First of all, it's a YouTube video. If the authors want to be taken seriously, they should write a paper, and explain their methodology in detail, including the reason why specific aspects of the experiment were chosen to be what they were.
4:36 -"So how can we tell who is not correct?"
This is the specific point at which everything goes off the rails. The video proposes two explanations, one of which is a fully realised hypothesis involving known processes and materials, and the other of which is a vague suggestion with no proposed mechanism or specific sequence of events. With the statement above, it deliberately implies that one of these explanations must be correct, therefore all that's required is the elimination of the other. It's a classic case of the false dilemma fallacy.
5:27 "...aluminum scraps, some from an airplane..."
Cute. A piece of utterly irrelevant information to give the impression that the materials have been carefully chosen.
The temperature wasn't measured beyond the observation that it melted aluminium, but the observation that the steel was glowing red suggests that the temperature was never high enough to reach the melting point of an iron-sulphur eutectic or produce significant decomposition of the gypsum. The duration was about two days, and no particular effort was made to reproduce the exact composition of the WTC7 rubble pile beyond vague guesswork. The conditions of the fire - a well-ventilated, fast-burning, open fire - were nothing like the slow-burning, diffusion-limited and well-insulated fire in the rubble pile. As an attempt to reproduce the conditions seen by the corroded beam, this was more or less worthless.
However, something useful might have been done if the steel beam had been chemically analysed to see whether any sulphur was present in the surface. Some form of chemical analysis might produce some useful information. Simply looking at the steel, observing that there weren't any holes in it, and noting that for the most part it was still sound, is a pathetic mockery of serious analysis. To conclude from this cursory inspection that "The aluminum, concrete, drywall, diesel fuel and building materials did not cause any intergranular melting" (7:26) is utterly unwarranted. Truthers are, as usual, avoiding seeing anything they don't want to by not bothering to look for it properly.
From there, the video degenerates into outright lying. I note with interest at 8:30 that the narrative says "There is a reason why NIST ignored all their advice..." while the text on screen simply begins "NIST ignored all their advice..." - classic poisoning the well, while pretending innocence. And the same at 8:40 - "Perhaps NIST knew that..." is missing from the text.
Nice one at 8:50, where the glowing material coming from WTC2 is (a) identified as molten steel despite the fact that it's not hot enough to be molten steel, and (b) described as coming out of "the tower" to give the deliberate false impression that it came from WTC7, the only tower that's been discussed in the video so far. I see the iron-rich spheroids are now "iron spheroids", and it's suggested that thermite reactions can go on for days.
Oh, and RedIbis, since you're now claiming that you always admitted there was such a thing as thermal expansion and that it happens in all building fires, would you like to join me in pointing out that "a new phenomenon called thermal expansion due to an office fire" is an extraordinarily ignorant description, and quite simply wrong?
And at 9:28, the biggest lie of all: "The murder of thousands on 9/11 wasn't considered a crime, and therefore [was] never investigated as a crime". You heard it here first, folks; Operation PENTTBOM, the largest operation in the history of the FBI, never happened.
Last of all, as others have pointed out, the missing part of the video is the part where anyone demonstrates that thermate can cause erosion and thinning of steel structural members by intergranular eutectic melting. Until someone's demonstrated this, there isn't even a competing hypothesis.
Truther videos make me sick. This laughably incompetent piece of cargo cult science is no exception.
Dave
