“Hand Waving” the Physics of 9/11

David L Griscom
Ph.D. in Physics, Brown University, 1966.
Fellow, American Physical Society.
Research physicist at Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) Washington, DC, 1967-2001

Manuel Garcia, who has his Ph.D. in Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering from Princeton and works as a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has written a recent series of articles for CounterPunch, which is described by the editors as a “widely applauded primer on the laws of physics and the myths of conspiracists (sic)” concerning the collapses of World Trade Center towers 1, 2, and 7.

Below, I will take issue with Dr. Garcia’s primer. He doesn’t get MY applause.

I too hold a Ph.D. (in Physics) from an Ivy League university (Brown) and have worked as a physicist at a national laboratory (33 years at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC).

Physicists with international reputations hate to be caught making mistakes. Even Albert Einstein was chagrined by what he regarded as his “biggest blunder,” that is, adding a “cosmological constant” to his general theory of relativity in order to stabilize the universe against gravitational collapse. Einstein threw in the towel after the astronomers determined that the more distant galaxies have greater “red shifts,” thus proving that the universe is actually expanding. Only after his death was it found out from studies of the cosmic microwave background radiation that, “yes, Virginia,” there really is a cosmological constant!

But there was only one Einstein. The rest of us have little hope that history will look kindly on our blunders. continued →