Did something other than an airplane bring down the Twin Towers on 9/11?

Many deluded people still believe that something other a mere plane crash brought down the World Trade Center towers on 9/11? A large proportion of these 'truthers' just want to blame the USA for everything and cannot conceive of George W. Bush being to blame somehow. There's plenty of proof that airplanes did hit the Twin Towers on 9/11 and plenty of scientific proof as to how the Twin Towers collapsed.

However one Norwegian materials expert disagrees with the consnsus view, Christian Simensen thinks the Twin Towers were ultimately felled by a thermite reaction:

' "If my theory is correct, tonnes of aluminium ran down through the towers, where the smelt came into contact with a few hundred litres of water," Christian Simensen, a scientist at SINTEF, an independent technology research institute based in Norway, said in a statement released Wednesday.

"From other disasters and experiments carried out by the aluminium industry, we know that reactions of this sort lead to violent explosions."

Given the quantities of the molten metal involved, the blasts would have been powerful enough to blow out an entire section of each building, he said. This, in turn, would lead to the top section of each tower to fall down on the sections below.

The sheer weight of the top floors would be enough to crush the lower part of the building like a house of card, he said.'

Here's some science...



Thanks to Boing Boing for the spot.

'The AFP has a write-up about the theory. There's also a more-detailed explanation on the website of SINTEF, the Norwegian research lab where Simensen works. Finally, this appeared in the trade journal Aluminum International Today, and they've got an email address where you can request a copy of the story.'