The Tiger Town Observer

Issue date: 3/6/07 Section: News and Opinion

Generally, I'm not bothered when people tell me that the attacks on September 11th, 2001 were orchestrated by the federal government as part of a false flag operation to give the federal government an excuse to attack Afghanistan and Iraq.

"It's a conspiracy, man, the government is out to get us. You should see Loose Change, it'll change the way you think, man!" They say.

"You're an ill-informed, easily-manipulated patsy who will believe anything said to him as long as it's contained in a video with sinister music and disingenuous research tactics," I am tempted to respond.

This type of stupidity and blatant distortion of the facts needs to be met with cold rationalism. Name calling, though entirely warranted when speaking to conspiracy theorists, really does nothing to correct their distorted world views in the same sense that urinating on a wall does nothing to change its position, either. For most people, the big picture argument is enough to discount any conspiracy theory. After all, why would the government stage the most elaborate, perfectly executed hoax as a means for attacking Iraq by using invented Saudi hijackers? Wouldn't a smattering of Iraqi, Iranian and North Korean hijackers have served our purposes better? Why hasn't anyone come forward about the cover-up? And just how did they get explosives in the towers without anyone noticing? These are the questions critical thinkers ask, and that's what naturally precludes them from the conspiracy theory community.

Enter the big wigs. Not satisfied that the motivation to murder 3,000 fellow citizens has never been shown or trumpeted by even the most vitriolic Bush administration critics, some academics have take it upon themselves to prove that the official collapse theory as reported by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, as well as FEMA and the ASCE is scientifically false. They've banded together to form an organization called "Scholars for Truth." Aside from an astoundingly disappointing list of philosophy professors and folklorists, the list does include two people worth mentioning, Dr. Steven Jones and Dr. Judy Wood. Dr. Wood is the primary subject of this article, and is particularly worthy of mention because until 2005, she was an assistant professor of mechanical engineering here at Clemson.

Of particular note when speaking about Judy Wood are her two great contributions to the 9/11 conspiracy theory. Her first is her Newtonian mechanics based proof that the pancake theory of collapse is false. This is presented in her "Billiard Balls" paper by a series of charts indicating that a pancaked collapse would have lasted nearly 100 seconds, rather than the observed 10.

Continued...

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