How can Popular Mechanics possibly have omitted mention of more than a thousand experts who all contend that the Twin Towers and WTC 7 were brought down with explosives? In PM's entire 216-page book, there is not a single mention made of AE911Truth or its founder, architect Richard Gage.
It is quite evident that Popular Mechanics has failed to explain away the extreme heat and molten metal that clearly existed at Ground Zero. They have also failed to show the temperatures inside the buildings were sufficient to cause collapse.
To be sure, Popular Mechanics does quote engineers that say the collapse times of the Twin Towers were not remarkable at all, but omits the opinions of the hundreds of architects and engineers who reviewed the destruction and stated the collapses happened too quickly to have been caused by fire.
The next section of Popular Mechanics' book deals with one of the more direct pieces of evidence of demolition for the Towers — the isolated ejections of dust and debris from the Towers during the collapses. Like most of its arguments, PM's challenge to this evidence of demolition is extremely weak and was previously refuted by experts at AE911Truth and elsewhere.
It would be quite interesting if any defender of the official 9/11 story were able to show that a chaotic event like the WTC disaster could create highly engineered, multilayered, nanothermite-composite materials. Any accidental thermite reactions would not have happened at a large scale and at all relevant points.
Although it is debatable whether or not the seismic readings from 9/11 indicate that explosives were used, it is evident that seismic spikes do not always occur in a demolition.
“[I]f NIST did engage in fraudulent science, this would not be particularly surprising. NIST is an agency of the US Department of Commerce. During the years it was writing its World Trade Center reports, therefore, it was an agency of the Bush-Cheney administration. In 2004, the Union of Concerned Scientists put out a document charging this administration with 'distortion of scientific knowledge for partisan political ends.' By the end of the Bush administration, this document had been signed by over 15,000 scientists, including 52 Nobel Laureates and 63 recipients of the National Medal of Science.” — David Ray Griffin
The fact that WTC 7 damaged some of the surrounding structures does not negate the notion that the building was brought down through controlled demolition. The majority of the building's debris clearly landed in its own footprint — a signature of controlled demolition, which fire has never accomplished in any other high-rises, though there have been many larger, hotter, and longer-lasting fires.
Barry Jennings retracted only one aspect of his testimony to the Loose Change producers, and that was his claim that he stepped over dead bodies as he was rescued from the building. However, he never retracted his statement about hearing the explosions in WTC 7. But PM dishonestly portrays Jennings as if he retracted his entire testimony.
Because the steel was recycled so quickly, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) hardly had any steel to examine from the three towers. Much of the steel that NIST did have was left uncatalogued and stored in Hangar 17 at the John F. Kennedy Airport. NIST used fallacious reasoning to exclude most of this steel from its primary investigation.