Consider a typical mole whose mass is ~100 g. What is the mass of one mole of moles?

Let’s face the problem head on:

100 g = 0.1 kg.

A mole of any item is Avogadro’s number (~6.022 x 10²³) of that item, so the mass of a mole of burrowing moles would be 6.022 x 10²² kg.

For comparison, consider that the mass of the earth is ~5.97 x 10²⁴ kg, which is nearly 100 moles of moles.

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Other thoughts on moles:

When I was a kid in high school chemistry I learned that a mole of a substance is the “gram molecular weight” of the substance. In other words, given that the molecular weight of carbon is 12, a mole of carbon is 12 grams of carbon. Similarly a mole of water is 18 grams of water. Using these concepts in problem solving was quite “do-able” but tended to get tangled up.

In teaching high school physics I have taken the liberty of reformulating the definition a bit. Rather than count the atoms or molecules, count the “nucleons,” where a nucleon is either a proton or a neutron. (Yes, I realize the mass of a proton is 1.673 × 10⁻²⁷ kg whereas the mass of a neutron is 1.675 × 10⁻²⁷ kg, not to mention that the masses vary depending on the binding energy in the nucleus, and not to mention that we quit counting the electrons long ago, … but to “slide rule accuracy”, yes I still keep my slide rule handy, their masses are equal.)

Bottom line: Avogadro’s number is the number of nucleons in a gram of anything.

To bring this home I ask my students to estimate the number of protons in their body. If their weight is 150 lb, first convert to kg (~68 kg). 68 kg is 68,000 grams, so there are 68,000 x Avogadro’s number of nucleons in their body. That works out to be 68,000 x 6.02x10²³ = 4.09 x 10²⁸ nucleons. For small atoms near the top of the periodic table there are roughly equal numbers of protons and neutrons, so there are ~2 x 10²⁸ protons. In a physics context this spins off easily into the pondering the total electric charge on the protons in their body, and how precisely balanced this must be with the number of electrons to not be repelled by someone you are trying to hug, etc.

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BTW, had you noticed that the reciprocal of Avogadro’s Number is, pretty closely, the mass of a proton in grams? Is that surprising?

The belief that the Apollo landings were a hoax seems to increase with each new generation to emerge since the Moon landings took place. We are half way from the time of Apollo 11 to the time when no one with living memories of that event will remain. By that time it is possible that the majority of people will not believe it happened. There is an anemically funded program to return human explorers to the Moon, and it is possible this too will be considered, by some, to be a current ongoing ’hoax’ made more possible with the progress in digital image effects.

Many objections have been raised to the authenticity of the Apollo program, ranging from claims about the lethality of the Van Allen belts, to various photographic issues, to supposed odd behavior of the returned astronauts. None of these issues is definitive proof of fakery, but the onslaught of one objection after another makes the proposition more seductive and attempted refutation a daunting prospect. (Someone who goes under the name of Everyday Astronaut has undertaken to produce a very impressive list of solid answers for these kinds of objections, if you would like to invest 2h 20min of listening time some evening.)

Our approach here will not be to go down the list of supposed anomalies and debunk them all one at a time. There will always be more, and every explanation will immediately lead to quibbling. Suffice it to say that an anomaly is not a proof of fakery. It is a puzzle to be solved. There are excellent discussions of all the usual objections but they have had little impact on those who are already convinced that people are out to deceive them. We will leave you to search these out on YouTube, and elsewhere, for yourself.

What our goal is here is to present the affirmative case for the authenticity of the Apollo program. If it is established that the moon landings had to have happened, then the anomalies (effects of exposure to Van Allen radiation, diffuse lighting in the lunar shadows, lack of stars in astronaut photographs, etc.) become a list of puzzles to be investigated and solved. There is no way to “prove” anything to determined disbelievers. For them, the assumption that all contrary evidence is faked becomes the default “retreat zone” in any discussion of the evidence. But these people are not really our target audience. Our intention is to set what we believe is the strongest affirmative evidence on the table so that a reasonable person trying to makes sense of the debate would find it hard to brush it aside and simply say “Fake News.”

There are several strong lines of evidence that all six of the moon landings did in fact take place. We believe these range from very persuasive to conclusive.

1. Returned lunar samples and the transformative effect they have had on solar system research.

2. Multiple high resolution photographs from lunar orbiters of all of the Apollo landing sites.

3. Lunar ranging experiments.

1. Lunar samples

All six Apollo landings, as well as Russian and Chinese robotic landers, returned samples of rock and lunar regolith (i.e. lunar “soil,” that is not really soil by terrestrial standards, but simply lunar rock that has been pulverized by billions of years of meteoric impacts and chipped and cratered by a constant rain of high speed micrometeorites).

Samples have been returned by three unmanned Russian landers,
Luna 16–101 grams
Luna 20–30 grams
Luna 24–170 grams

and a Chinese lander in 2020,
Chang’e 5–1.731 kg

By contrast, the Apollo landers returned,
Apollo 11–21.55 kg
Apollo 12–34.3 kg
Apollo 14–42.8 kg
Apollo 15–76.7 kg
Apollo 16–95.2 kg
Apollo 17–110.4 kg

(1 kg = 1000 grams)

What sets the Apollo samples apart are quantity and variety. The unmanned landers reached down and took a scoop of whatever was there. The Apollo astronauts roamed around and searched for rocks based on various criteria in an effort to further the understanding of lunar geology, discovering some interesting unexpected finds along the way. The last three missions included a Lunar Rover, which allowed sampling over a much wider area. Dr. Harrison Schmitt, a PhD geologist, was recruited specifically for his geological expertise to be one of the astronauts on Apollo 17. A talk in 2020 by Brian Day, Deputy Staff Scientist at NASA, at the Chabot Space and Science Center in Oakland, CA, documents the discovery of several specific lunar rocks that were later studied in the lab upon return.

Various properties of the lunar rocks and regolith, make them distinct from terrestrial samples. For instance, the mineral anorthite is rare on earth but common on the moon. Lunar rocks are depleted of volatile materials, most notably water. Water, in the form of hydrated minerals at the molecular level, is entirely absent in most lunar rocks. An estimated 20% of the surface material consists of glass beads, rock that was melted, “sprayed up,” in volcanic events, and solidified before they returned to the surface. Recent research has revealed the presence of microscopic quantities of water in some of the glass beads (a result of studying the lunar samples, by the way. Science evolves.). Radioactive dating of lunar rock samples shows that the oldest lunar rocks are older than the oldest terrestrial rocks. The earth’s surface is heavily eroded and reprocessed by tectonic forces, whereas the lunar highlands, which have not been flooded by basaltic lava flows that cover the basins, preserve rocks that date back to the end of the initial period of heavy meteoric bombardment. Weathering by atmosphere or water are not present on the moon. The only forms of “weathering” are bombardment by micrometeorites, traveling up to 160,000 mi/hr (for head-on collisions with particles from the Oort Cloud), and direct impact of cosmic rays and the solar wind on the surface, unlike the earth, which is protected by an atmosphere and magnetic field. Even small lunar rocks show evidence of cratering by micrometeorites. The lunar samples returned from the Apollo missions are some of the greatest scientific legacies of the Apollo program which continue to be studied by scientists all over the world.

Direct study of the lunar samples has transformed our understanding of the early earth and the planetary system as a whole. It may be hard to grasp the magnitude of the sample return project, but the Lunar Sample and Photo Catalog makes browsing the lunar samples accessible online. It correlates multiple photographs of the samples with links to the published research on each sample. Take the time to browse this catalog and associated research and you can clearly see this is not a sham activity.

Figure 3 is a partial illustration of the extensive photographic record for a single rock from the Apollo 11 mission. Listed with it are the scientific studies based on that particular sample.

In summary, the project of gathering and returning lunar rock and regolith samples was a massive undertaking, which can in no way be likened to a PR stunt or “photo op” to bolster national prestige, as some have described these missions. The extensive sample collection laid the basis for ongoing science which has revised our views of processes in the early solar system. The physical evidence provided by the returned samples is not compatible with a theory that says the mission was faked.

2. Lunar Orbiter Photographs of the Apollo Landing Sites

The lunar descent modules and the various artifacts left behind on the moon are too small to be detected by earth-based telescopes. The largest earth-based telescopes have a resolution at the surface of the moon on the order of 100 meters. However a number of lunar orbital missions have brought cameras very close to the moon, enabling mapping of the surface to very high resolution. Being closer makes all the difference. Photos from these orbiters have documented all of the Apollo landing sites, showing the descent modules, the rovers, scientific packages left behind on the lunar surface, shadows of the flags planted on the surface (with the exception of the Apollo 11 flag, which Buzz Aldrin noted was blown over by the rockets during ascent), and the trails of disturbed surface material kicked up by the feet of the astronauts and the parallel tire tracks of the lunar rovers, which correspond with the video taped astronaut activity. Lunar orbiters have been launched by the U.S., India, and China. We have numerous photographs of the landing sites from the U.S. and Indian orbiters. We have statements from the Chinese that they have photographed the Apollo landing sites, but they have not made their images public. Note that India and China are not under the control of NASA, and it would be unlikely for China to affirm the presence of nonexistent Apollo landing sites.

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) website has images of all of the Apollo landing sites photographed from its original 2009 orbital altitude, in comparison with significantly more detailed views taken in 2019 by the same spacecraft when it was moved to a lower orbit. Figure 4 shows the Apollo 17 landing site imaged in 2019. The photograph annotates several of the places the astronauts are shown visiting in their video coverage of the event.

Another page on the same site shows all of the other Apollo landing sites. Here is Apollo 11:

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is the national space agency of India, which is independent of NASA. The agency’s Chandrayaan-2 mission consisted of an orbiter and a lander. The lander crashed, but the orbiter took high resolution photographs of the lunar surface, including the Apollo 11 and 12 landing sites.

Many images of the Apollo 11 descent stage have been obtained in varying lighting conditions by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) in recent years with its high resolution camera:

These orbiters were not sent to the moon to photograph the Apollo landing sites. The LRO is a long term survey mission that has been mapping the entire lunar surface to this kind of resolution. The Apollo landing sites are at this point just part of the landscape.

3. Lunar ranging experiments

Modern surveyors commonly use laser ranging to measure distances, at construction sites and elsewhere, quickly and accurately. The main instrument contains a laser and a retroreflector is mounted on the target pole, held by the assistant. A built-in computer calculates the distance based on the round trip travel time of a pulse of laser light.

The principle of a retroreflector is three mutually perpendicular reflecting surfaces, forming the corner of a cube. If light enters the reflector from any angle it will be reflected, typically three times, and then be sent directly back along a line parallel to the incoming ray.

The same principle is used for bicycle reflectors that are designed to shine headlights back to the driver of the oncoming car.

Three of the Apollo lunar landers (11, 14, and 15) carried arrays of retroreflectors to the moon. Lunar ranging data for the moon is desired for a number of applications, including refining our knowledge of the changes in the motions of the moon and earth (it turns out the moon is receding from the earth by a few centimeters per year), measurement of continental drift on the earth, high precision testing of the theoretical predictions of general relativity, etc.

The Apollo retroreflectors are tangible artifacts of these missions that were placed by human hands, remain to this day, and have been interacted with from earth on an ongoing basis over decades, starting with an initial verification run from Lick Observatory as soon as the Apollo 11 retroreflectors were put in place, while the astronauts were still on the moon. (That initial measurement, by itself, improved on the precision of all previous measurements by a factor of 100!) The presence of these reflectors, coupled with ongoing interaction that verifies their existence and location is proof that the missions that enabled them actually happened. The landings were not simulations.

At this point my initial inclination would be to say Q.E.D. (or in a British context, “Bob’s your uncle”) and do a mic drop. However I have found that some Apollo hoax proponents argue that the panels are not needed because laser ranging to the lunar surface itself was carried out prior to the Apollo missions. A brief history of Lunar laser ranging, on the MacDonald Observatory web site, confirms this claim, on one level, but it adds important nuance:

The concept of receiving laser light echoes from the lunar surface proceeded more or less in parallel with the artificial satellite experiments. However, the spreading of a beam of outgoing laser light as it interacted with, and was reflected by, the moon’s rough topography made ultra-precise distance determinations, as was done with artificial satellites, an impossibility. A number of such lunar experiments had been performed in the early 1960’s, both at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and in the former Soviet Union, but with little success. A later, more refined concept recommended the deployment of a corner retroreflector package on the lunar surface as a part of one of the unmanned, soft-landing Surveyor missions. This was never brought to fruition, however. It was only in the late 1960’s, with the birth of the NASA Apollo project for landing an astronaut safely on the moon, that the concept of laser ranging to a lunar surface corner retroreflector package became a reality. The first deployment of such a package on the lunar surface took place during the Apollo 11 mission in the summer of 1969 and lunar laser ranging (LLR) became a reality. Additional retroreflector packages were landed on the lunar surface by NASA during the Apollo 14 and Apollo 15 missions. Two French-built retroreflector packages were soft-landed on the lunar surface by Soviet landers.

Lunar laser ranging from the moon’s rough surface cannot account for the high precision lunar ranging program that is ongoing to this day, and in fact has been significantly upgraded in recent years.

The McDonald Observatory in Texas has been using a laser with nanosecond precision pulses that routinely measure the distance to each of the five lunar retroreflector arrays to a precision of approximately 1 cm.

As of 2005 we have entered a new era of lunar ranging with the APOLLO program, an acronym for “Apache Point Observatory Lunar Laser-ranging Operation,” in New Mexico. It uses a dedicated 3.5 m telescope.

APOLLO measures the round-trip travel time of laser pulses bounced off the lunar retroreflectors to a precision of a few picoseconds [trillionths of a second] corresponding to about one millimeter of precision in range to the moon.

That’s measuring the distance to the moon to within the thickness of a dime.

For those of you who don’t understand the top data plot, the horizontal axis is the duration of a measurement run, during which many laser pings are sent to the moon and back. Each return photon received is indicated as a data point. The scattered data points are due to reflections from the rough lunar surface. The line of precisely timed return pulses are due to hits on the reflector panel.

Bringing the purpose of this discussion back into focus, the only way measurements to the lunar surface can possibly achieve millimeter precision, or even the earlier centimeter precision, is to have stable target points on the moon. The laser beam itself diverges, on the order of miles at the distance to the moon, and the lunar terrain is rough, so there is no possibility of the reflected beam giving a meaningful distance on the scale of millimeters. It would be as nonsensical as trying to measure the diameter of a cotton ball with a micrometer. (A cotton ball is not spherical at that resolution.) The fact that these measurement programs are successful and funded, with decades of results to show for them, is evidence of the reality of the retroreflector arrays placed on the moon. That fact, in turn, is evidence of the reality of the Apollo missions that placed them there.

Any one of the three lines of evidence we have presented should be adequate to assure any wavering person of the seriousness and authenticity of the program of manned space exploration. The three lines of evidence reinforce each other and validate the rest of the photographic and video record. (Whether, moving into the future, manned or robotic missions are more practical, economical, and scientifically productive is a question for a different discussion.) The arguments that the lunar landing missions were faked are hollow, regardless of how seductive these arguments may seem. Once we recognize, with clarity, that

• the missions returned large quantities of lunar material, qualitatively and quantitatively beyond the scope of the robotic sampling accomplished by the Russians in the 1970’s and even the Chinese robotic mission in 2020.
• the authenticity of the returned material has been documented through countless scientific studies over decades, leading to new knowledge about the geology of the earth-moon system.
• the missions left tangible artifacts, reflector panels (as well as seismometers and other scientific apparatus), which have been authenticated by ongoing interaction over decades, enabled continuing scientific investigations that have advanced our knowledge of orbital dynamics and fundamental physics
• Lunar orbital missions, both by NASA and foreign entities not controlled by NASA have confirmed through their regular mapping operations, the hardware left at the landing sites, the trails in the lunar dust left by astronauts and the lunar rovers that correspond with live video footage at the time

…we can use these specific lines of affirmative evidence to “calibrate” the authenticity of these events.

This allows us to admit all the rest of the evidence into consideration. We can leave our cynical assumptions of fraud behind and approach the outstanding questions with a more constructive attitude. Instead of saying, “Aha, the astronauts could not possibly have passed through the Van Allen radiation belts, gotcha!” we can ask, “How indeed did the astronauts negotiate the hazard of the Van Allen radiation belts.” Any surviving scientists who grappled with and solved these issues, and younger colleagues who have had first-hand knowledge of their work, could be drawn into a meaningful conversation about this puzzle. The same is true for lighting issues in photographs on the lunar surface. The same is true for the visibility of stars from the lunar surface, etc. All of those “anomalies” constitute puzzles to be pondered and answered. Many of them already have. A mindset that the missions were fraudulent leads us to reject everything about the Apollo program. A mindset that the missions were authentic opens the door to consider each event and each anomaly on its merits. Perhaps we can learn something by actually engaging them as problems to be solved. But, as far as we, the authors, are concerned, none of those questions come close to invalidating what was in fact “a giant leap for mankind.”

David Chandler (lead author): I have taught physics, mathematics, and astronomy from 1972 to 2012, apart from some time in the middle working as a software engineer. In the 1980’s and 90’s I wrote an astronomy package that did, among other things, star mapping and celestial mechanics. On the side I have been an avid amateur astronomer.

Don Davis is a long time friend and world class space artist and illustrator who has worked closely with scientists at the USGS and NASA illustrating their concepts. I describe him as someone to turn to if you want a photograph from some place in space or time that you can’t reach. For instance, working closely with planetary science experts, he did a series of illustrations, of the Moon at different stages of its evolution, from early accretion, through different eras of volcanism and cratering, to the present day. He won an Emmy for his work on the episode of Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos” about Mars: Blues for a Red Planet. He is an expert on planetary surfaces and a deep thinker about space exploration and its implications for humanity. I sought out his collaboration on this piece because of his extensive background knowledge and his deep concern and involvement with this issue.

A concern that Don and I share is that our culture appears to be descending into a new “dark ages.” If we cannot use good discernment to judge between our authentic history and a scam, we are at the mercy of those who would destroy our intellectual heritage.

I have taught physics, math, and astronomy since 1972 and am currently retired. My only interest in interacting with flat-earthers on social media, which I do very infrequently, is to toss out some instant education morsels to challenge true believers and rescue the gullible who may be about to drink the Kool-Aid. What I have gotten back are not rational arguments but virulent personal attacks. That is not the path to productive dialogue or the search for Truth; it is a sign that something deeper is going on. So apart from occasionally dabbling in this activity, with minimal investment of my time and energy and with low expectations of satisfaction, I try to stay away. However, I get re-motivated when people I know, or otherwise respect, wander too close to the quicksand.

Here’s the big picture.

All the cultures of ancient Mesopotamia, saw the earth as a flat disk with the sky as a solid dome overhead. The Babylonian version, told in the Enuma Elish portrays Tiamat, the primordial goddess of the sea, personified as a sea monster, and ancestral mother of all the other gods, defeated in a cosmic battle of the gods, led by Marduk. Tiamat was killed, then split in half, end to end, with one half used to form the earth and the other half to form the firmament. So we end up with a flat earth and a solid dome for the sky.

Genesis 1, in the Bible, looks like the Babylonian cosmology, stripped of its polytheistic context, retrofitted with Hebrew theology, and organized as a stylized liturgy for use in worship. It is based on a 7-day sabbath cycle, asserting the preeminence of Israel’s God as the sole creator and the “goodness” of creation, culminating with man (male and female) who are given dominion over the earth. The picture, again, is of a flat earth with the sky, the firmament, as a solid dome overhead. The Book of Job reaffirms the solid dome of the sky, using the same Hebrew word translated in Genesis as firmament; “Can you, like him, spread out the skies, hard as a cast metal mirror?” In Genesis 1, the central act of creation consisted of pushing back “The Deep,” leaving a “bubble,” bounded by the earth below and the firmament above, as a habitat where mankind could live.

The flat-earth-solid-dome cosmology served well enough for early civilization, and it is the cosmology intuitively adopted by children even today. My (very intelligent) daughter, in third grade at the time, came home to announce that she had learned that the earth was round! Having been immersed in studying the process of concept formation in science education, I sat her down and gave her a blank sheet of paper. I asked her to show me the earth. She drew a big circle. I then asked, “Where are we?” She immediately pointed to the center of the circle. “Where are the mountains?… the ocean?….” All of these she drew inside the circle. “Where are the sun and moon?” Those she put outside the circle. “How did the astronauts go to the moon?” Somehow they had to poke through the sky. She wasn’t clear just how. Then I said, “I thought we lived on the outside.” She said, “Oh no. If we were out there we would die!” “Why?” I asked. “There is no air out there.” The moral of this story for education is that just because a child says the right words, it doesn’t mean they have actually updated their preexisting conceptual framework.

So why did civilization move away from the flat-earth cosmology, and what would motivate my daughter to do so in her own development? In my daughter’s case she had experiences with travel, maps, globes, time zones, star gazing with her dad, etc. in the process of growing up. It wasn’t the evil educational system ramming anything down her throat. The system obviously failed to even break through her preconceptions! She simply outgrew her early flat-earth concepts. In the case of civilization, the change came with the rise of long distance trade and navigation. Simply traveling back and forth across the Mediterranean, from Greece to Egypt, revealed anomalies that contradicted the flat-earth paradigm. People standing on the shore could watch ships disappear over the horizon, then reappear when they climbed to higher ground. Also, the stars visible near the southern horizon in Egypt could not be seen at all in Greece. Traveling north and south is like going around a bend in the earth. You are IN FACT going around the bend. This effect would amplify as they sailed farther south along the Nile.

Early navigators in the Mediterranean were smart enough to realize that the dominant cosmology of their day was wrong and came to adopt a new model: a spherical earth. Eratosthenes, who lived in Alexandria, Egypt about 200 BCE, recognize that he could measure the size of the earth by measuring its curvature over a known distance. It was known in his time that on a certain day of the year in the Egyptian town of Syene, near what is now Aswan, the sun at noon would shine straight to the bottom of a deep well without illuminating the sides. In other words, the sun passed directly overhead on that day. Eratosthenes noted that on the same day, an obelisk in Alexandria, where he lived, cast a shadow, from which he could measure that the sun was a little more than 7 degrees from the vertical (7.2 degrees, actually). The north-south component of the distance from Alexandria to Aswan, using modern units of distance, is about 780 km. 780 km for 7.2 degrees of curvature translates to 39,000 km for 360 degrees of curvature. His numbers, using antiquated units, were very close to these. This was a phenomenally accurate estimate of the earth’s circumference (within a few percent), given the crude technology and limited mobility available to him. (I have had high school students in Southern California coordinate with a high school in Montana to duplicate Eratosthenes measurement, with good results.)

Tell this story to a flat-earther and they will immediately pounce on you and say this depends on the assumption that the sun is at an essentially infinite distance, so the rays illuminate Alexandria and Syene along essentially parallel lines. Note, this is never brought up as an attempt to refine the discussion. It is always a “gotcha.” If the sun were smaller and closer, Eratosthenes’ method would be wrong, they say.

OK, let’s look a little closer: What does the flat-earth model predict for the distance to the sun? We have a right triangle with the sun above one point and 7.2 degrees off vertical at another point, 780 km away. Work out the trig and you have a distance to the sun of about 6,174 km. Is this sounding silly yet? We know that the moon is ~384,000 km away… we’ve been there!

But measuring the distance to the moon does not depend on NASA. Archimedes, a rough contemporary of Eratosthenes, figured out for himself, by observing eclipses, that the moon is ~30 earth diameters away and about one fourth the size of the earth. He went beyond that to deduce, by timing how long it took for the moon to go from first quarter to third quarter phase and back again, that the sun is ~40 times as far away as the moon. Since the sun appears to be about the same size as the moon in the sky it must be ~40 times as large as the moon, or in other words 10 times the size of the earth.

His measurements for the sun, were logically correct but highly sensitive to small errors in measurement, so he was off by a factor of 10. The sun is actually ~400 times the distance of the moon and ~400 times as large as the moon, or ~100 times as large as the earth. If you really want to see Archimedes’ brilliance at work, read The Sand Reckoner, in which he describes all of these measurements! Based on the fact that the sun was so large, Archimedes agreed with Aristarchus before him that the sun, not the earth was the center of the “universe.” Even taking Archimedes’ gross underestimate of the distance to the sun at face value, it is sufficiently far away to justify Eratosthenes’ measurement for the size of the earth. (The sun is not 6,300 km from the earth. It is 149 million km away!)

So even by 200 BCE we have a secure and quantitative foundation for believing that the earth is a sphere. The flat-earth model was consigned to the dustbin of history, until resurrected by modern-day, anti-intellectual charlatans.

By the way, why does the sky appear to be a dome? It’s a matter of depth perception. Your eyes can judge relative distances across the room, or across a school yard using parallax: triangulation. You have two eyes, giving you two points of view of the world. The offset produces small shifts in the view depending on distance, so more distant objects are viewed along the sides of longer, thinner triangles.

The ability to judge distance fails once you extend out on the order of miles because the lines of sight to distant objects appear to be essentially parallel. Since you can’t tell relative distances to distant objects, except by secondary clues, the foothills and the much more distant mountain peaks, that may be more than 10 times as far away, appear to be flattened up against each other. Since you can’t distinguish the relative distances to the sun, moon, and stars, they all appear to be the same distance away. A figure in three dimensions, where all the points are the same distance from a single point is called a sphere. That sphere, generated by the limits of our depth perception, is the solid shell of the sky perceived by children today, and children in the distant past who grew to adulthood with no way to correct their misperception. The universe, for the people of the ancient world, was very small indeed, until they learned to use reason to work their way past their perceptual limitations. Growth in understanding is incremental and cumulative. That is the intellectual heritage the flat-earthers of today are asking us to give up.

Gravity

Let’s ask a different question. Why do things fall? The response for ancient people would be to give you a quizzical look for even asking such a question. This was not the kind of question they thought about and not the kind of thing their cosmology could answer. There is simply an up and down to the universe. Duh! Heavy objects move downward and light objects, like fire, move upward. End of story.

In a flat-earth cosmology “the gravitational field” would consist of parallel field lines. This is the picture of gravity used in the first few weeks of a physics class where the assigned problems are limited to the scale of a football field and the height of a tall building or possibly an airplane. For such a scale, a flat-earth and a uniform gravitational field are reasonable approximations. But this model doesn’t scale up to cosmic dimensions. If it did, there would be nothing to keep the moon from simply falling out of the sky. Since it is moving sideways, the moon might miss the earth, but it would follow a parabolic trajectory, passing the earth only once, then continuing to accelerate past the earth and off to infinity. You can’t have a closed orbit of any kind without a central force, and the uniform gravity of a flat-earth cosmology does not provide a central force.

The people of the ancient world, in fact everyone prior to Newton, divided physics into two separate realms: terrestrial physics and celestial physics. The two realms followed different laws. Newton’s law of universal gravitation is what unified physics, for the first time, and fully integrated the earth into the cosmos. You can’t re-import a flat earth into a post Newtonian world. It doesn’t work. If you want a flat earth you need to divest your mind of all thoughts of space, give up travel beyond a few miles from home, stop asking about how things work, and give up all technology based on Newtonian principles. Newtonian physics is an outgrowth of the Copernican Revolution that took the earth out of the center of the universe and made it into a heavenly body, like all the rest. Copernicus avoided the wrath of the Church by releasing his writings when he was on his death bed, but his followers met the full brunt of theocratic authoritarianism for speculating that if the earth is a heavenly body, perhaps the heavenly bodies included other earths, with other civilizations, which messed up their tidy earth-centric theology.

“What’s wrong with using Newtonian physics in the context of a flat earth?,” you ask. Newtonian gravity is a force of attraction between all pairs of particles in the universe that have mass, with a strength that diminishes with the distance between them. (This description is a little bit oversimplified, but this is not intended to be a full physics course.) Gravity is the reason planets (including the earth) are spherical. All the mass in the planet is pulling inward on all the other mass, causing everything to pull together, to crunch in as close as possible. Even the largest asteroids are spherical for this reason. The only bodies in our solar system that are not spherical are the smallest asteroids, which have minimal mass, and therefore weak gravitational fields that are not sufficient to overcome the material strength of the rock resisting the compression. If Newtonian gravity applied on a flat earth, people would be pulled together, sliding across the surface and piling up in the middle. So would all the loose material on the surface. Every fracture in the rock would trigger landslides toward the center, so the initially flat earth would quickly crush into a ball.

Direct Perception of a Spherical Earth

Let’s come back to the question of direct perception. How can someone tell that they live on a spherical earth, not a flat earth, without relying on arguments from authority (what you were told by teachers, the Discovery Channel, NASA, etc.)? I routinely assigned this question to my students when teaching astronomy. The classic answers to this question (classic, literally in the sense that these proofs were cited in ancient literature, long before Columbus), are:

(1) When you watch a ship sail off to sea it disappears hull first. Conversely, when you are on a ship approaching the shore, someone up in the crows nest can spot land before someone on the deck. The height of the observer allows them to see farther over the horizon. Flat-earth theory, on the other hand, would predict you could see any point on the earth from any other point, with a sufficiently powerful telescope, because there is no curvature to limit the view.

You can calculate the distance to the horizon, ignoring atmospheric refraction of light, for a spherical earth with simple geometry, as an application of the Pythagorean Theorem. It turns out that the distance (in km), to good approximation, equals 3.57*sqrt(h), where “h” is given in meters, but mention this to a flat-earther and they will jump all over it with examples where you can see farther than predicted. That is because the simple geometric derivation ignores the effect of atmospheric refraction.

It’s like an inverted mirage. Lines of sight, especially close to the horizon, are bent because of the temperature gradient of the air. This effect deflects the image upward by about a half degree, on the average, which means when the sun appears to be just touching the horizon it has already completely set, geometrically speaking. The math needed to derive the formula that takes refraction into account is actually quite difficult, and the result depends on the exact temperature profile of the atmosphere (called the lapse rate) which varies greatly from day to day, but on the average you can see about 8% farther than what is predicted by the simple geometric formula. Bottom line, use 3.86 instead of 3.57 in the previously cited formula for typical results, but expect significant variations. In other words, you might be able to see ships farther out to sea than the simple formula would predict, but you are never going to see a fireworks show in Hawaii or Japan from the coast of California, regardless of your telescope, because of the curvature of the earth.

One way to get around the atmospheric variability is to compare the horizon distance for two different elevations at about the same time. I once proposed this on a flat-earth Facebook page. Use a drone at the beach, photograph the horizon as the drone rises, then again as it returns to the beach. A drone at 100 m elevation should be able to see ~7 times farther than a drone at 2 m elevation. Pick a day when there is a lot of boat activity. A similar demonstration would be to have a drone photograph the sun as it disappears at sunset, then send it up ~100 m to see the sun reappear, then return to ground level. That would be fun to see, and utterly inexplicable in terms of a flat-earth model. (In researching this article I found a video that beautifully supplies the drone footage I was asking for, and more. Super cool!!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pA_G5Duo_lw

Another way to directly detect the curvature of the earth without atmospheric refraction interfering, came to me when an employee at J.G. Boswell company (one of the world’s largest corporate farming operations) set up an appointment to consult with me during office hours when I was teaching physics and astronomy at Porterville College. He said he was involved in “laser grading” the fields. This involves setting up a tripod with a spinning laser beam that defines a horizontal plane of light which is detected by a sensor on a mast attached to the grader.

The grader automatically adjusts the height of the blade to maintain a constant offset from the horizontal plane of light, resulting in a precisely flat field. He told me that a problem with these fields, however, was that when irrigated, the water tended to pool up in the middle. We did the calculations and concluded that the effect he was observing was due to the curvature of the earth. It’s like making a shallow slice near the edge of an orange. The center of the slice is “deeper” into the orange. Water, under the influence of gravity, maintains a constant radius from the center of the earth, so it conforms to a sphere, making a laser-graded field deeper at the center. This would not happen on a flat-earth.

(2) When we watch lunar eclipses, we are seeing the shadow of the earth projected on the moon. This shadow is always circular, no matter the orientation of the earth, which varies with the time of night when the eclipse occurs. Flat-earthers will point out that non-spherical objects, such as disks, can cast circular shadows but the key element of this argument is that the effect is the same regardless of where the eclipse occurs in the sky, overhead or near the horizon. A sphere, but not a disk, casts a circular shadow from any angle.

(3) The stars you can see vary with latitude. This, to me, is the clearest and most irrefutable proof accessible to direct observation that the earth is spherical. If you are in the northern mid-latitudes, say 40 degrees north latitude, Polaris would be 40 degrees above the horizon, stars within 40 degrees of the north celestial pole would always be visible, and stars within 40 degrees of the south celestial pole would never rise above the southern horizon. If you took this to the extreme and traveled to the North Pole, you would see Polaris directly overhead and only see the stars north of the celestial equator. You would never see Scorpius or the bottom half of Orion or the bright star Sirius. As you travel south, however, Polaris gets closer to the horizon, and more stars become visible near the southern horizon. If you travel to Ecuador, Polaris would be on one horizon, and the south celestial pole would be on the opposite horizon. All the stars, of both hemispheres, would rise and set each night. In Australia or New Zealand, the south celestial pole would be always visible to the south at an angular elevation equal to the south latitude of your location.

More…

Do you realize that the seasons are reversed in the northern and southern hemispheres? Have you noticed that the variation in the length of the day, summer to winter, is more extreme at far northern latitudes and less extreme near the equator? The extremes of the Arctic and Antarctic regions experience 24 hour daylight and 24 hours of darkness in mid summer and mid winter. All of these facts are easy to explain on a spherical earth, but not on a flat earth.

Have you ever seen the Southern Cross from your home? (Not if you live in the northern half of the United States. You can see it from southern Florida or Hawaii, however, near the southern horizon in the springtime sky.) Whenever I hear Joan Baez sing “A Song for David,” which has the lines, “And the stars in your sky are the stars in mine,” the Sheldon in me immediately goes to the thought that the singer and her lover must be at the same latitude!

The latitude variation of the visible stars shows curvature in the north-south direction; time zones show curvature in the east-west direction. You have a phone. If you are on the East Coast try calling a “friend” on the west coast on a nice spring or autumn day at 7:00 am, when the sun is shining brightly. You will likely get an angry response for wakening your one-time friend from deep sleep in a dark room at 4:00 am. That can’t happen on a flat-earth because when the sun is above the horizon it illuminates the entire disk, so it would be visible to the entire earth at the same time.

One more thing. We are not reliant on just the classical proofs. We do in fact have modern technology including satellites and space travel, and we have in fact traveled to the moon and looked back. That is not a popular thing to say on flat-earth blogs, because a lot of their conspiracy bait is an appeal to anti-authoritarianism. The government lies, NASA is the government, so you can’t believe anything that comes out of NASA. It’s true, the government lies, when it seems expedient to do so, but the belief that the government lies all the time, or that they can maintain a coherent deception, propagated over decades, involving billion dollar projects and the entire careers of thousands of scientists and engineers, who would be in a better position than any self-appointed blogger to detect such a gigantic ruse, puts this notion at the bottom of the plausibility scale. Yes, we’ve been there, and we’ve looked back, and this is what we saw.

That is not a disk we are seeing. It is a sphere illuminated from one side.

Why didn’t I just show this picture at the beginning and do a mic drop? It’s because I too value skepticism; not cynicism, but skepticism. I don’t want to simply be “told.” I want to “understand,” and to assess what is true for myself. The government does in fact lie whenever it seems expedient. But the Iraq weapons inspectors (who certified the absence of WMDs) had a saying, which I just learned came from a Russian proverb, “Trust but verify.”

If we are driven by unbridled cynicism, we impoverish our lives. However, digging in, to confirm or dis-confirm what we are told, actually increases our understanding and enriches our experience. What we can see if we engage with this process is that the Newtonian world view is indeed well founded. Yes, physics has moved beyond Newton, but that is another story. It is another instance of “standing on the shoulders of giants.”

The Flat-Earth Psy-Op

Given the absurdity of the flat-earth model in the modern world, where we can literally travel to and be in instant communication with people over the entire sphere of the earth, and make direct observations that would make Eratosthenes and Archimedes drool with envy, promoting flat-earth theories in today’s world would, you would think, be nothing but a joke. But you would be wrong. Try having a rational conversation in a flat-earth forum on social media. I have wandered into that arena on a few occasions and found that what is going on is not a joke. It is far darker.

I started this essay saying I believed the modern flat-earth “theory,” or flat-earth “conspiracy theory,” as some would say, is a psy-op. Why would government security agencies care what people believe about the shape of the earth? Clearly they don’t. What they do care about is what people believe about possible government wrongdoing, like the JFK, RFK, and MLK assassinations, 9/11, and other, more current events, where some people allege corrupt insider involvement. Direct evidence that the CIA has made efforts to manipulate domestic opinion that could affect public policy is found in CIA memo 1035–960, dated Jan 4, 1967, shortly after the release of the Warren Commission Report on JFK’s assassination. A central issue in the JFK assassination case was whether Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone gunman (the official position) or whether there was a broader conspiracy, which would open the door to characterizing the assassination as an outright coup. Open discussion of this question, which would supposedly be free speech protected by the First Amendment, was seen as a serious threat, so the CIA circulated memo 1035–960 giving talking points aimed at smearing “conspiracy theorists” as irresponsible, unpatriotic, Communist sympathizers. Lance deHaven-Smith, in his book, Conspiracy Theory in America, shows a graph derived from the Google Ngram tool that counts word frequency in published books, documenting the precipitous rise in the occurrence of the term “conspiracy theorist” since the JFK assassination. It has become the “go-to” smear word to be applied to anyone who looks into any topic they want to suppress.

If you look at that graph you will notice that the use of the term “Conspiracy Theorist” has been accelerating since 9/11. (There is a lag time due to the publishing process because this tool is counting word usage in printed books.) Few, if any, of the recent controversies labeled as “conspiracy theories” have anything to do with the question of an actual lone perpetrator vs. a conspiracy. (In the case of 9/11 the official story was itself a conspiracy, in the legal sense of the term.) Instead, it has become a generic term of derision to signal that any member of the press, or person in a position of authority, or anyone who wants to be taken seriously in academic circles, should dismiss the supposedly crazy ideas without so much as a hearing. Books and articles have been written pathologizing “conspiracy thinking” as a form of mental illness.

So how do they weaponize the “conspiracy theorist” label? My hypothesis, and I am not alone in thinking this, is that they aggressively promote truly crazy theories about just about anything, the more absurd or grotesque the better, so they can associate true craziness with the “conspiracy theory” label. Once there is public buy-in for the unacceptable nature of conspiracy theories in general, the term is applied with a broad brush to any topic the “powers that shouldn’t be” want to silence. Being personally involved in the scientific research relating to the events of 9/11, I am very conscious of how this smear tactic plays out in that arena. But the same process is going on all around us today. Pick your topic.

The process has entered a new phase recently where mere public scorn has morphed into active censorship. They started, of course, with low hanging fruit, like Alex Jones, but that was just to get their foot in the door. The First Amendment is being trashed right in front of our eyes every day. (I have to be careful because if I say the wrong thing, Medium will censor this article. Why, in America, should I ever have to worry about something like that?) Do I think flat-earth theories should be censored? Absolutely not. They should be exposed, examined, and rejected on their merits. People should learn to think critically and be careful not to become enamored of charlatans, because what they are doing is not only crazy, but it demeans public discourse. It’s playing into the hands of the would-be totalitarians among us.

It relies on the SOH-CAH-TOA definitions of the trig functions, but only uses them as a way of organizing statements about the ratios of the sides of the triangles.

Note:

— The three triangles are similar.

— a sin(theta) + b cos(theta) =c

— sin(theta)=a/c; cos(theta)=b/c

— Substitute: a(a/c) + b(b/c) =c

— Therefore a² + b² =c².

This is in no way a comprehensive listing of alternative news and information sources, but it is a starter list compiled from my own resources as an introduction for those who have not ventured past the Main Stream Media, also known as “corporate media.” Using the Internet as a source of news requires discernment, because the Internet is wide open to all kinds of opinions and worldviews. The question is whether it is better to be exposed to the full range of opinion, and use your own judgment, in
dialogue with people you know and whose values you share, or have your news restricted and filtered to serve a possibly hidden agenda determined by the corporate owners of media companies. Internet social media, including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc. have been going through rapid
evolution. The information posted on YouTube has started to be heavily censored. YouTube “content creators” as they are called, have increasingly had to play cat and mouse with the censors, lest they become “demonetized” or “de-platformed.” One tactic is to post the first 10 minutes on YouTube, then move the rest of the program to Rumble.com or Odysee.com. You will find lots of crazy, obnoxious content on those services, mixed in with real jewels, but that is the way freedom of speech works. You are the one who must separate the wheat from the chaff.

Some of the jewels I have found

TheGrayzone (Featuring Max Blumenthal, Ben Norton, Aaron Maté, and Anya Parampil)
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEXR8pRTkE2vFeJePNe9UcQ
Odysee: https://odysee.com/@TheGrayzone:c

“The Grayzone is a news and politics website dedicated to original investigative journalism and analysis on war and empire.”

Sample videos:
https://odysee.com/@TheGrayzone:c/opcw-chief-misleads-un-with-new-lies,:0 (OPCW Chemical Weapons scandal and coverup)
https://odysee.com/@TheGrayzone:c/syrian-insurgents-guilty-of-'red-line':d (Sarin Attack in Syria came from US supported rebels)

Empire Files (Featuring Abby Martin)
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCG29FnXZm4F5U8xpqs1cs1Q
Odysee: https://odysee.com/@EmpireFiles:0

“An independent documentary & interview series hosted by Abby Martin — reporting on war & inequality from the heart of Empire.”

Sample videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxvNZisaB8E (Life in Palestine)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFoxL3sOAio (Interviews in Israel)

Glenn Greenwald
Rumble: https://rumble.com/c/Ggreenwald
Glenn Greenwald is best known for helping to publish the documents made public by Edward Snowden. He was a cofounder of the (once) progressive newspaper “The Intercept,” but subsequently left the organization and has been commenting on world issues on his Rumble channel.

Corbett Report (Featuring James Corbett, a Canadian social commentator living in Japan)
YouTube: The Corbett Report has been terminated by YouTube. If you want to see what that looks like, go to https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7TvL4GlQyMBLlUsTrN_C4Q
Odysee: https://odysee.com/@corbettreport:0

“The Corbett Report is an independent, listener-supported alternative news source. It operates on the principle of open source intelligence and provides podcasts, interviews, articles and videos about breaking news and important issues from 9/11 Truth and false flag terror to the Big Brother police state, eugenics, geopolitics, the central banking fraud, and more.” James Corbett is excellent and well-researched on many topics.

Sample video: https://odysee.com/@corbettreport:0/propagandawatch-stop:2 (Stop Watching Propaganda)

The New Atlas
International news commentary by Brian Berletic (former pen name, Tony Cartalucci)
Rumble: https://rumble.com/c/c-1459863

Former US Marine, author, and reporter, Brian’s primary focus has been Geopolitics, The Great Game, US Dollar hegemony, US/Foreign policy, NATO, Syria, China/Encirclement, and Ukraine. This channel has some of the best commentary on the war in Ukraine that avoids the propaganda
narrative that this is an unprovoked war of Russian aggression. Brian speaks from the perspective that this is a proxy war between the U.S. and Russia, where the U.S. has played a dominant role and Ukrainians are being used as pawns. (For background, see Oliver Stone’s Ukraine on Fire.) On first impression, this may come across to some as pro-Russian, but it is important to acknowledge the historical role of the U.S. and the prevalence of propaganda in the U.S. mainstream media. At minimum, it is important to at least hear this alternative perspective.

Sample video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqVPM0KSUpo (Rand Corp. paper on provoking Russia)

Kim Iversen (Kim Iverson is in the process of migrating her YouTube audience to Odysee in response to YouTube censorship, although her YouTube channel still exists.)
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoJTOwZxbvq8Al8Qat2zgTA
Odysee: https://odysee.com/@KimIversen:d

“I don’t ‘fall in line’ when the line leads to bullshit.” [Kim is an independent commentator with a unique mix of perspectives that cut across conventional left-right classifications.]

Sample video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Od2DEVt7q0 (Wahhabism)

The Jimmy Dore Show (Featuring Commedian-turned-commentator, Jimmy Dore)
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3M7l8ved_rYQ45AVzS0RGA

Rough-cut, no holds barred, usually on-target exposés couched in humor. Some will find the language and style off-putting; others will find the level of candor and authenticity refreshing.

Sample video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzh9_DfRaHg (Legalizing All Drugs)

Dark Horse Podcast (Intelligent conversations featuring Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, evolutionary biologists.)
YouTube: (YouTube has been censoring these videos, so they are uploaded simultaneously on Odysee.com and Spotify.)
Odysee: https://odysee.com/@DarkHorsePodcastClips:b
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/57R7dOcs60jUfOnuNG0J1R

“Videos about adaptive evolution, good governance, the breakdown of civil discourse and subsequent mayhem at Evergreen and other college campuses, and about the emerging Coalition of the Reasonable.” … and over the last few years, many interviews on Covid-19 research.

Sample videos:
https://odysee.com/@DarkHorsePodcastClips:b/discovery-of-novel-covid-treatment:a (Interview with Dr. Pierre Kory on the history of Ivermectin)
https://odysee.com/@BretWeinstein:f/TessLawrie:0 (Interview with Tess Lawrie on assessing Ivermectin as a treatment for Covid-19)

Dr. John Campbell
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Campbellteaching/videos

(One of the driest, most data focused discussions of Covid issues on the internet, … but consider that he is followed by over 2.6 million people! He is still on YouTube, but he uses his English wit, irony, and understatement paired with body language, warmth, and humanity, to get his message past the censors.)
“Hello Everyone, My name is John Campbell and I am a retired Nurse Teacher and A and E nurse based in England. I also do some teaching in Asia and Africa when time permits. These videos are to help students to learn the background to all forms of health care. My PhD focused on the development of open learning resources for nurses nationally and internationally.”

Sample videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEwktv-AGEw (Pandemic unnecessary deaths, the data)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5sc7G4s4CY (Vitamin D, now conclusive)

Children’s Health Defense (Founded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. A resource primarily on vaccine safety and related issues.)
Rumble: https://rumble.com/user/childrenshealthdefense

“Children’s Health Defense’s mission is to end childhood health epidemics by working aggressively to eliminate harmful exposures, hold those responsible accountable, and to establish safeguards so this never happens again.”

Sample Video:
“Until Proven Otherwise” https://rumble.com/v1rl1kk-until-proven-otherwise-featuring-cardiologists-dr.-peter-mccullough-dr.-ase.html

Some Websites with Alternative News and Information Resources:

Global Research
https://www.globalresearch.ca/ One of the few outlets that address 9/11, among many other topics of concern.

PEERS Want to Know
https://www.wanttoknow.info/subscribe:
“…Information-packed emails filled with reliable news and information that is under-reported or hidden from the public…. We search, select, and summarize for you key media articles and other vital information which should have made headline news.”

Sample video:
The Power of Nightmares (BBC documentary promoted by PEERS) Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

Some of my own topical web sites:

911SpeakOut.org
https://911speakout.org
Scientific research on the events of 9/11.

LCurve.org
https://lcurve.org
A dynamic graph of the US income distribution + commentary.

Say No to War
https://saynotowar.org
Discussion of issues of war and conscientious objection.

DC Writings
https://dcwritings.com
My collected writings on all topics

by David Chandler

Part 1 2 3 4 5 6

Free fall of WTC 7, the “near free fall” (i.e. uniform downward acceleration) of WTC 1, and the manifest use of explosives in bringing down WTC 2, just scratch the surface of the research that has been done on uncovering the true story of 9/11. (A good cross section of the diverse lines of research can be found in the video record and published proceedings of the 2011 Toronto Hearings, officially, the International Hearings on the Events of September 11, 2001.) Rather than trying to cover the whole waterfront, we will here focus on the single line of evidence we have been developing throughout this series of essays: the freefall of WTC 7 and near freefall of WTC 1. It is time to ask, where does this line of evidence lead?

1. Explosives and/or other demolition techniques had to have been used.

Free fall (WTC 7) implies the removal of all support, pure and simple. We have also shown that “near free fall,” falling with uniform downward acceleration (WTC 1), whether at the exact acceleration of gravity or not, requires the removal of a substantial amount of support independent of the falling mass. Sudden onset of downward motion and falling with a level roofline, in either case, implies the synchronized removal of support, across the entire width of the building, and these were very large buildings: 100 meters wide in the case of WTC 7 and 64 meters square in the case of the Twin Towers. Lack of synchronization would result in the buildings tumbling down rather than descending straight down. The only feasible way this could be accomplished is with the use of explosives.

WTC 2 is a separate case. Something apparently went wrong and the building did tumble down. The fact that the remainder of the building continued to demolish itself, all the way to the ground, however, without the fig leaf of a pile driving mass leads to the same conclusion. All three buildings were rigged with explosives that could be detonated in a synchronized manner.

Some have said the buildings came down “through the path of greatest resistance,” rather than taking the path of least resistance. I too have said at times that they came straight down through their supporting structure. These statements involve irony. Collapsing structures don’t do that. The buildings fell through the path one would assume provided the greatest resistance. The fact of free fall, or near free fall, however, tells us the resistance was not actually present and the falling section of the building could not have participated in its removal. Therefore explosives, or other demolition techniques, had to have been used to clear the way. (I refer to “other demolition techniques” only to cover my bases. Verinage demolitions, pioneered in France, do not use explosives, but they require extensive preparation and substitute the input of energy through bulky hydraulic devices to buckle the columns. They would not have been a realistic option for a covert demolition such as we saw on 9/11. However, even if other techniques could have been used, the significance for any investigation is that demolition implies preparation and intention.)

NIST argues that the buckling of columns in WTC 7 could have occurred “naturally” due to fire, but NIST’s computer modeling cannot actually reproduce the observed effects. The NIST model is problematic because NIST has not released all of the parameters they used in modeling the building structure. Leroy Hulsey and a group at the University of Alaska, under contract with Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, have constructed an independent open-source computer model of WTC 7. From the very start of their project they discovered numerous ways the NIST model failed to accurately represent the true structure of the building. The Hulsey group tried and failed to induce collapse, in their model, using fire, and they have been unable to induce the kind of collapse that was observed by any means short of cutting all columns.

The simultaneity of the support failures needed to produce sudden, straight down collapse with a level roof line rules out the progressive collapse hypothesis for WTC 7 promoted by NIST. Progressive collapse does not match what was observed. NIST attempts to cover themselves by claiming, without evidence, that progressive collapse occurred in the interior without disturbing the visible surface of the building. As we discussed in Part 4, this scenario is clearly false. The exterior structure is not a separate, stand-alone entity. Major girders directly connect the perimeter columns to the interior columns. Failure of the interior columns would cause simultaneous disruption of the exterior, as NIST’s own modeling clearly shows.

We must conclude that the apparent demolitions of these buildings could not be caused by natural collapse mechanisms. The apparent demolitions point to actual demolitions using explosives or other demolition techniques. (I leave the door open on the exact methodology of demolition more as a hypothetical possibility than a practical reality. The reality, in all likelihood, is the use of incendiaries to weaken key structures followed by explosives to provide the coup de gras.)

Does this mean controlled demolition companies were involved in the conspiracy? Not necessarily. As one military demolition expert put it to me, “The most experienced demolition ‘company’ in the world is the U.S. military.” I have ceased using the term “controlled demolition” because preserving neighboring buildings was clearly not a priority. I prefer the term “explosive demolition.” Whatever the exact mechanism of the demolition, these were intentional acts that employed outside energy sources apart from the potential energy of the buildings.

2. The demolitions had to have been prepared prior to 9/11/2001

Demolitions require intricate planning and execution. This takes time to set up. The demolition of WTC 7 could not have been initiated as an afterthought on the day of 9/11/2001. The famous quote by Larry Silverstein, where he says that he and a fire chief decided to “pull” the building because of the tremendous loss of life that had already occurred has to be erroneous. He and whatever fire chief he was supposedly talking to could not have decided upon, and then carried out a demolition of the building, all in the same day while fires raged on a number of floors. Silverstein’s comments have the appearance of a poorly thought out, self-serving, after-the-fact pseudo explanation for why the demolition looked so much like a demolition.

One of the most common objections to the idea that the buildings were rigged ahead of time is that the process could not have happened in secret. Those rigging the building had to install tens of tons of explosives. How could this have been done without being visible to the users of the building. My first response to this kind of objection is “Newton trumps Freud.” If the physical evidence says it happened, then it happened. Psychological objections don’t hold up against physical evidence. You may speculate about the psychological, sociological, and political ramifications at your leisure. But since this is such a stumbling block to so many people, let’s take another look.

Given the speculative nature of the objection, let me offer a plausibility argument in response. We know that the Twin Towers were undergoing an elevator renovation, rewiring projects, and fire proofing upgrades in the months preceding 9/11. Elevator shafts would give access to all the core columns. If workers wearing company uniforms and carrying security passes set out orange cones and “Caution: Men at Work” signs, they could wheel pallet loads of materials into the building, close down access to one or more elevator shafts at a time and be completely transparent to the tenants and visitors in the building. The same reasoning applies to workers with wiring or spray-on materials closing access to certain areas, removing ceiling panels, and doing their work in plain view. WTC 7 was even more secure than the Twin Towers, considering its tenant list. It is hard to pin down the details, but the same general scenario could apply.

A few years ago I was giving a talk at a conference on this very topic on a college campus where major renovations were taking place. Parts of the buildings we were using were blocked off and we had to work around the heightened noise level. No one paid any attention to exactly what it was they were doing. (They could have been rigging the building with explosives, for all we knew!) Still the audience acknowledged that apart from my calling attention to the presence of the workers during my talk, they had accepted them as part of the background scene and had been hardly aware of them.

3. The individual demolitions had to have been part of the overall operation of 9/11

Let’s start with WTC 7. We have seen that the demise of WTC 7 was due to demolition which involved foreknowledge. The cover story for its demolition, since it was not hit by a plane, was that it was badly damaged by debris from the collapse of the North Tower across the street. It would not make any sense to have a sudden demolition of WTC 7 without the other collapses providing a rationale, so WTC 7 cannot be analyzed in isolation from the other building collapses that day. It is actually probable that WTC 7 was intended to come down along with the Twin Towers, which would have provided much more adequate cover, but something probably went wrong and the building had to be brought down later in the day with a hastily concocted rationale. Another possibility that has been suggested is that WTC 7 was the intended target of Flight 93 that crashed in Shanksville Pennsylvania. We were told that the intended target of Flight 93 was either the White House or the Capitol Building. (How could anyone know? Why would they tell us that?) Neither of these scenarios played out, but the building was rigged to be demolished, so it was brought down with the weak excuse of debris damage. Police, firemen, and news reporters spent the afternoon telling people to back away because, “That’s the building that is going to go down next.”

They needed to get the word out with a plausible scenario (the building was “unstable”) so that an unaccounted for building collapse would not take everyone by surprise and be seen as a suspicious event.

Once we recognize that the Twin Towers’ collapses were necessary precursors for the WTC 7 demolition, WTC 7 has to be seen as a part of the same coordinated operation that brought down the Twin Towers. We have seen that there is an independent scientific basis for knowing that the Twin Towers were also demolished. The buildings were ready to be brought down before the planes were ever hijacked. The planes were therefore not needed to destroy the buildings, but they were needed to be a cover story to give a rationale for the building collapses. The hijackings thus could not have been the work of independent terrorists. The pseudo-terrorist-patsy-hijackers were orchestrated by those who stage managed all the other events of that day. The hijackers and the planes could actually be seen as the first layer of the cover-up.

But how could hijacked planes be allowed to wander around the skies for over an hour without being intercepted, which has been the routine practice for planes that wander off course? (Not necessarily shot down, but at least accompanied and checked out up close by fighter jets.) There had to be some combination of staged civilian and military air traffic “mix-ups” to allow the hijacked planes to continue to their targets unmolested. There is a lot of material out there on this topic. I will leave the details of this drama for further reading, but regardless of the details, this lack of response was so anomalous that some kind of interference with the air security apparatus is apparent. The web of intrigue continues to spread, once we realize the hijackers entered the country with questionable visas and were tracked by the FBI, but not interfered with, the whole time they were here.

Free fall implies explosives, which implies preparation and foreknowledge. It also implies high level access into very secure areas (of WTC 7) that housed offices of the Secret Service, the Department of Defense, and the CIA. The fact that the plane impacts were essential to the collapse scenarios for the Twin Towers implies coordination of the demolitions with all that was involved in the planes, the hijackers, the preparation of the hijackers, the issuing of shady visas, arranging for their financing, housing, and training, and coordination with the military to not intercept or shoot down the planes before they reached their targets. All of this had to be coordinated with the propaganda campaign to leverage this one-day event into a generations-long war on terror, unleashing the flow of money into the military industrial complex, and Congressional action (in the PATRIOT act) allowing the roll-back of constitutional rights in favor of greater social control. Finally, to prevent this “opportunity” from turning into a disaster for the perpetrators, everything had to be coordinated from day one with an elaborate cover-up. This brings us to our final point.

4. The fact of high level coordination places constraints on who the perpetrators could have been.

The free fall of WTC 7 and the near free fall of WTC 1 do not immediately point to a specific perpetrator, but they do define the nature of the operation and lead to the chain of inferences we have just seen. Who could the perpetrators be?

The perpetrators were clearly not the hijackers. The planes had nothing to do with the buildings falling. As we have seen, the planes could be considered part of the cover-up. The hijackers were bit players in this drama. The perpetrators had to have been in positions of significant power to be able to coordinate such a wide-ranging series of events.

At the operational level, there was a need for expertise in demolitions and access to the demolition agents used. We have not discussed it in these articles, but independent researchers have found residues of a military-grade demolition agent, nanothermite (not available on the open market), in the dust.

Private demolition companies have the expertise, but they are not the only ones. The military has ample expertise, access to the novel agents used, and a culture of secrecy. It is possible, of course, that the actual task of rigging the buildings could have been outsourced to foreign nationals and/or foreign agencies. This would answer the commonly raised emotional objection that American citizens would never do such a thing, or in their remorse they might have blown the whistle.

The military chain of command did seem to have a role in the obfuscation of the air traffic that day. Much has been written about multiple war games that could have drawn fighter jets out of the area, obscure last minute changes in hijack protocols that obstructed the possibility of rapid response, shifts of responsible personnel that put inexperienced people at key positions in the decision making chain, and the possible insertion of confusing false blips onto radar screens. Communications between the FAA and NORAD were confused and inefficient, with conflicting and changing accounts and timelines. I have seen much of this literature, but I am not the person to make definitive statements on these issues. This has not been the focus of my research. What I can say is that the military response that was routine in the months and years leading up to 9/11 was non-functional that day, allowing planes to fly around for over an hour and hit both of the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. Obstruction of our defenses was crucial for the success of the overall operation, so one must conclude that the confusion was by arrangement. Whoever the perpetrators are, they had to have the clout to manipulate the functioning of the military that day.

I previously said it is altogether plausible that foreign nationals or even foreign security agencies had a hand in the actual rigging of the buildings, to avoid the issue of individual moral qualms and whistle-blowing. However the requirement that the perpetrators had to have clout with the military establishment rules out, in my mind, that this was a foreign operation at the top level.

The perpetrators had to manage the procurement, training, maintenance, and deployment of the hijacker-patsies. One aspect of this was the issuance of questionable visas, the majority of them from the same consulate in Saudi Arabia, by some accounts issued by the same person. If this was part of the operation, which it seems it must have been, then the perpetrators had influence within the State Department, which could also point to the CIA. Money to finance the needs of the hijackers was funneled in from various sources including Saudi Arabia, so there appears to be international cooperation at some level, but not outside control.

From the very first day there were indications of media control. Talking heads spelled out the official explanation du jour of why the buildings fell. Very early in the day they identified Osama bin Laden as the most likely perpetrator, and made numerous references to this event being a new Pearl Harbor, setting it up to be treated as one.

Stories about the impending demise of WTC 7 are perhaps the clearest example of media manipulation. Given that WTC 7 was not hit by a plane, and that the NIST investigation took years to identify the (supposed) cause of the collapse, and that no steel frame high rise had ever collapsed simply due to fire, there is no plausible reason why it would be identified in real time as “the building that is going to go down next.” Furthermore, several news outlets, most prominently the BBC, got the script that the building had come down, complete with an explanation for the collapse, before it had actually collapsed.

These clips were broadcast on BBC news in the hour before WTC 7 actually came down. CNN seems to have gotten the same script even earlier and handled it in other ways.

I’m not trying to say BBC or CNN are part of the conspiracy. Just that the media was being manipulated. What it tells us is that the perpetrators had the clout to do so.

There are finger prints all over this case belonging to the CIA, the FBI, the US Military, the military industrial complex, Larry Silverstein (who leased the Twin Towers in the summer of 2001 and immediately took out a multi-billion dollar insurance policy for acts of terrorism), and likely international collaborators. But what about the Bush administration?

For me the most blatant sign that the Bush administration is a prime suspect is the cover-up. David Ray Griffin has written a whole book on the omissions and distortions of the 9/11 Commission Report, which provides plenty of evidence on this point, but reminding ourselves that we are focused on the trail of inferences from the free fall of WTC 7 and the near free fall of WTC 1, let us turn our attention to NIST. NIST is a government agency in the Department of Commerce which is under Executive branch control. We have seen that NIST, or at least a select team within NIST, has produced documents that have many examples of contradictions, irrational arguments, and blatantly invalid analytical methods. Interestingly, the whole report is not this way. There are large sections with characteristically meticulous, scientifically valid work which is then ignored when it comes to the conclusions.

One example I have not discussed already is the analysis of the spread of the fire in WTC 7. One very long and detailed section (NIST NCSTAR 1–9 section 5.6.3) tracks the fire as seen through windows in photographs time stamped throughout the day. The fire burned in any one area no more than about 15 to 20 minutes before exhausting the fuel and moving on. By the time the building collapsed the fires were nearly out. This is all documented in the report itself. But then they introduce computer fire modeling software and create a simulation. Somehow they get the simulation to produce intense fires on the 12th floor around column 79 just when and where their theory requires intense heat to make their thermal expansion model trigger the initiation of collapse. NIST’s own observational evidence shows that the fire had burned through that area several hours previously and had already depleted the fuel, but they rejected their own observational data in favor of their computer model which they could control by manipulating the inputs. Even if the fire could get as hot as they claim, where and when they claim, thermal expansion would only work in their collapse model if they ignored the sheer studs that strengthened the steel-to-concrete connections in the floor, ignored the stiffeners at the ends of the girders that gave the flanges an order of magnitude more strength than they assumed, misstated the sizes of the girder seats, and omitted several bracing beams. These elements are all in the blueprints but omitted from NIST’s computer model. There appears to be a clear agenda to force their computer model to produce a natural collapse, without the use of explosives, by any means necessary.

The question that comes to my mind is why would an organization that prides itself on its reputation for high standards of science stoop to such depths to produce a blatantly deceptive report? If this were a report on an issue that did not stir such public outrage, it would have surely passed under the radar, as most 10,000 page reports do. What they may not have counted on was citizens who are science literate, who have the ability to think and calculate for themselves, and who care about their country. We are now more than 16 years removed from the events of 9/11 and yet large numbers of scientists, engineers, architects, and many others with scientific knowledge and high levels of concern are still pushing for the truth to come out.

Do you believe that NIST, or the competent professional scientists and engineers at NIST, concocted this monstrosity of a report and pushed it out the door after the elections, before President Obama took office, during the lame duck period at the end of the Bush presidency, without having been given a political mandate from above to create a report that points away from demolition or even a realistic consideration of demolition? As we continue to the bottom of the rabbit hole, we come to the Bush administration. This is where the means (the political, economic, and military power), the motive (a rationale for war to redraw the map of the Middle East to control its resources), and the opportunity all come together. We have in the NIST report the grossest example of “Bush Science” (the manipulation of scientific results to fit policy objectives — something seen repeatedly during the Bush administration). Only the administration has the reach to manipulate the military, the press, the State Department, the CIA, our allies, and command the resources to bring the materials and expertise together. The only reason the Bush administration would want this covered up is if the blood is on their own hands. 9/11 was the ultimate psy-op: too big to be accused of in polite society. Even the suggestion of insider involvement has been made taboo. I guess that makes me a crazy, lunatic, tin-foil hat wearing conspiracy theorist. Yet we have no place else to turn. We seem to be at the very bottom of the rabbit hole. Or does it go yet deeper?

Part 1 2 3 4 5 6

by David Chandler

Part 1 2 3 4 5 6

We have been talking exclusively, up until now, about the free fall of WTC 7. But what about the Twin Towers? Of the two, the simpler case is the North Tower (also known as WTC 1).

WTC 1, a 110 story building, was hit by a Boeing 767 at the level of the floor slab of the 96th floor. The fuselage split and entered the 95th and 96th floors. The wings were tipped to the left, so varying degrees of damage extended from the 93rd to the 99th floor.

The official story evolved over time. The public was presented, very early on, with the “pancake collapse” theory in the NOVA program, “Why the Towers Fell” in May 2002, and the notion stuck in the public mind.

The pancake theory, and the illustrations used in the NOVA program, drastically understated the core structure, which actually consisted of 47 massive interconnected columns gathered together near the center of the building, acting as a very rigid building within a building.

If the floors pancaked, the core would remain as a free-standing tower, when all was said and done. This clearly did not happen. NIST rejected the pancake theory and instead postulated that the upper section of the building acted as a “pile driver” that crushed the columns of the lower section of the building, causing them to buckle. They relied on the work of a structural engineer from Northwestern University, Zdenek Bazant, who envisioned the top block crushing the lower block to the ground before crushing itself in the end: crush down followed by crush up, as he put it.

(Bazant’s paper was submitted for publication two days after the events of 9/11.) There are many things wrong with this analysis, but NIST adopted it without critique as a substitute for doing their own analysis.

Turning to observations, the first major ejection of dust and debris marking the start of collapse occurred at the 98th floor, so if we were to view the collapse as consisting of a top block of floors falling and crashing against a lower block of floors, it would be 12 stories vs. 97 stories. The top 12 stories could not survive to crush the lower 97 stories because the forces of interaction would be equal and opposite at every point. The two sections would destroy each other at the same rate, so by the time the top 12 floors of the bottom section were destroyed, the top section would also be destroyed, leaving nothing to crush down the rest of the building.

I say “if we were” to view it this way because if you watch the start of the collapse, the roof actually moves downward to about the level of the 105th floor before the top “block” starts its descent at all. In other words the top block does not act as a coherent unit that might be viewed as a hammer, or pile driver, that could crush the columns of the lower stories. It is nearly 50% demolished internally before it starts moving into the lower section of the building. NIST provides no insight into how the top section, with no pile driver above it, might accomplish this self-demolition.

We could stop there and say NIST failed to describe the reality, but let’s continue, for the sake of argument, by granting their assumption that the top block acted as a coherent unit capable of crushing what was below it. What insight might be gained by measuring the motion of the roof line? Is it, for instance, in free fall?

I measured the downward motion of the roofline and the answer is no, it was not in freefall. It fell with a uniform downward acceleration about 64% of the acceleration of gravity.

So what are the implications of that result? Unlike the simple case of free fall, we actually have to do some math in this case. I started by wondering to myself, what does this less than free fall downward acceleration say about the force of interaction between the upper and lower blocks?

To answer this question I started with the kind of analysis I teach my students in introductory physics classes. I drew a free body diagram.

This kind of diagram isolates a single object (the top section of the building in this case), upon which you represent all the forces acting on it, then combine the forces to find the net force. Finally you apply Newton’s Second Law which says that the net force equals the mass times the acceleration of the object.

In this diagram we see that the weight of the top block, W (weight is the force of gravity acting on a mass; W = mg), acts downward and the resistive force, r acts upward. The net force is mg-r which is set equal to ma (mass times acceleration). We know the acceleration from measurement to be 0.64 mg, so solving algebraically we get that the resistive force is 0.36 mg or 36% of the weight of the top block.

According to Newton’s 3rd law, the forces between two interacting objects are always equal and opposite, so the force the top block is exerting on the bottom block is 36% of its weight. That’s interesting because if the top block were stationary it would exert 100% of its weight on the bottom structure, as it did for many years! How can it be exerting a force less than its weight? Shouldn’t it be exerting a greater force due to its downward velocity, a “dynamic load,” in addition to its weight? Of course it should. If you drop an anvil on your toe it exerts a larger force than if you simply set it on your toe. But observationally we can see that the force of interaction is reduced, not increased! That tells us something is wrong with our assumptions.

What we have here is an underlying structure with a large reserve of strength. The core columns were designed to support 3 times the weight above them, and the perimeter columns were designed to support 5 times the weight above them. Rather than supporting 3+ times the weight, it is failing to support even 36% of the weight. Therefore we can conclude that about 90% of the strength of the supporting columns has been removed. If the support had been completely removed we would have free fall, as in the case of WTC 7. This is not free fall, but this is also not the behavior of a falling block crushing a structure that was otherwise capable of supporting it. To study this analysis in greater detail see my paper in the Journal of 9/11 Studies, “Destruction of the World Trade Center North Tower and Fundamental Physics.”

Graeme MacQueen and Anthony Szamboti explained this phenomenon in perhaps more intuitive terms in a paper entitled, “The Missing Jolt: A Simple Refutation of the NIST-Bazant Collapse Hypothesis.” They asked, where’s the jolt? If you have ever watched an actual pile driver pound pilings into the ground (as when building a pier), a weight is lifted up and allowed to drop repeatedly. As it delivers each blow the reaction force brings the falling weight to rest. It is in fact the transfer of the downward momentum of the driving weight to the pole that creates an impulse, the excess force or dynamic load, that drives the pole into the ground. To deliver that impulse it has to give up momentum, i.e. it has to lose speed. The impact is visible as a jolt. The weight comes to rest, so it must be lifted up to be dropped again and again. But observationally we see that the top section of WTC 1 accelerated downward uniformly, without losing speed, for the entire time the roofline was visible. It did not act like a pile driver because it never gave up its momentum. It accelerated uniformly downward the whole time, not at free fall, but uniformly downward at a slightly lesser rate. Since it never lost its momentum (by never losing its speed) it never applied an excess force to the underlying structure. That is because 90% of the underlying structure had been removed, so it was not there for it to impact. It was falling into the void. Uniform downward acceleration is not free fall, but it has the same implications for WTC 1 as free fall has for WTC 7: explosives were being used to pre-pulverize the building allowing the top section, or what was left of it, to fall with negligible resistance.

For completeness I should mention the south tower. The South Tower, WTC 2, was hit at the level of the 81st floor slab, so the top block in this case was 29 floors tall. By the time the building was about to collapse, firemen had reached the level of the fires and reported that they were relatively small and could be put out with minimal effort. Something else was happening, however, because molten metal could be seen pouring out of the NE corner of the building.

Whether it was actually iron or steel or something else, the color indicates that the temperature was that of molten iron. NIST tried to argue that it was molten aluminum from the plane, but this is a pathetically weak argument. Aluminum melts at a much lower temperature, so even if it glowed it would not be the same color. In fact molten aluminum appears silvery. The significance of all this is that fire produced by burning oil, gas, wood, or most organic materials in open air has a maximum temperature about 1000°F too low to melt iron. This molten iron, or other material at the temperature of molten iron, was caused by something other than burning jet fuel or office furnishings. (Even NIST agrees, by the way, that the jet fuel was burned off in the first few minutes and thereafter the fires were fueled by office furnishings.)

This series of articles is about the way the towers fell, so we are getting a little off track, but molten iron pouring out of the side of the building is a little hard to pass over without mention. We appear to be seeing part of the demolition process in action: pre-weakening with high temperature incendiaries. Shortly after the molten metal appeared, the tower began to fall precipitously.

Unlike WTC 1, the tall top block of WTC 2 immediately began to tip, rotating to the east.

This motion made tracking the downward motion impossible to follow in the same terms as the straight down motion of WTC 1, but the sequence of events that followed defies the pile driver hypothesis. How do you have a pile driver if the driving weight falls off? The motion is a little complicated to describe briefly in detail, but that is essentially what happened. Despite the loss of the driving weight, the lower section of WTC 2 self-destructed all the way to the ground, with explosive ejections ringing the building and running down the building far in advance of the hypothetical collapse front. The explosive demolition process is easy to see. Interpreting this as anything else is very difficult to do.

In Part 6 we return to the central question: what are the larger implications of these observations?

Part 1 2 3 4 5 6

by David Chandler

Part 1 2 3 4 5 6

In Part 3 we looked at NIST’s Final Report on the Collapse of World Trade Center Building 7; Draft for Public Comment released in August 2008. We turn now to the final report released in November 2008.

During the public comment period after the release of the final draft a number of organizations and individuals, myself included, submitted “requests for correction” heavily criticizing the measurement of the descent of the building that led to the conclusion that it came down 40% slower than free fall. As we saw in Part 3, Steven Jones had elicited a commitment from NIST that they would make a change in the final report due to the erroneous phrase, “Assuming that the descent speed was approximately constant,” when the building was clearly accelerating. A minimal change in the wording was all any of us expected.

However, when the final report was released we were surprised to see a new analysis that acknowledged 2.25 seconds of absolute free fall! I immediately changed the title of my YouTube video that displayed my measurement of free fall to WTC7 in Freefall: No Longer Controversial.

Case closed! Or is it? Upon closer inspection, the new NIST analysis merits more analysis.

Section 3.6 of NIST NCSTAR 1A says,

This is a restatement of the original flawed analysis, which NIST is still defending as valid. NIST does not acknowledge any shortcomings of this approach.

Next, the report says, “A more detailed examination of the same video led to a better understanding of the vertical motion of the building in the first several seconds of descent.” In other words, the new analysis is a supplementary analysis, showing the displacement, velocity, and acceleration of the building rather than just the overall time of fall. The results are presented in an elaborate, cluttered, and deceptive graph:

The first thing you might notice about this graph is it is upside down relative to the graph in the header of this article. That is because the vertical axis of the graph plots the downward velocity. The orientation of the graph is not a substantive issue. I am just explaining this detail for clarity.

The equation of the red regression line in Stage 2 has a slope of 32.196 ft/s² (= 9.813 m/s²), well within the margin of error of absolute free fall. In other words, with this red regression line, NIST does acknowledge free fall. However, there is a period of gradual transition into free fall which NIST calls Stage 1. Keep in mind that NIST is continuing to use Camera 3 (looking upward from West Street) for its measurements. They are also tracking a point near the middle of the roof line where the ambiguity between vertical and lateral motion is maximum (see Part 3). My graph for the NW corner of the building from a level vantage point undergoes a sudden transition from support to free fall. When I repeated NIST’s measurement with the Camera 3 video and a point near the middle of the roof line my results look almost identical to the NIST results, with the erroneous gradual transition leading into free fall. We must conclude that the gradual transition is an artefact of the deceptive camera angle. The bottom line is that the existence of Stage 1, where the building is said to be descending slowly with resistance as the columns progressively buckle, is a fiction.

The rounding of the graph in Stage 1 also accounts for the discrepancy between my measurement of 2.5 seconds of free fall and NIST’s measurement of 2.25 seconds of free fall. If you note where the red regression line crosses the horizontal axis, where the real descent begins, you get 2.5 seconds of free fall just as I did. (The exact duration of free fall is not significant in terms of the implications, but I wanted to point out the source of the discrepancy in case anyone was wondering. I was not just being careless!)

Another point of clarification is the curve NIST uses to interpret the data. They give the equation of the curve, right on the graph, so out of curiosity I plotted it. It is a kind of bell curve. Off hand, it looks like a rather odd way to describe the building collapse data.

The curve has absolutely no physical significance. It is being used merely as an interpolation curve, one that fits the data reasonably well over a certain portion of the domain. I have elsewhere described this as the mathematical equivalent of laying a wet noodle on the data and nudging it around until it fits pretty well. This procedure is not wrong. I am just mentioning it in case some of you might think the curve is the result of some kind of high level analysis. It’s not.

What is wrong with the curve is that it reinforces what is wrong with the data, emphasizing the non-existent gradual transition to free fall. When a level camera perspective is used, eliminating the ambiguous kink in the roof line, the velocity graph takes a sharp turn. One moment the building is stationary, the next moment it is falling at absolute free fall.

When I was in 7th grade one of the science teachers at our school got a grant to put up a fully functioning weather station. I was one of the students trained to use it. One of the skills I learned at that early age was how to read a mercury barometer. I learned that it was important to keep your eye level with the top of the mercury column or you would get false readings. What we have here is analogous. To see whether there is a dip in the roof line you need your eye (or in this case the camera) level with the roof line. NIST had access to the same videos I have, but they chose to use a camera angle that introduces tremendous parallax. One is led to wonder why.

The section concludes,

As stated here, after having made their detour into comments about velocity and acceleration, NIST reverts fully to the original 5.4 second time interval dressed up as a three-stage process. But as we have seen, there is no gradual transition into free fall. If there is no gradual transition there is no Stage 1. If there is no Stage 1, there is no 5.4 second interval which is the linchpin of this analysis. The 5.4 second interval and the “three stages of collapse progression” are simply fabrications.

Another issue is hiding in the language. Laced throughout this section is a repeated phrase, “the north face.”

On one level this phrase seems innocuous. The videos being used for measurements do in fact show the north face of the building. However if you dig deeper you find that the actual claim being made is that only the exterior façade is falling at free fall. A few pages earlier in the report is a table of events including several seconds prior to the start of the visible collapse over which the buckling of core columns propagates from one end of the building to the other. The report claims, “The horizontal progression of buckling core columns was interior to the building and could not have been observed from the street.” Somehow NIST is imagining that the collapse of the interior of the building was decoupled from the exterior walls and occurred earlier than the collapse seen on video. In their account, only the exterior façade remained, which later buckled low in the building resulting in the observed free fall.

The supposed decoupling of the interior collapse from the visible exterior collapse is NIST’s ultimate rationale for accepting the observation of free fall. This claim is both implausible and contrary to the evidence. The WTC 7 Q&A page on the NIST web site makes the claim of decoupling even more explicit. There it says, “WTC 7’s collapse, viewed from the exterior (most videos were taken from the north), did appear to fall almost uniformly as a single unit. This occurred because the interior failures that took place did not cause the exterior framing to fail until the final stages of the building collapse. The interior floor framing and columns collapsed downward and pulled away from the exterior frame.”

How does this contradict reality? Let me count the ways! First, take the time to study a compilation of views of WTC 7’s collapse from different camera angles.

Compare this reality with NIST’s purported reality. Of course, we are seeing the surface of the building, but there are numerous clues about what is going on in the interior.

Notice that the west penthouse (on the right) is supported until about a half second prior to the visible collapse. The columns supporting it must therefore still be present up until that point.

Notice that there was window breakage below the east penthouse when it collapsed into the building several seconds earlier. There was no more window breakage, however, until the start of the visible collapse, which spawned a rash of window breakage under the west penthouse. If surface clues, like window breakage, had accompanied the relatively minor earlier east penthouse collapse, surely a major event, the progressive failure of all the core columns, would have been at least as visible. But that was not the case. After the collapse of the east penthouse there was a quiescent period before the final global collapse.

If the interior columns had buckled they would have pulled the floors down with them, This would have pulled inward on the exterior walls and we would see visible deformations on the surface. The girders could not pull away from the exterior walls, as the NIST Q&A piece claims, because there is no mechanism for the interior to decouple from the exterior walls. The girders directly tie the interior columns to the exterior walls. Note that NIST’s own computer models of the collapse all involved major deformations of the exterior walls, but no such large deformations were seen in the videos of the actual building even as the building was falling.

When WTC 7 collapsed it gave rise to a huge roiling cloud of dust and debris that flowed down the street as a dense slurry, in a manner some have compared with the ground-hugging pyroclastic flow from a volcano.

Had the interior of the building collapsed earlier than the visible collapse of the exterior walls, as NIST proposes, the large mass of debris inside the building would have easily broken through the walls and the debris clouds would have flowed down the streets prior to the visible collapse of the exterior walls. This did not happen. The collapse of the interior of the building that gave rise to the debris clouds was simultaneous with the visible collapse of the building.

NIST cannot just supplement the errors in the draft report and expect the errors to go away. The draft report is based on the fiction of an early start time for the collapse using a deceptive camera angle to make that determination. After being assailed by its critics (us), the final report conceded the fact of free fall while trying desperately to discount the significance of that finding. The consequences do not go away, however. It is clear that the building fell with a sudden transition to free fall, and that the interior of the building gave way only about a half second early, which is a common demolition technique to pull the building in on itself. The further implication, as discussed previously, is that the building had to have been demolished by an external energy source (explosives).

Something else has been learned from the NIST report, as significant as the physical analysis. What we have seen is that NIST produced a report that is both implausible in general and impossible in detail. They did not do that through incompetence, because the scientists and engineers at NIST are most assuredly not incompetent. NIST has a well-deserved solid reputation for competence and rigor. We must conclude, therefore, that at least under the influence of the Bush administration, a select team within NIST knowingly participated in a cover-up. Since 9/11 was a crime, the NIST report must be considered a criminal cover-up. In fact, since 9/11 provided a false pretext for attacking multiple countries, resulting in the deaths of millions of people, most of them civilians, NIST committed a war crime by participating in covering up a war crime. In a just world, NIST would be held accountable.

Questioning the official story of 9/11 has become taboo in politics, the media, in academia, and in polite society in general. But the events collectively known as 9/11 changed the course of U.S. foreign and domestic policy and impinged on our civil rights and our very identity as a nation. How is it that examining such an event, in careful detail, should be considered taboo if we expect to remain a free society?

And so the rabbit hole opens wide. Before we enter in, let us look briefly at the motion of the Twin Towers. They did not fall at free fall, but let’s take a closer look.

Part 1 2 3 4 5 6

by David Chandler

Part 1 2 3 4 5 6

In Part 1 we looked at the kinematics (analysis of motion) of the fall of WTC 7. We reviewed the process of measuring acceleration and saw the direct observational evidence that the NW corner of World Trade Center Building 7 (WTC 7) descended at the acceleration of gravity for the first 2.5 seconds of its fall.

In Part 2 we looked at the dynamics (analysis of forces) of the fall of WTC 7. We established that as a direct consequence of free fall the falling section of the building could not have been what was crushing or removing the underlying structure. The building had to have been falling as a consequence of structure that was removed by other forces.

At this point it is easy to see why many scientists, engineers, and architects see pre-planted explosives as the only plausible explanation of the forensic evidence, acknowledging that there is a very deep rabbit hole of logical consequences that follow. The official story is all about avoiding that rabbit hole, but any honest investigation would need to do justice to the forensic evidence. So let’s see how the official investigation handled the free fall question.

The Bush 43 administration handed the task of explaining the collapses of the World Trade Center buildings to NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, an agency in the Department of Commerce in the executive branch of the government. It is not an independent agency. NIST released their first report on the Twin Towers without mentioning WTC 7 in 2005. It discussed the collapse of WTC 7 in a separate report released in 2008, at the very end of the Bush 43 presidency.

We will take the WTC 7 story in two parts. NIST issued their Final Draft for Public Comment in August 2008. I and others responded to this report, both in writing (in a formal “Request for Correction”) and through questions at a video taped Technical Briefing Conference. Changes were made in response to these comments and the final report was issued in November 2008. We will focus here on the August report, and discuss some of the objections that were raised, and cover the final report in Part 4.

NIST’s Final Report on the Collapse of World Trade Center Building 7; Draft for Public Comment is divided into a shorter summary report labelled NIST NCSTAR 1A and the full report labelled NIST NCSTAR 1–9. Section 3.6 of the summary report, starting on p. 40, discusses “Collapse Time.”

The section starts by saying, “NIST was interested in estimating how closely the time for WTC 7 took to fall compared with the descent time if the building were falling freely under the force of gravity.” It is curious that the framing is in terms of time rather than “acceleration.” The realistic task at hand was to correctly characterize the collapse of the building. The overall time of fall is not the issue. The most natural and meaningful way to compare the fall of the building with the acceleration of gravity would be to measure the acceleration of the building. NIST, in this report, chose not to do this. In the very next sentence they spell out their alternative methodology: “Assuming that the descent speed was approximately constant, the two quantities needed for the determinations were (1) a length that some feature of the building descended and (2) the time it took to fall that distance.”

The reference to “constant speed” was clearly an error. Even casual observation indicates that the building was not falling at constant speed, and that while it was moving downward it was accelerating. It is clear from context that the sentence was confused because the following paragraph starts, “The theoretical time for free fall (i.e., neglecting air friction), was computed from, t = √(2h/g),…” This formula applies only to motion at the acceleration of gravity, starting at rest, with no resistance of any kind. This approach is equivalent to using a stop watch to record the starting and ending time. Use of this formula completely contradicts the constant speed assumption.

Even if the report had said, “Assuming that the acceleration was approximately constant,” the methodology would still be invalid because there is no a priori basis for that assumption. We covered this issue in Part 1 of this series. The only way to determine the acceleration of the motion in a complex situation (such as a building falling through its own structure) is to compute the velocity as a function of time, over many short intervals, and determine the rate of change of the velocity from one interval to the next. Typically one would accomplish this by graphing velocity vs. time and computing the slope in any interval of interest. The virtual stopwatch approach, employed by NIST, is equivalent to computing the slope of a straight line connecting the first and last data points on the graph, ignoring all the data in between. This approach provides a meaningless result that obscures the true motion of the building. If NIST had provided the actual graph of velocity vs. time, and connected the first and last dots with a straight line, we could see for ourselves that the virtual stopwatch approach was a ludicrous irrelevancy. The actual motion of the NW corner of the roof, over the 5.4 second time interval chosen by NIST, was to remain at rest for about 1.5 seconds, then fall at the acceleration of gravity for about 2.5 seconds, and then continue accelerating downward at less than free fall over the remaining time. To do a simple stopwatch timing to characterize a motion of this complexity is a completely meaningless exercise. Coming from a professionally competent scientific organization such as NIST, it is hard to see this analysis as anything other than an attempt at deception.

As we stated above, the gravitational acceleration formula stated in the report applies only if there is zero resistance and only if the start time is the actual starting time of the fall. So what about NIST’s choice for the start time for their virtual stopwatch? The report states that the start time was the very first indication of motion of the roof line. In the technical briefing conference that followed the release of the August draft report, John Gross spelled out explicitly that they looked for a single pixel change from the color of the building to the color of the sky near the middle of the roof line to mark the start of downward motion. However, the report also states that they used Camera 3, which looks up at an angle at WTC 7 from ground level on West Street. From this angle it would be impossible to distinguish vertical motion from lateral motion of the roof line.

In fact, the motion NIST designated as the start of downward motion was actually a lateral motion. From the perspective of the upward-looking camera, a V-shaped kink seemed to develop in the roof line, but in fact it was not a vertical kink but a lateral fold along a vertical axis. We know this because other cameras positioned level with the top of the building, show no kink. The roof line remains straight, right up to and through the time of global collapse. NIST knew the fold was lateral because they say so. On p. 275 of the full version of the report (NIST NCSTAR 1–9) the kink is described by saying, “It also appears that the east end of the north face is rotating to the north relative to the rest of the north face.” So relying on the inherently ambiguous geometry of the upward-looking camera angle to misrepresent what they knew to be lateral motion, and treating it as the start of downward motion, again appears to be an attempt at deception. The outcome was a starting time that was about a second and a half before the actual onset of downward motion. From NIST’s start time to the time when the roof line descended to the 29th floor (the lowest point visible from Camera 3) was 5.4 seconds. Free fall to the 29th floor would have taken about 3.9 seconds, so if the extra 1.5 seconds were omitted, all we would have left would be free fall transitioning to near free fall. NIST clearly didn’t want to go there.

I have created a video with a clock running at one revolution per second. The end of the timing interval is when the roof line is at the 29th floor. When the clock is run backward from this point for 5.4 seconds you can see that when the clock was started the roof line was not descending at all. John Gross’s changed pixel had to have been the result of the horizontal motion of the roof line.

NIST’s explanation of the collapse of WTC 7 in Section 3.6 is sufficiently incoherent that one might wonder what it actually says. On the surface it appears to be a claim that the building fell significantly slower than it would have if it were in free fall. But NIST never actually commented on the acceleration of the building. They simply compared two unrelated time intervals: 1. the time from the first pixel color change until the roof line reached the level of the 29th floor, on the one hand, and 2. the time for an object in absolute free fall to traverse the same vertical distance, on the other. One might claim (if one were a lawyer) that NIST made no claim about the actual acceleration of the building at all. It is only by glossing over the incoherence of the argument that we think NIST has claimed that the building fell slower than free fall. Scientists and engineers don’t communicate this way, which is why I am led to speculate that this section may well have been written in collaboration with a legal team. NIST desperately wanted to deny free fall, because that is the opening of a very deep and troubling rabbit hole. But they didn’t want to actually lie, in the sense of producing a document that would be provably fraudulent in court. So, according to my best guess, NIST opted for incoherence to avoid an overt lie.

NIST’s account gets more tangled, however, as we go on. At NIST’s Technical Briefing Conference during the period for public comment I was able to submit a question.

I referred to the measurable acceleration of the building as being (generously) within a few percent of free fall compared with NIST’s claim that it fell 40% slower than free fall. I asked, “How can such a publicly visible, easily measurable quantity be set aside?” Shyam Sunder, the lead investigator for NIST’s WTC 7 report responded, “A free fall time would be an object that has no structural components below it….” But, “there was structural resistance that was provided in this particular case, and you had a sequence of structural failures that had to take place, and everything was not instantaneous.” In other words, even though the report arguably avoids the outright lie of denial of free fall, through a (seeming) strategy of incoherence, Shyam Sunder fills in the gap here and provides the outright denial that the building was in free fall, because, as he explains, it could not have been in free fall. Rather than try to explain the observable reality of free fall, NIST attempted to obscure the fact of free fall using an invalid, and completely meaningless measurement and computation. Those of us who addressed free fall in the period for public comment apparently forced a reconsideration of this strategy because in the final report NIST changed tactics.

I don’t want to leave this topic without suggesting how the change in the final report may have been brought about. Later in the Technical Briefing Steven Jones, a physicist at BYU, pointed out the simple and undeniable error in the report: “NIST discusses the fall time for WTC 7 on page 40 of the summary report, where it’s stated, ‘assuming that the descent speed was approximately constant.’ However observations by others of the descent speed show that the building is accelerating rather than being at constant speed. Why did NIST assume that the descent speed was approximately constant?”

Shyam Sunder handed that question to John Gross, who spent about 45 seconds recounting how the measurement was made and saying absolutely nothing in response to the question, while fidgeting with his pen, rubbing his nose, and displaying extreme discomfort. At that point Shyam Sunder asked if someone could clarify the comment. Someone else leaned in and said they would have to correct this in the final report.

With that response we had a commitment, documented on video, to change the final report. The door had been opened. One might think a simple change of wording in that one spot might have fulfilled the commitment, but as we shall see in Part 4, NIST responded with a new analysis that actually acknowledged free fall. Isn’t that interesting! More to come.

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by David Chandler

Part 1 2 3 4 5 6

If you haven’t read Part 1 of this series, you should really start there.

In Part 1 we saw that the free fall of World Trade Center Building 7 (WTC 7) on 9/11/01 is an observational reality, independent of any politics, how or why questions, or any theories, conspiratorial or otherwise. It is an objectively measurable fact. The central question asked in Part 1, which has not yet been answered, was, “What does it take for a tall building to collapse downward through its own structure in absolute free fall?” Let us approach this question by looking at the physical implications of free fall.

So what does free fall imply?

We can state with certainty that during free fall the falling section of the building could not have been what was destroying the structure underneath it. The clearest way to understand this is to consider the energy involved. When an object is elevated it has potential energy. In free fall, the potential energy is converted entirely into kinetic energy with no energy left over to do anything else.

Let’s unwrap that statement.

Think of a mouse trap. When you load a mouse trap you have to apply a force to the spring as you move the spring into position and lock it. When we apply a force to move an object we say we have done work on it. Another way to say this is we have given energy to it. Energy is what you transfer to an object when you do work on it. Once loaded, the trap has the potential to do the same amount of work on something else when the trap is released, so we say the loaded trap has potential energy — spring potential energy in this case. Doing work on an object and transferring energy to the object are two ways of talking about the same thing.

Lifting a bowling ball in a gravitational field is a lot like loading a mouse trap, but in this case we do work against gravity instead of a spring. The lifted bowling ball has potential energy equal to the work done in lifting it: gravitational potential energy, in this case. We call it potential energy because, as in the case of the mouse trap, the energy can be retrieved and changed into other forms when the ball is allowed to fall. You wouldn’t want to drop it on your foot because it will dump its potential energy into your foot and perhaps break some bones. A more purposeful use of the potential energy of a raised bowling ball is to allow it to swing back, then swing down in a circular arc, gaining speed as it goes down, and release it as it is moving horizontally at floor level. This converts the potential energy into kinetic energy, energy of motion, which we see as the ball speeding down the lane.

When the ball hits the pins it transfers some of its energy to the pins, causing them to be knocked around. Some of the ball’s energy also goes into producing sound, heat, and deformation, as dents are formed in the pins. The energy transferred into these other forms is deducted from the kinetic energy of the ball, causing it to slow down. Throughout this process, from lifting the ball to swinging it to the floor, to hitting the pins, the total energy is conserved. It all adds up to the original energy at the beginning of the process. The energy is simply converted from one form to another as it is passed around to the various objects in the system. Calculating with energy amounts to bookkeeping.

A tall building has potential energy given to it as it was built by cranes that lifted the heavy components into place. As in the case of a loaded mouse trap, that energy remains, hidden and seemingly passive, as the building is held in place for years. That stored energy is released, however, if the building is demolished. In a conventional demolition, support is removed low in the building, allowing the top section to fall. As the building falls, its potential energy is transferred into other forms. If it does not interact with anything along the way, all of the potential energy is converted into kinetic energy of the downward moving building. This is a description of free fall. If the falling section crushes or otherwise interacts with the underlying structure, the energy is shared among various forms: energy of deformation of the structure, kinetic energy carried off by objects being thrown around, and heat generated by these processes. Any energy transferred to these other processes is deducted from the kinetic energy of the falling top section of the building, causing it to slow as it falls. The only way free fall can be maintained is for none of the energy to be used for other purposes. In free fall, the potential energy is converted to kinetic energy of the falling mass, and nothing else.

In the case of WTC 7 the fact of an extended period of free fall has been established by direct observation and measurement. See Part 1 of this series. We can conclude that all of the potential energy was being converted into kinetic energy with nothing left over to do anything else. Only after the 2.5 second mark, when the building ceased to be in free fall, does the falling section of the building start to interact with the structure, and transfer its energy into other forms. In a natural collapse there is no free fall. It is the descending building itself that demolishes the underlying structure as it collapses. In a commercial demolition there may be a short period of free fall, or near free fall, when the support is initially removed, but for the sake of economy the top section of the building is allowed to contribute its enormous potential energy into the demolition process. The initial free fall, if any, had to be induced from some external energy source, usually explosives. In the case of WTC 7 it is clear that there was enough destruction due to an external source of energy to clear the way for eight stories of free fall. The free falling building did not destroy those eight stories. It was the clearing away of those eight stories by other means that allowed the free fall to occur.

We are now able to answer our original central question: “What does it take for a tall building to collapse downward through its own structure at absolute free fall?” The answer is the underlying structure has to be removed, and the energy needed to accomplish this has to be supplied from some external source. The free falling section of the building does not contribute to this process.

What could the external source of energy be? In simple demolitions energy is provided by a wrecking ball that attacks the structure piecemeal. Like a wrecking ball the Twin Towers were hit by airplanes, but like the wrecking ball these impacts caused only localized damage which the towers survived for an hour or more. WTC 7 was not hit by an airplane. Earthquakes can cause buildings to fail, but there were no earthquakes in New York City that day. Verinage demolitions, innovated in France, are accomplished by simultaneously buckling all of the support columns on the middle floors using hydraulics or sometimes cables. Fire can cause wooden structures to collapse, but fire tends to eat away at a structure, causing a series of local failures that may culminate in a global collapse. Fire, on the other hand, has never caused the complete collapse of any steel frame high rise, even after burning for many hours. The only way, apart from Verinage demolitions, buildings have ever been brought straight down with sudden onset, and with an initial period of free fall, is by using explosives to suddenly and simultaneously remove all column support. All of these mechanisms, apart from earthquake or fire, would seem to require rather major outside intervention.

I ended Part 1 by pointing out that I was not engaging in any kind of conspiracy theory, because I did not put forth any theory whatsoever, conspiratorial or otherwise. The same remains true here. I have simply provided the background physics sufficient to understand the nature of the problem.

After a great deal of pressure and a long delay, the Bush administration commissioned an analysis of the collapses of the Twin Towers, completed in 2005, and WTC 7, completed at the very end of the Bush presidency in November 2008, by NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Many people assume that NIST is an independent scientific agency, but in fact NIST is a government agency under the Commerce Department, which is in the executive branch of the government. Keeping that in mind, we look at the analysis provided by NIST in Part 3.

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