldn’t happen and posted his presentation on his web site where it gradually developed.

Björkman became a formal critic of the “Progressive Collapse” or “Piledriver” theory promoted by Dr. Zdenek Bazant, a consultant for the National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) in its work on 9-11. The Piledriver theory basically says that prolonged heating weakened the support columns of a single floor which caused the upper section to crush what was below it in a chain-reaction all the way to the bottom.

-continued-

http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-36199-Conspiracy-Examiner~y2010m8d6-NIST-piles-it-higher-and-deeper-an-interview-with-s...

Hi. This is my first post to this forum, although I've been reading it for some months. My name is Richard Johns, and I'm a philosopher of science, teaching in the philosophy department at the University of British Columbia. My doctoral thesis was a study of the kind of probability that physicists deal with, now published as a monograph *A Theory of Physical Probability* with the University of Toronto Press. My other main research interests are in logic, and the physics of self organisation.

I became aware of the anomalous failures of the WTC towers through a friend who is a civil engineer. I have done some reading about these "collapses", and am especially interested in Bazant's work. It is fascinating to see (apparently) absurd views published by such an able scholar in a reputable academic journal. I'm determined to get to the bottom of this.

I am planning to put my thoughts on this issue on my new personal bog:

http://richardajohns.blogspot.com

So far there is just one, rather provisional, posting, which is pasted below.

----------------------------------------------------------------

In the June, 2006 paper Mechanics
of Progressive Collapse: Learning from World Trade Center and
Building Demolitions, by Zdenek P. Bazant and Mathieu Verdure, the
authors make the following stunning statement:

DR. BAZANT - NIST's 911 FALL GUY

by Gordon Ross, ME, June 4, 2007*

When NIST encountered the sticky problem of how to explain the various facets of the collapse of the WTC Towers which did not fit their pre-ordained conclusion they must have been overjoyed to come across a hastily written paper by Dr. Bazant which purported to show, in a theoretical manner, that once started, the tower collapse would inevitably progress to ground level.

Dressed up a little to remove the obvious shortcoming that it talked of the columns reaching temps of 800 C the paper could be presented in NIST's final report in place of what should have been there - a comprehensive examination of all of the evidence which could be gleaned from the collapse and the debris field. When it all comes on top NIST can stand back and point at Dr. Bazant as the reason for their failure to study the collapse. It was he after all who assured them that collapse was inevitable.

But NIST's attempts to hide behind this theoretical paper, hampered as they were by the large hole at its centre, are now under threat by Dr. Bazant's latest attempts to bolster his ailing theory. Moving from the previously safe haven of his theoretical world he now moves into the real world of physical observations of the events of the day. But the harsh light of reality easily shines through the still retained security blanket of mathematical formulae to reveal this theory's true nudity.

Did it never occur to him ask why NIST avoided like a plaque, any detailed mention of the collapse process?

Continued after the jump...