9/11 Debunked: "Molten Metal" Explained

[William Seger]

53. No, it was not

An independent study confirmed that the far more plausible hypothesis -- that Harrit's "unreacted thermite" chips are just chips of steel primer paint -- is in fact correct. At one point, Harrit and Jones shared their samples with another "truther" scientist, and when he was unable to duplicate their results, they vowed not share any more samples.

The most notable thing about Harrit's paper is that it actually contains very convincing evidence that the chips neither look nor react like thermite, yet Harrit comes to the stunningly anti-scientific conclusion that that means it must be some unknown, highly engineered form of thermite! The next most notable thing is that even after acknowledging that paint chips were considered as a possible explanation, the attempts to rule out paint are stunningly inadequate (e.g. rather than even attempt to find out what kind of primer paint was used on WTC steel, Steven Jones just scraped some paint of the BYU stadium bleachers and compared that). Even if you take what's presented as evidence in that paper at face value (a foolish thing to do, as the independent study shows), you don't need to be a materials scientist to notice that the paper's conclusions are simply not logically supported by that evidence.

We've been through this junk science again and again around here, and damnedifIknow why we'll have to do it again and again.